Today, many children worldwide grow up in bilingual or multilingual families. This study explores early literacy development in Russian-Hebrew bilingual families in Israel. It studies the contribution of the home literacy environment (HLE), the language of communication, and the nature of the maternal writing support in Hebrew and Russian, to…

This study tested the potential of a technological intervention procedure for promoting letter-naming and initial-phoneme detection skills among preschoolers at risk for Specific Learning Disorder. The study rational is based on evidence for paired associated learning of visual-verbal stimuli, integrated with the use of a tangible technological…

This study examined affix letter spelling among 6th grade Hebrew-speaking children with dyslexia compared with chronologically age-matched and reading level-matched controls. As different languages are characterized by multiple dimensions of affix spelling complexity, we specifically targeted the following unique dimensions relevant to Hebrew: (1)…

The current study followed literacy skills development amongst 79 Arabic native speaking pupils from kindergarten to fourth grade. Based on reading comprehension attainments in fourth grade, two groups of skilled and poor readers were identified. Poor readers showed significantly lower performance on measures of phonological and morphological…

The study focuses on the beliefs of Arabic-speaking mothers in Israel relating to early literacy, and the relations between their beliefs and their children's actual early literacy skills. Participants included 113 mothers and their 5-6-year-old preschool children. At the families' homes, mothers reported about the richness of the home literacy…

The study examined aspects of parent-child shared reading interactions of two Hebrew alphabet books, children's motivation to engage in early literacy activities, and how these variables relate to children's early literacy skills. Participants were 44 children (32 girls, 12 boys) aged 4.6 to 6.6 years (M = 5.6, SD = 0.54) and one parent (42…

To isolate cross-lingual phonological effects during visual-word recognition, Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals who are native speakers of Spoken Arabic (SA) and proficient readers of both Literary Arabic (LA) and Hebrew, were asked to perform a visual lexical-decision task (LDT) in either LA (Experiment 1) or Hebrew (Experiments 2 and 3). The critical…

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…

This study examined the nature of parents' shared reading with their preschoolers between and across two different alphabet trade books. The "busy" book contains more sentences and words per page, more complex illustrations per page, and the target letter takes up less of the page and appears in the same colour as the text. The…

Alphabet-boards are commonplace in lower grade classrooms in elementary-schools. If designed correctly, alphabet-boards can help internalize letters into memory. The purpose of this study was to examine alphabet-board characteristics that should be considered by teachers for providing a clear, readable, and applicable pedagogical tool. The…

The authors compared the discourse of 100 Israeli preschool teachers with a group of children during three book-sharing contexts: reading, reconstruction, and telling. During telling and reconstruction, the teachers used more utterances and questions and referred more to concept of book and to the illustrations. During reading, they referred more…

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

This study examined changes in reading motivation and reading achievement among Hebrew-speaking first graders following an intervention program designed to increase intrinsic reading motivation. The program was delivered by the class teacher and focused on choosing relevant reading materials, providing choices for reading and encouraging social…

Twenty kindergartners (eight boys) with cerebral palsy (CP) and their mothers engaged in a writing activity that required dyads to compose a grocery list containing four items together. Maternal writing supports were observed, including graphophonemic mediation (i.e., support for letter--sound correspondence) and printing mediation (i.e., guidance…