Shifting demographics in K-12 schools have increased Spanish-speaking Multi-Language Learners' (MLLs') enrollment across the United States. While literacy variations between MLLs and proficient English speakers have been studied predominantly with upper elementary students, there remains a need for more exploration among early elementary…

Conceptual models of early writing suggest multiple component skills support children's early writing development. Although research interest in early writing skills has grown in recent years, the majority of studies focus narrowly on procedural knowledge or transcription skills (i.e., handwriting and spelling) to the relative exclusion of how…

Using Biber's (1988) multidimensional analysis, this study investigates textual variation in second language (L2) learners' writing at different proficiency levels, and attempts to identify any developmental progression. The study used a corpus of 5200 argumentative essays written by 2600 students learning English as an L2. The results indicate…

Two experiments investigated whether exposure to Chinese characters and pinyin would facilitate oral vocabulary learning for Chinese as a first (L1) and second (L2) language learners. In Experiment 1, 48 second Chinese graders studied 15 made-up associations between spoken labels and pictures accompanied either by no orthography, by pinyin, or…

The present study aimed to examine the contributions of two separate Pinyin skills and oral vocabulary to Chinese word reading of 70 third graders in a U.S. Mandarin Immersion program where Pinyin was introduced at Grade 3. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that Pinyin initial-final spelling--the skill to spell Chinese syllables using Pinyin…

Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we…

Measures of decoding and oral language have been shown to predict early reading comprehension across a wide variety of languages, though the timeframe and strength of the predictions vary by orthographic depth. This study is the first to examine predictors of early reading in Vietnamese, a transparent orthography of Romanized letters and…

The comparison between spoken and handwritten production in picture naming tasks represents an important source of information for building models of cognitive processes involved in writing. Studies using this methodology systematically reported longer latencies for handwritten than for spoken production. To uncover the origin of this difference…

Spelling skills have been identified as one of the major barriers to written text production in young English writers. By contrast oral language skills and text generation have been found to be less influential in the texts produced by beginning writers. To date, our understanding of the role of spelling skills in transparent orthographies is…

This study investigated the syntactic ability of 82 struggling adult readers who recognize words between the third and fifth grade levels. Analysis of the adults' performance on the TOLD-I:3 indicated that they were deficient on the syntactic task. Correlations found the struggling adult readers' oral language skills, written language skills, and…

In Study 1, children in grades 4-9 (N = 88, 29 females and 59 males) with persisting reading and/or writing disabilities, despite considerable prior specialized instruction in and out of school, were given an evidence-based comprehensive assessment battery at the university while parents completed questionnaires regarding past and current history…

The connection between language and reading is well established across many languages studied to date. Little is known, however, about the role of language in reading in Arabic--a Semitic language characterized by diglossia--in which the oral and written varieties differ across language components. This study examined the relationship among…

Individual differences in abilities to form, access, and hone phonological representations of words are implicated in the development of oral and written language. This study addressed two important gaps in the literature concerning measurement of individual differences in phonological representation. First, we empirically examined the…

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in…

The effect of capitalizing on orthography in auditory learning of English words was examined in 74 children who spoke Mandarin Chinese as their primary language. To use orthographic information for auditory word learning, children must recode printed words phonologically to assist the reconstruction of the speech single misheard or underspecified,…