Gender-fair language makes women and people of other genders, their interests, and achievements more visible. However, critics argue that gender-fair language impairs the comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal of texts. This study tests these assumptions specifically concerning the gender asterisk, a form of gender-fair language that makes people…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine the development of spelling in a large sample (N = 503, boys: N = 219) of Greek-speaking children with (N = 41) and without (N = 462) reading difficulties. Children were initially tested in Grades 2-4 and then at five consecutive measurement points over a 3-year period, focusing on how initial…

Research on alphabetic reading presents conflicting findings concerning the timing of orthographic and meaning processes in reading morphologically complex words. Chinese characters offer distinct visual cues for morphemes, enabling straightforward manipulations to examine orthographic and meaning processes. Guided by the Character-Word Dual…

Word recognition is a fundamental reading skill that relies on various linguistic and cognitive abilities. While executive functions (EF) have gained attention for their importance in developing literacy skills, their interaction with domain-specific skills in facilitating reading among different learner groups remains understudied. This study…

Preschool teachers' literacy-related beliefs and literacy knowledge relate to their educational practices and preschoolers' literacy skills. In this light, we explored how preschool teachers' beliefs regarding early literacy and its promotion predict their knowledge, reflected in how they evaluate three young children's writing products and their…

Children's ability to correctly name letters is a key predictor of later reading abilities and skills, but research on letter naming from Scandinavian orthographies is scarce. The aim of this study is to explore how child- and letter-related factors (i.e., gender, child name, phonemic awareness, letter position in the alphabet and frequency, and…

Vocabulary knowledge greatly affects writing performance (Staehr in Lang Learn J 36:139-152, 2008; Johnson in Tesol J 7:700-715 2016), but little is known about the relative contribution of different dimensions of vocabulary knowledge to reading-to-write performance. The current study attempted to investigates the contribution of…

Background: Prominent theories of reading make the prediction that individual differences in children's word learning capacity determine the pace of their acquisition of reading skill. Despite the developmental nature of some of these theories, most empirical research to date has explored the relation between word learning capacity and reading at…

In this study, we examined the relationship between phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and character reading in Chinese kindergarten children. One hundred and twenty children were assessed in each of their three years at the kindergarten, with 12-month intervals in between. Using cross-lagged panel modeling, we found that:…

To investigate whether audiovisual associative learning uniquely contributed to Chinese character reading (accuracy and fluency), the current study examined it along with phonological processing skills, including phonological memory, phonological awareness, and rapid automatized naming (hereafter, RAN). Hierarchical regression analyses found that…

Four experiments were designed to investigate the possible effect of orthographic neighborhood frequency (NF) on Chinese character recognition. Orthographic neighbors were operated under two conditions: stroke based and radical based. With the lexical decision and repeated-matching tasks adopted, the results showed an inhibitory NF effect on…

This study examines the use of braille contractions in a corpus of spelling tests from braille-reading children in grades 1-4, with particular attention to braille contractions that create mismatches with morphological structure. Braille is a tactile writing system that enables people who are blind or visually impaired to read and write. In…

This article positions braille as a writing system worthy of study in its own right and on its own terms. We begin with a discussion of the role of braille in the lives of those who read and write it and a call for more attention to braille in the reading sciences. We then give an overview of the history and development of braille, focusing on its…

Orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge of conventions of a written language) has been identified as a predictor of both basic and higher-level reading processes, however, mostly examined in a cross-sectional design. It remains unclear, whether and how orthographic knowledge contributes uniquely in explaining differences in the acquisition of…

The present study aimed to investigate whether and how Chinese single character reading and 2-character word reading can reflect somewhat different processes. Tasks of Chinese rapid automatized naming (RAN), morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, along with vocabulary knowledge and nonverbal intelligence tasks,…