Because of its regularity, it is relatively easy to learn to read and spell in Finnish. However, a specific hurdle in spelling acquisition seems to be the doubling of consonant letters. In this study on consonant letter doubling spelling in Finnish children (91 Grade 1 and 191 Grade 2 children), we asked two questions. First, are items with double…

There has been a significant volume of research studying the effect of individuals' motivation on reading comprehension. The findings of previous research have demonstrated both the direct contribution of motivation to comprehension and its indirect influence through mediating effects of reading amount and strategy use. The effect of the linkage…

The role of parental literacy skills in cross-linguistic transfer, the phenomenon of the sharing of skills and competence from one language to another, is under-researched. The present study tested 147 Hong Kong Chinese children and their parents (76 boys; mean age = 7.16). Parental literacy skills significantly explained children's reading and…

There is no obvious boundary information in Chinese reading. It has been shown that the introduction of word boundary information presented with alternating colors without changing the text distribution could significantly improve the reading speed of Chinese children in grade 2 (Perea and Wang in Mem Cognit 45(7):1160-1170, 2017.…

Reading acquisition involves connections between the spoken language and the writing system. The English-language writing system holds an inconsistent alphabetic system, thus encouraging readers to develop representations between the grapheme and the word. Reading in English as a Foreign language supposes a challenge, especially when the reader's…

This study developed and validated a Chinese name writing scale (CNWS) for evaluating early handwriting skills of kindergarten children. We then used the validated CNWS to examine the developmental characteristics of Chinese name writing skills among kindergarten children in Hong Kong in a cross-sectional study. CNWS was developed based on English…

This study investigates the possibility that solitary dialog, in which individuals construct in writing a hypothetical dialogic argument, may more fully reveal individual skill achievement in argument than do conventional argumentive essays. A sample of 54 11-12-year-old Chinese students individually composed such written dialogs, subsequent to…

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether morphological awareness measured before children are taught to read (Kindergarten in Israel) predicts reading accuracy and fluency in the middle of first grade, at the very beginning of the process of learning to read pointed Hebrew -- a highly transparent orthography, and whether this…

The main purpose of this longitudinal research was to study the effects of transcription skills, text generation skills and self-regulation on Icelandic children's writing, compare their effects on two different text genres and see if it changes with age, from second to fourth grade. Eighty-seven Icelandic children were followed up from first…

This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory…

This study investigated the construct of paired associate learning (PAL) and its associations with Chinese word writing in kindergarten children. A total of 188 Chinese children (95 boys, mean age = 5.65 years; SD = 0.34) from [Xi'an], Mainland China in the third year of kindergarten participated in this study. Children were assessed on measures…

Bilingualism appears to be related to poor language and reading comprehension in the instructional language (L2). However, in the long term, an early age of second language acquisition (AoA) may produce higher levels of second language skills than a later onset of L2 exposure. Most studies on school-aged second language learners (L2 learners)…

Reading prosody is considered one of the essential markers of reading fluency, alongside accuracy and speed. The aim of our study was to investigate how development of reading prosody in Spanish children varies with sentence type and length. We compared primary school children from the third and fifth grades with an adult sample. Participants were…

Phonological awareness has been found to be an important skill underpinning reading development in several alphabetic languages. However, the development of phonological awareness and its relationship to reading development can be influenced by the nature of the language under investigation. While understanding this relationship in Thai language…

The present study examines the visual attention span deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Twenty-five Cantonese-speaking Chinese dyslexic children (DD group) were compared with 25 chronological-age-matched (CA) controls and another 25 reading-level-matched (RL) controls on their performance in visual attention span, reading, and…