While the theoretical models of morphological processing in Roman alphabets indicate prelexical activation, a model established in Korean suggests postlexical activation. To extend the model of Korean morphological processing, this study examined within-scriptal (Hangul-Hangul prime-target pairs) and cross-scriptal (Hanja-Hangul prime-target…

Mind wandering occurs when a reader's thoughts are unrelated to the text's ideas. We examined the relation between mind wandering and readers' memory for text. More specifically, we assessed whether mind wandering inhibits the reader's development of the situation model and thus their ability to identify and recall the text's most central ideas.…

While it has been shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is important for children's literacy development in their first language (L1), less is known about its association with reading in a second language (L2). The present study examined the different effects of SES on the acquisition of reading in Chinese as L1 and English as L2 from ages 7 to…

Children's early knowledge and skills set the stage for later reading development. The present studies examined children's conceptual knowledge of reading prior to formal literacy instruction. Young children's knowledge about who is able to read books and what readers are reading when they read books has been studied primarily through interviews.…

This study assessed the effects of four types of teaching instruction for Hangul learning in Korean kindergartners. Forty-five four-year-old children participated in a Hangul learning experiment where they were taught 6 new Korean Guljas (Korean written syllable) in each of four conditions--whole Gulja, alphabet letter, CV (consonant + vowel) body…

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 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 universal role of phonological processing skills for reading acquisition has been established in many different languages including Arabic. However, in Arabic little knowledge exists about the development of wide-range of phonological tasks and about the correlations between them. We longitudinally studied the developmental trends and…

One of the aims for compulsory education is to diminish or alleviate differences in children's skills existing prior to school entry. However, a growing gender gap in reading development has increasingly been documented. Regrettably, there is scant evidence on whether differences between genders (favouring girls) have their roots in pre-reading…

We examined whether akshara knowledge, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and RAN predict variability in word and nonword reading skills in Grade 1-4 children (N = 200) learning to read Sinhala. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that akshara knowledge had the strongest unique association with both word and nonword reading accuracy…

The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-letter processing in two reading-related skills: visual attention span (VAS) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). VAS (i.e., the number of visual elements that can be processed at once in a multi-element array) was tested with a visual 1-back task and RAN…

We tested the effects of orthography on text reading by comparing reading measures in Arabic and Hebrew-speaking adults. The languages are typologically very similar, but use different orthographies. We measured naming speed of single letters, words and nonwords, and visual processing. Arabic-speakers also performed some of the tasks in Hebrew. We…

This study, which was drawn from a larger published work, examined language proficiency and literacy skills predictive of learning content and function words via the commonly used practice of flashcard word reading, which tests word knowledge in isolation. The current study also investigated differences in word learning performance between…

Concurrent associations between teacher ratings of inattention, hyperactivity and pre-reading skills were examined in 64 pre-schoolers who had not commenced formal reading instruction and 136 school entrants who were in the first weeks of reading instruction. Both samples of children completed measures of pre-reading skills, namely phonological…

The purpose of this study was to examine African American children's performance on a phonological awareness task that included items reflecting differences between African American English (AAE) and mainstream American English. The relationship between spoken production of AAE forms and performance on phonological awareness, vocabulary, and…