Purpose: It is often assumed that phonological awareness only reflects children's phonological skill. However, orthographic representations have been found to be automatically involved during phonological awareness tasks, which we refer to as automatic orthographic activation. Although previous longitudinal neural studies have addressed how…

Auditory processing of temporal information in speech is sustained by synchronized firing of neurons along the entire auditory pathway. In school-aged children and adults with dyslexia, neural synchronization deficits have been found at cortical levels of the auditory system, however, these deficits do not appear to be present in pre-reading…

During reading acquisition children learn to recognize orthographic stimuli and link them to phonology and semantics. The present study investigated neurocognitive processes of learning to read after one year of schooling. We aimed to elucidate the cognitive processes underlying neural tuning for print that has been shown to play an important role…

English-speaking preschoolers who knew letters but were nonreaders (M = 4 years 9 months; n = 60) were taught to segment consonant-vowel (CV), VC, and CVC words into phonemes either with letters and pictures of articulatory gestures (the LPA condition) or with letters only (the LO condition). A control group received no treatment. Both trained…

Learning music can help children with reading readiness and beginning reading skills. (MKM)

Results of this study suggest that, for primary level children, the natural'' perceptual unit of spoken language is the syllable, not the phoneme. (Authors)

Presents results of two experiments which measured difficulty of learning vowel and consonant sounds and revealed significantly more correct responses for consonant sounds than for vowel sounds. (JM)

Reports a study supporting the teaching of auditory analysis skills to prekindergarten children. (TO)

Nineteen kindergarten children were pretested on readiness and blending tests and randomly assigned to a control or experimental group to determine if auditory blending skills were teachable and important in a beginning reading program. Following instruction in sequencing and blending sounds, the experimental group gained significantly in both…

An extended readiness unit plan for beginning first graders who demonstrated a limited degree of readiness in kindergarten is provided. The unit theme is the five senses, and the following sequence of presentation is used: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Visual-perception activities receive the most emphasis. Included in procedures for…

The main purpose of this investigation was to study the relationships between visual memory and early reading achievement. Short term and intermediate memory were examined in relation to vocabulary, reading comprehension, and reading readiness in first grade pupils. The Gates MacGinitie Readiness Skills Test; the Visual Memory for Designs Tests,…

Children, four, six, eight, and twelve years old, and adults participated in a study of judgments of syllable similarity. Subjects listened to a disyllabic nonsense unit (the standard) followed by two comparison stimuli; they were then asked to choose the comparison stimulus "most like" the standard. Changes between the comparison stimuli and the…

Research findings concerned with the relationship between the child's oral language behavior and learning to read are described. A cognitive-biological approach to the child's perceptual system development is taken, and data are presented to support both the developmental point of view of language development and the point of view that the child…

A LONGITUDINAL STUDY WAS PERFORMED WHICH FOLLOWED THREE GROUPS OF CHILDREN (CULTURALLY DISADVANTAGED, AVERAGE, AND CULTURALLY ADVANTAGED) THROUGH GRADE THREE IN AN ATTEMPT TO DETERMINE THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CERTAIN PERCEPTUAL FACTORS ON SUCCESS OR FAILURE IN BEGINNING READING. INSTRUMENTS USED WERE SELECTED TO IDENTIFY…