Models of reading development point to a role for knowledge about the orthography quite late in children's reading development; here we explore the contributions of early orthographic knowledge -- of the features of print -- to word reading development between kindergarten and Grade 1. We did so in a longitudinal study of 93 emergent bilingual…

These two studies examined the processes underlying English and Chinese word reading in Chinese-English bilinguals in relation to their experiences with their second language (L2), as determined by length of time in an English-speaking environment. Phonological awareness, morphological awareness and vocabulary measures were administered in English…

This study examined cross-language transfer of word reading accuracy and word reading fluency in Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants included 51 Spanish-English and 64 Chinese-English bilinguals. Both groups of children completed parallel measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy,…

We present the results of an empirical test of the hypothesis that transfer of orthographic processing to reading occurs when the scripts under acquisition are written with the same unit (specifically, the same alphabet). We tested 97 Spanish-English bilingual children in Grades 4 and 7. We measured mother's education level, verbal and nonverbal…

Two Canadian First Nations samples of Grades 3 and 4 children were assessed for cognitive processing, word reading, and phonological awareness skills. Both groups were from Plains Cree rural reservations in different provinces. The two groups showed significant differences on several key cognitive variables although there were more similarities…