Previous studies exploring the cost of reading sentences with words that have two transposed letters in adults showed that initial letter transpositions caused the most disruption to reading, indicating the important role that initial letters play in lexical identification (e.g., Rayner et al., 2006). Regarding children, it is not clear whether…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate general spelling difficulties. This study investigated accuracy on and sensitivity to silent letters in spelling in children with and without DLD. Investigating silent-letter production provides a window into orthographic and morphological knowledge and enhances understanding…

This project tested the effects of adding instruction of trios of children in patterning, mathematics, early literacy, or social studies to ongoing instruction in kindergartens. Children were randomly assigned to trios which were randomly assigned to one of four kinds of instruction. A quarter of the trios received patterning instruction with a…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

Movement, which draws on motor skills and executive functions for managing them, plays an important role in literacy learning (e.g., movement of mouth during oral reading and movement of hand and fingers during writing); but relatively little research has focused on movement skills in students with specific learning disabilities as the current…

Relationships between attention/executive functions and language learning were investigated in students in Grades 4 to 9 (N = 88) with and without specific learning disabilities (SLDs) in multiword syntax in oral and written language (OWL LD), word reading and spelling (dyslexia), and subword letter writing (dysgraphia). Prior…