Letter knowledge and word identification are key skills for reading and spelling. Letter knowledge facilitates the application of sublexical letter-sound mappings to decode words. With reading experience, word identification becomes a key lexical skill to support decoding. In transparent orthographies, however, letter knowledge might be an…

Reading numbers aloud, a central aspect of numerical literacy, is a challenging skill to acquire, but the origins of this difficulty remain poorly understood. To investigate this matter, we examined the performance of 127 third- and fourth-grade children who read aloud, in Hebrew, numbers with 2-5 digits. We found several key observations. First,…

Recent developments in technology have accelerated the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on our lives. The ability of generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to both 'write' (generate new texts) and 'read' (e.g. summarise texts) in a human-like manner means they are set to play an increasingly important role in the literacy…

Recent developments in technology have accelerated the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on our lives. The National Literacy Trust is interested in exploring how such platforms might influence, and potentially redefine, what it means to be literate in the digital age. Based on data from more than 50,000 children and young people taking…

The potential of speech technology to improve educational outcomes has been a topic of great interest in recent years. For example, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems could be employed to provide kindergarten-aged children with real-time feedback on their literacy and pronunciation as they practice reading aloud. Within these systems,…

Recent developments in technology have accelerated the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on our lives. The ability of generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to both 'write' and 'read' texts in a human-like manner means they are set to play an increasingly important role in the literacy lives of children, young people and…

Studies investigating relations between morphological awareness and literacy in German, a language with a rather transparent but asymmetric orthography, are sparse. Little is known about the role of grade level for these relationships and of their relative strength compared to those between other language-related variables and literacy skills.…

Background: The study aimed to explore to what extent variables associated with lexical and sublexical spelling processes predicted single word spelling ability and whether patterns of lexical and sublexical processes were different across ages. Methods: Beginning (mean age 7 years, N=144) and advanced (mean age 9 years, N=114) English-speaking…

Morphemes, the smallest meaning-bearing units of language, recur in many words. Therefore, morphological knowledge can facilitate the comprehension of novel words. This study tested the effectiveness of a morphological training program on children's learning and retention of exposed words and morphologically related unexposed words compared with…

The Malay language writing system is alphabetic and orthographically transparent. This study aimed to determine whether phonological processing skills predict Malay word-level literacy acquisition in Chinese children from a national-type Chinese primary school in Malaysia. A correlational study among 113 Year 1 Chinese children who are non-native…

The advance of new hearing technologies has generated high expectations regarding the development and learning of deaf children, but little research has been done on the language levels of this generation of deaf learners who receive education at the same pace as their hearing peers. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between…

Israel has two official languages: Hebrew and Arabic, and one semi-official language, English. Within this multilingual environment, the national English curriculum relates to all learners as one homogenous population. There are no specific directives regarding the linguistic needs of diverse language backgrounds. Studies of literacy acquisition…

We investigated the dimensionality and relations between L1 (a speaker's first language) and L2 (a speaker's second language) writing skills in narrative and informational genres and higher order cognitive skills--inference, perspective taking, and comprehension monitoring--for Spanish-English dual language learners in primary grades. Dimensions…

In a world driven by literacy, there is still unfortunately a stigma about teachers who are not English, language arts or reading teachers, undertaking teaching of reading skills and/or strategies in their courses. The maths world still does not accept reading as a major component; however, the consequences are too noticeable to ignore. It is time…

The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational setting in the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b) the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingual children and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect. Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired…