This study sought to examine the influence of transcription skills, evaluated using graphonomic measures, on the proficiency of text generation in students attending primary schools in Spain. A longitudinal design was employed involving 278 Spanish students distributed across three cohorts (cohort 1: 1st-2nd-4th grade; cohort 2: 2nd-3rd-5th grade;…

This study analyses the impact of certain cognitive processes on the writing of words in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first and second years of Primary Education. One hundred twenty-eight schoolchildren from Ecuador and 109 from Algiers participated in this study. All the participants were aged…

Background: Learning to read is a complex process that involves phonological and orthographic processing abilities, broader language skills and cognitive processes across all writing systems. Although these components remain common, the pace of acquisition of phonological and orthographic processing and reading abilities differ across writing…

Purpose: Two types of orthographic knowledge were examined: i) knowledge of permissible letter combinations (general orthographic knowledge) and ii) knowledge of whole words (word-specific orthographic knowledge), to gain further insights into the relationship of general and word-specific orthographic knowledge with literacy skills. Method:…

Orthographic knowledge of alphabet-letters is thought to mediate accurate motor execution of letter-writing. This study examined the effectiveness of a handwriting program for early non-proficient writers which integrated instruction of factual, procedural, and spatial information to develop orthographic knowledge of alphabet-letters, for the…

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)…

This study analyzes the impact of certain cognitive processes on word and pseudoword reading in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first year of Primary Education. The study was conducted with a group of 113 pupils from Algeria and another group of 128 pupils from Ecuador, from a middle-class background…

Set for variability (SfV) is an oral language task that requires an individual to disambiguate the mismatch between the decoded form of an irregular word and its actual lexical pronunciation. For example, in the task, the word wasp is pronounced to rhyme with clasp (i.e. /waesp/), and the individual must recognize the actual pronunciation of the…

The goal of the paper was to investigate whether morphological units -- stems and suffixes -- influence orthographic processing by modulating visual attention demands to the task. Orthographic processing was measured with a visual one-back task requiring letters to be detected within pseudowords not including stems/suffixes, or containing real…

The purpose of this study was to examine the profiles of nonresponders among native Chinese-speaking students struggling in English reading before and after an intensive intervention in phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge. Struggling English learners (n = 72) were screened from 668 Grade 4 students based on their English word…

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…

Although phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are confirmed as early predictors of reading in a large number of orthographies, it is as yet unclear whether the predictive patterns are universal or language specific. This was examined in a longitudinal study across Grades 1 and 2 with 1,120 children acquiring one of five…

This study examined whether spelling tasks contribute to the prediction of the handwriting status of children with poor and good handwriting skills in a cross-sectional study with 276 Spanish children from Grades 1 and 3. The main hypothesis was that the spelling tasks would predict the handwriting status of the children, although this influence…

This study investigates the English spelling of students in grades 2 through 8 in Mainland China. A review of spelling and cross-linguistic research in spelling is presented. The orthographic development of 273 students was assessed "with validated spelling inventories" (Sterbinsky, 2007) to sample developmental features across three…

Word and pseudoword reading are related abilities fundamental to reading development in alphabetic orthographies. They are respectively assumed to index children's orthographic representations of words, which are in turn acquired through the underlying "self-teaching mechanism" of alphabetic pseudoword decoding. Little is known about…