Background: Letter knowledge is crucial in the first stages of reading development. It supports learning letter-sound mappings and the identification of the letters that make up words. Previous studies have investigated the longitudinal impact of early letter knowledge on children's further word reading abilities. This study employed an artificial…

To investigate phonological effects in visual word recognition, a visual lexical decision task was used in which the critical stimuli were two types of highly familiar Hebrew acronyms: 'phonological' acronyms that are conventionally pronounced as single words via letter-to-sound translation (?"? (d"?) = /da?/), and 'lexical' acronyms…

Good and poor comprehenders exhibit different profiles of cognitive abilities, despite comparable decoding skills. Recent work suggests that executive functions, particularly cognitive flexibility, may underlie poor comprehenders' difficulties in childhood and adulthood. However, metalinguistic skills that enable readers to reflect on various…

Background: We examined the component skills of reading comprehension (i.e., letter sound knowledge, syllable reading fluency, decoding fluency, text or oral reading fluency and listening comprehension) and their structural relations using data from three sub-Saharan African languages with transparent orthographies in a multilingual context.…

This study explores Finnish children's word-level spelling by applying a linguistically based multilayered word structure model for assessing spelling performance. The model contributes to the analytical qualitative assessment approach in order to identify children's spelling performance for enhancing writing skills. The children (N = 105)…

Graphotactic knowledge and word-specific orthographic knowledge have been shown to account for unique variance in concurrent spelling skills beyond phonological skills in the early school years.The present study examined whether knowledge of spelling patterns conditioned by phonological context would add to the concurrent prediction of spelling…

Background: Although a large body of research has investigated teachers' reading-related knowledge and associated pedagogical practices, comparatively little is known about these factors in parents. Therefore, the present study examined the association between parental reading-related knowledge and feedback during child-to-parent reading. Methods:…

This study examines the effects of teaching common complex grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) on reading and reading motivation for at-risk readers using a randomised control trial design with taught intervention and control conditions. One reading programme taught children complex GPCs ordered by their frequency of occurrence in…

The dual-route model of reading proposes distinct lexical and sub-lexical procedures for word reading and spelling. Lexically reliant and sub-lexically reliant reader subgroups were selected from 78 university students on the basis of their performance on lexical (orthographic) and sub-lexical (phonological) choice tests, and on irregular and…

The current work examines children's sensitivity to rime unit spelling-sound correspondences within the context of early word reading as a way of assessing word-specific influences on early word-reading strategies. Sixty 6-7-year-olds participated in an experimental reading task that comprised word items that shared either frequent or infrequent…

There is now a strong evidence base from theory and research providing a "template" to inform practice at Wave 2, guiding the design and implementation of time-limited effective early intervention programmes for pupils identified as "at risk" of reading difficulties following initial literacy instruction (Rose, 2009). In…

This paper presents a treatment study with a developmental dysgraphic girl, KM, and addresses the mechanisms by which orthographic learning of spelling rules might occur. Before treatment, KM's spelling of words and nonwords was impaired. Analyses of spelling errors indicated poor knowledge of sound-to-letter correspondences. Treatment focused on…

Skilled readers were trained to recognise either the oral (n=44) or visual form (n=40) of a set of 32 novel words (oral and visual instantiation, respectively). Training involved learning the "meanings" for the instantiated words and was followed by a visual lexical decision task in which the instantiated words were mixed with real English words…

Forty-eight adults were trained on monosyllabic pseudowords and their meanings and then tested in vocal spelling. The orthographic inconsistency of the rime (e.g. "orn, awn" for "glorn") and the number of learning trials affected accuracy and response latency in the vocal spelling test. In addition, orthographic typicality as assessed by neighbour…

Sixteen Head Start classrooms, involving 128 children, were randomly assigned to three approaches for augmenting early literacy instruction: (a) instruction in phoneme segmentation, blending, and letter-sound relationships, (b) rhyming instruction and (c) vocabulary instruction. The phoneme segmentation approach was more effective in promoting…