Phonological awareness plays a key role in learning to read; therefore, its assessment has received a lot of attention. Research in the domain of phonological awareness has been characterized by attempts to develop reliable and valid assessment tools for diverse populations. Over the past few decades, phonological awareness assessment has gone…

All Arabic-speaking children grow up in diglossia. They use a spoken Arabic vernacular (SpA) for everyday speech but Standard Arabic (StA) for reading/writing. The current study reports a pilot diglossia-centred intervention among Palestinian-Arabic-speaking kindergarteners (N = 290; mean age 64.52 months). The study examines the effectiveness of…

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…

There is tremendous variation in the use of American English by major geographic regions, as well as within these regions or cities, and by cultural background. The variety of English spoken by many African American people in the United States is called African American English (AAE). AAE affects early literacy skills in ways that may require…

The science of reading (SOR) refers to the sum of what we know about how people learn to read based on empirical studies across multiple disciplines. The purpose of this review was to identify research evidence to inform the SOR for multilingual learners (MLs). We reviewed 30 systematic reviews related to reading and reading instruction for MLs…

Purpose: Infants rapidly acquire the sound patterns that characterize their native language. Knowledge of native language phonological cues facilitates learning new words that are consistent with these patterns. However, little is known about how newly acquired phonological knowledge--regularities that children are in the process of…

This study investigates the cross-linguistic transfer of literacy skills in Spanish-English, Chinese-English bilingual, and English monolingual children (N = 283, 5-10 years). Research question 1 examines English literacy and asks how phonological and morpho-semantic skills contribute to word reading as a function of children's language…

Multitiered systems of support hold promise for dual language learners when culturally and linguistically responsive practices guide instruction. We modeled growth on Spanish and English early literacy skills and examined the role of language exposure and use at the individual and classroom instruction level in a group of 313…

This study investigated English phonological awareness in adult native speakers of English (L1) and in relation to their phonological awareness skills and proficiency in their German (L2). Most research in L1 phonological awareness focuses on younger children, their phonological awareness development, the relationship between reading and…

The longitudinal study investigated the directionality and transfer mechanism of cross-linguistic transfer of phonological awareness between L1 and L2 in predicting early writing (word dictation) in Chinese children learning English as L2. Ninety primary school Grade 1 (P1) students were assessed on phonological awareness in Cantonese (syllable…

We investigate the interrelations between pronunciation and writing skills in French as a foreign language produced by two groups of bilingual learners (German-Russian; German-Turkish) and a monolingually raised German control group (each n = 10). As an indicator of the learners' pronunciation skills, we refer to a perceptually relevant acoustic…

Background: Precocious readers (PRs) are children who read and comprehend fluently in their native language, without receiving formal instruction. This study examined Hebrew-speaking PRs in comparison with a group of age-matched peers and a group of reading-level-matched peers. By examining Hebrew, which is a transparent orthography when it has…

This study investigated the influence of first language (L1) phonology on second language (L2) early reading skills in Sylheti-English bilinguals (N = 58; 48% girls; British Bangladeshi) and their monolingual-English peers (N = 43; 45% girls; 96% White British, 4% multiethnic British) in a diaspora context. Language-specific phonological awareness…

Prior research has extensively explored audiovisual speech perception and literacy skills in various linguistic contexts. Studies have shown that children's ability to integrate auditory and visual speech cues plays a crucial role in language acquisition and development (Erdener & Burnham, 2013; Lalonde & Werner, 2021). Furthermore,…

This article provides a review of previous studies that have examined the effects of orthography on establishing contrastive phonological representations in second language acquisition and presents results from an original study on Mandarin speakers' production of English stops investigating how the presence of orthography affects the production…