This study investigated the unique contribution of orthographic awareness, letter knowledge, and patterning skills to early literacy and arithmetic competence. A total of 145 third-year kindergarten (K3) children (M[subscript age]: 73.43 months, SD = 5.36; 70 boys, 48%) from Hong Kong participated in this study. Children were assessed on their…

Dyslexic individuals have serious difficulties in learning to read, and several software programs have been developed to overcome them. Previous research studies found that in most cases, providing correct spelling and word recognition with greater accuracy constitutes the key function. However, more research has to be conducted on the software…

Does visuospatial orientation influence repetition and transposed character (TC) priming effects in logographic scripts? According to perceptual learning accounts, the nature of orthographic (form) priming effects should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast,…

Background: There is emerging evidence that individuals with developmental dyslexia show deficits in visual-spatial attention. This study focused on visual searches and examined whether visual search deficits would be found in Chinese children with dyslexia. More importantly, we examined the associations between dyslexia and distinct types of…

Utilizing a longitudinal sample of Finnish children (ages 6-10), two studies examined how early linguistic (spoken vs. written) and spatial skills predict later development of arithmetic, and whether counting sequence knowledge mediates these associations. In Study 1 (N = 1,880), letter knowledge and spatial visualization, measured in…

Spatial attention performance was investigated in adults with dyslexia. Groups with and without dyslexia completed literacy/phonological tasks as well as two spatial cueing tasks, in which attention was oriented in response to a centrally presented pictorial (arrow) or alphabetic (letter) cue. Cued response times and orienting effects were largely…

We researched the efficacy of an early literacy programme in enhancing immigrant children's phonological awareness (PA) and print knowledge, including transferring learning to numeracy. Participants were 294 Ethiopian-born immigrant children in Israel at kindergarten age and one of their parents. Parent-child dyads were randomly selected to…

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,…

Research Findings: The present study evaluated the impact of a working memory (WM) stimulation program on the development of WM and early literacy skills (ELS) in preschoolers from socioeconomically deprived rural and urban schools in Chile. The sample consisted of 268 children, 144 in the intervention group and 124 in the comparison group. The…

To examine whether enantiomorphy (i.e., the ability to discriminate lateral mirror images) is influenced by the acquisition of a written system that incorporates mirrored letters (e.g., b and d), unschooled illiterate adults were compared with people reading the Latin alphabet, namely, both schooled literate adults and unschooled adults…

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal…

Seventy-five Dutch elementary school students wrote letters of a cursive alphabet after presentation of printed and cursive letters. Analysis revealed that spatial ambiguity, allographic variability, contextual ambiguity, and letter frequency are determinants of the time needed by children for perceiving printed and producing corresponding cursive…