Phoneme awareness is critical for literacy acquisition in English, but relatively little is known about the early development of phonological awareness in ESL (English as a second language) bilinguals when their two languages have different phonological structures. Using parallel tasks in English and Mandarin, we tracked the development of L1…

Previous research on age and schooling effects is largely restricted to studies of children who begin formal schooling at 6 years of age, and the measures of phoneme awareness used have typically lacked sensitivity for beginning readers. Our study addresses these issues by testing 4 to 6 year-olds (first 2 years of formal schooling in the United…

Knowledge of letter-sound correspondences underpins successful reading acquisition, and yet little is known about how young children acquire this knowledge and what prior information they bring to the learning process. In this study, we used an experimental training design to examine whether either prior letter awareness or prior phonemic…

This study compared normally achieving fourth-grade ''Phoenician'' readers, who identify nonwords significantly more accurately than they do exception words, with ''Chinese'' readers, who show the reverse pattern. Phoenician readers scored lower than Chinese readers on word identification, exception word reading, orthographic choice, spelling,…

Learning about letters is an important foundation for literacy development. Should children be taught to label letters by conventional names, such as /bi/ for "b", or by sounds, such as /b[inverted e]/? We queried parents and teachers, finding that those in the United States stress letter names with young children, whereas those in…

The effects of the phonological similarity between a letter sound and the sound in a spoken word, and phonological awareness on letter-sound learning were examined. Two groups of 41 kindergartners were taught four letter sounds. First, both groups had to learn the associations between four symbols and four familiar words. Next, both groups were…

Two studies examined six-year-olds' use of analogy in spelling: between visible clue words and similar sounding target words and when clue words are not visible. Both studies found that equal numbers of analogies were made between words sharing a rime unit, a consonant-vowel, or a vowel but were not made when only common letters were shared. (KDFB)

Studied whether kindergartners and first graders spell a sequence of phonemes with the corresponding consonant letter rather than spelling the sequence alphabetically with a consonant letter followed by a vowel. Found that children made letter-name spelling errors, especially when the consonant and vowel formed a complete syllable, showing that…

This study investigated knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, their learning, and their contributions to word recognition. Of 123 preschoolers examined on letter knowledge, 65 underwent training on both letter names and letter sounds in a counterbalanced order. Prior to training, children were more advanced in associating letters with their…

Researchers found that children who were lexical readers (those who read words as units) tended to make more errors involving partial lexical information when spelling irregular words than those who were sublexical readers (those who translated letters into sounds when reading). Sublexical readers tended to spell non-words better and to make more…

Two groups of grade school children were tested for their ability to use orthographic rimes as functional units of reading by reading pseudowords. The results suggest that the size of the orthographic rime frequency effect reflects the operation of two factors: vocabulary size and grapheme-phoneme conversion skill. (SW)

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset. We presented the nonwords used by Treiman and colleagues in their 2003 study to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school…

Investigated the processes that 158 children in grades 3 through 6 used for spelling. Children had the most difficulty with spellings based on morphological information and the least with those based on invariant sound-spelling relationships. (SKC)

Four experiments examined whether letter names at the ends of words are equally useful as letter names in the initial position. Findings indicated that 4- and 5-year-olds derived little benefit from such information in reading or spelling, although adults did. For young children, word-final information appeared to have less influence on reading…