It is well established that emergent literacy is a strong predictor of later reading difficulties, and that the "home literacy environment" plays an important role in the development of children's preschool emergent literacy and oral language. Furthermore, reading difficulties runs in families and children with a family risk of reading…

Dyslexia is a specific disorder of language development that mainly affects reading. Etiological researches have led to multiple hypotheses which induced various diagnosis methods and rehabilitation treatments so that many different tests are used by practitioners to identify dyslexia symptoms. Our purpose is to determine a subset of the most…

This study was designed to examine the independent contributions of phonological awareness, orthographic processing and morphological awareness on early word reading. English-speaking children in Grades 1 and 3 completed measures of these three constructs, as well as standardised measures of real and pseudoword reading and of vocabulary. Each of…

We examined the double deficit hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers, 1999) and literacy development in a longitudinal dataset of 1,006 Finnish children who were nonreaders at school entry. A single phonological awareness (PA) deficit was a predictor of pseudoword spelling accuracy and reading fluency, and a single rapid automatized naming (RAN) deficit…

This article is a response to "Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS): A Tool for Evaluating Student Learning?" by Kamii and Manning (2005). The intent of their study was to evaluate how DIBELS and a writing test predict reading achievement, which was measured by scores on the Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT) as well…

This study investigated the link between phoneme and onset-rime awareness and reading outcomes in children learning to read in a second language (L2). Closely matched phoneme and onset-rime awareness tasks were administered in English and French in the spring of kindergarten to English-dominant children in French immersion programmes (n=98).…

Two experiments investigated the effects of strategy knowledge and strategy training on the working memory (WM) performance in children (ages 10-11) with and without reading disabilities (RD). Experiment 1 examined the relationship between strategy knowledge (stability of strategy choices) and WM performance as a function of initial, gain (cued),…

The PISA studies of reading achievement of 15 year old students in OECD and partner nations show Anglophone nations to have continuing high proportions of weak readers (less than or equal to Level 2), with no improvement in this area from 2000 to 2006 (OECD, "Science competencies for tomorrow's world: Executive summary," 2007). The…

Current theoretical interpretations of naming speed and the research literature on its relation to reading are reviewed in this article. The authors examine naming speed's effects across languages and the shape of its relationship to reading. Also considered is the double-deficit hypothesis, by which students with both slow naming speed and low…

The purpose of this study was to examine the developmental trajectory of speed and accuracy of words in context and in isolation among skilled, average, and less skilled readers (N = 201). The authors assessed fluency of words read in isolation and in contextual measures in the fall, winter, and spring of 1st grade. They performed a multivariate…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate rapid automatized naming skills (RAN) and immediate memory processes in 243 Chinese Mandarin-speaking elementary readers (ranging from Grade 1 to Grade 5). For RAN subtests, the mean naming time decreased monotonically with grade level in good and average readers, and a similar trajectory was found in poor…

The objective of this study was to investigate the contribution of rapid digit naming, phonological memory, letter sound naming, and orthographic knowledge to the prediction of responsiveness to a school-based, individual intervention of word reading fluency problems of 122 Dutch second and third graders whose reading scores were below the 10th…

Executive functions, including inhibition, have been implicated in children's reading ability. This study investigates whether children's performance on an inhibition task is more indicative of reading ability than a measure of another executive function, that is, planning. Fifty-three male participants were administered a reading test and tests…

Despite recent research findings that implicate a long list of student variables that predict reading success or failure, these predictor variables have not been considered in the context of contemporary models of multitiered schoolwide reading intervention. This longitudinal, retrospective study follows 668 kindergarten and first-grade students…

The objectives of the present study were twofold: (a) to explore the interrelationship among distal, proximal cognitive skills, and word reading; and (b) to identify those cognitive processes that predict phonological awareness and rapid naming. Seventy First-Nation Canadian children attending grades 3 and 4 were examined on phonological…