Orthographic knowledge is predicted to be central in the process of children's reading development. We examined both the temporal order between orthographic knowledge and each of word reading and word spelling--effectively, which predicts which by including autoregressive controls--and cross-linguistic transfer between English and French for our…

The relationships between phonological awareness, rapid naming, short term verbal memory, letter knowledge, visual skills and word reading in kindergarten, and the predictive patterns from kindergarten to first grade were examined in 41 Chinese-Dutch bilingual children living in the Netherlands in both their first language (Chinese) and second…

The goal of this longitudinal study was to examine how lexical quality predicts the emergence of literacy abilities in 169 Dutch kindergarten children before formal reading instruction has started. At the beginning of the school year, a battery of precursor measures associated with lexical quality was related to the emergence of letter knowledge…

In a longitudinal design, 51 low-achieving adolescents' development in writing proficiency from Grades 7 to 9 was measured. There were 25 native-Dutch and 26 language-minority students. In addition, the roles of (1) linguistic knowledge, (2) metacognitive knowledge, and (3) linguistic fluency in predicting both the level and development of writing…

This study was conducted to examine the factors that influence informational text comprehension and to determine how these vary for students with higher and lower component skills. The sample included 177 students in grades 3-5. Regression analyses were used to predict informational text comprehension with decoding efficiency, vocabulary…

There is concern that the violations of conventional grammar (both accidental and deliberate) often seen in text messages (e.g., "hi [smiley face emoticon] how is ya?!!") could lead to difficulty in learning or remembering formal grammatical conventions. We examined whether the grammatical violations made by 244 British children,…

Cunningham and Stanovich reported a longitudinal investigation over 10 years that examined the unique influence of exposure to print in explaining individual differences on various measures of reading achievement and declarative (general) knowledge. The present study replicated their investigation with a larger number of participants and…

How can it be explained that early literacy and numeracy share variance? We specifically tested whether the correlation between four early literacy skills (rhyming, letter knowledge, emergent writing, and orthographic knowledge) and simple sums (non-symbolic and story condition) reduced after taking into account preschool attention control,…

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…