The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

The goal of this study was to test the item-based assumption of the self-teaching hypothesis by reanalyzing Cunningham's (2006) data. In Cunningham's study, 37 first graders participated in a self-teaching experiment, and their orthographic learning was measured by a spelling task and an orthographic choice task. A 2-level logistic regression…

The universal role of phonological processing skills for reading acquisition has been established in many different languages including Arabic. However, in Arabic little knowledge exists about the development of wide-range of phonological tasks and about the correlations between them. We longitudinally studied the developmental trends and…

Although research on cognitive correlates of spelling has been conducted, these studies generally do not distinguish between different types of targets that need to be spelled. Arguably, the contributions of these skills differ for words opposed to pseudowords and for targets that can be spelled on the basis of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion…

The role of working memory (WM) in language acquisition has been widely reported in the developmental literature, but few studies have explored the role of sentence recall in the way WM and related linguistic abilities evolve. This study seeks to explore the organization and development of the memory architecture underlying language using a…

Although substantial research indicates motivation contributes significant variance to reading comprehension in upper elementary students, research with students in primary grades has focused, instead, on the relation of motivation to word reading. Assessment of reading motivation in 68 first and second graders indicated word and nonword reading…

Background: The awareness of the formal structure of language has been widely studied in the literature but less in a bilingualism context. Even less with second-language learners (SLL) who are acquiring their second language (L2) and are not considered as bilinguals. Aims: This study aimed at providing an investigation of young SLL's skills in…

Children's spoken nonmainstream American English (NMAE) dialect use and their knowledge about phonological representations of word pronunciations were assessed in a sample of 105 children in kindergarten through second grade. Children were given expressive and receptive tasks with dialect-sensitive stimuli. Students who produced many NMAE…

Language immersion students' lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic competencies are well documented, yet their phonological skill has remained relatively unexplored. This study investigates the Spanish vowel productions of a cross-sectional sample of 35 one-way Spanish immersion students. Learner productions were analyzed acoustically and compared to…

The purpose of this research was to assess the development of phonological skills before and during learning to read. Thirty-four children were tested twice, in nursery school and in first grade with an epiphonological task (E), e.g. judgment of similarity, and two metaphonological tasks, one requiring the extraction of common units (M1) and one…

Background: The aim of the present study was twofold: 1) to determine whether phonological skills measured in deaf prereaders predict their later phonological and reading skills after one year of reading instruction as is the case for hearing children; 2) to examine whether the age of exposure to a fully specified phonological input such as Cued…