"Tender Shoots" compared two book-reading and conversation approaches for parents and preschoolers to an activity-based control group. The "Rich Reading and Reminiscing" (RRR) condition taught parents to converse about the storyline; the "Strengthening Sound Sensitivity" (SSS) condition taught parents to converse…

Mathematical development processes begin long before school starts and the importance of previous mathematical knowledge for later school achievements is beyond dispute. For a suitable pre-school education, the focus of interest must be to find out which early learning processes prepare children best. In this article, the acquisition of the key…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a music training program on children's phonological awareness and naming speed in Spanish. Participants were preschool children whose first language was either Spanish (n = 45) or Tamazight ( n = 52), a Berber dialect spoken in Morocco's Rif area. The two-year pretest/posttest study…

This study assesses morpho-phonological alternation in plural formation by 5-year-old Dutch children with a familial risk of dyslexia, children with specific language impairment (SLI), and typically developing children. The morpho-phonological process investigated is the voicing alternation in Dutch singular-plural pairs such as bed [t]…

Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies show age-related effects of density on children's performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological awareness. To further investigate density…

A number of studies have shown that bilingual children have an advantage when performing on phonological awareness tasks, particularly in their stronger language. Little research has been done to date, examining the effects of bilingualism on both languages of bilingual children. In this study Mandarin-English bilingual children's performance on…

Efficacy of an explicit phonological awareness intervention embedded within repeated shared book reading with preschool children from low-income backgrounds with language delays was investigated. A multiple-baseline design across behaviors assessed the effects of phonological awareness training on rhyme and letter-sound knowledge with 13 preschool…

The authors studied the acquisition of nine #sC clusters in 30 Croatian-speaking phonologically disordered children, aged between 3;8-7;0 years, by analysing their renditions of target words elicited in response to visual stimuli presented on a computer screen. Results did not support the idea that a greater jump in sonority from C1 to C2 would…

This study investigated the acquisition of word initial s clusters of 3-5 year old Dutch children with phonological disorders. Within these clusters, sl was produced correctly most often, whereas sn and sx were the more difficult clusters. In cluster reductions, s+obstruent and sl clusters reduction patterns followed the Sonority Sequencing…

This study investigates whether the core bottleneck of literacy-impairment should be situated at the phonological level or at a more basic sensory level, as postulated by supporters of the auditory temporal processing theory. Phonological ability, speech perception and low-level auditory processing were assessed in a group of 5-year-old pre-school…