Reading is an essential skill for daily life and academic success. According to the connectionist model of reading, word recognition involves orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, as well as the interactions among them. Language skill such as phonological processing, develops earlier than reading acquisition, and thus likely serves…

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether morphological awareness measured before children are taught to read (Kindergarten in Israel) predicts reading accuracy and fluency in the middle of first grade, at the very beginning of the process of learning to read pointed Hebrew -- a highly transparent orthography, and whether this…

Previous meta-analyses highlight the role of executive functions (EF), encompassing working memory, task-switching, and inhibition, in reading comprehension, but have not demarcated its role in decoding, defined as use of orthographic patterns to access oral pronunciations. According to the dual-route model, decoding involves parallel activation…

The paper aims to account for linguistic and processing factors responsible for the incidence of spelling errors in Hebrew. The theoretical goal is to disentangle a complex interaction between morphology, phonology, and orthography in production of written words. We focused on a specific spelling error in Hebrew: an overt representation of the…

We provide an exhaustive review of studies in the relatively new domain of research on the influence of orthography on second language (L2) phonological acquisition. While language teachers have long recognized the importance of written input--in addition to spoken input--on learners' development, until this century there was very little…

In order to inform English foreign language (EFL) diagnostic assessment of literacy, this study examined the extent to which 175 first-language Hebrew-speaking EFL young learners from fifth to tenth grade exhibited differences in single-letter grapheme recognition, sub-word, and word reading, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) of letters and…

Although there is a growing research base on Arabic literacy development to inform our understanding of the factors that account for variability in word reading skill, the current body of research is limited by two major constraints. First, although several studies examine one or more early literacy constructs, we were able to locate only two…

Within the field of linguistics, whether considering language contact situations (Weinreich, 1979) or foreign language education (Lado, 1957), the topic of language transfer, especially as it relates to pronunciation, has always been an item of particular interest. While research on such transfer has mostly focused on various phenomena of the L1…

To examine the processing of phonological and configurational information in word recognition in discourse reading, we conducted two experiments using the self-paced reading paradigm. The materials were three-sentence discourses, in each of which the last word of the second sentence and the third word from the end of the last sentence formed a…

Learning letters is an important area of language learning, conducive to the beginning of reading and writing. Indeed, today's generation prefers to learn through digital games rather than through formal teaching processes. Inspired by this need, the researcher designed this study (a) to test the effectiveness of an instructional digital game,…

This study describes the development of a special education teacher observation protocol detailing the elements of effective decoding instruction. The psychometric properties of the protocol were investigated through many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM). Video observations of classroom decoding instruction from 20 special education teachers across…

The purpose of this article is to rethink how sight words are categorized in early childhood classrooms. Three categories of words (regularly spelled, temporarily irregularly spelled, and permanently irregularly spelled) are presented as a way to think about the orthographic representations of words and how these representations interact with…

This theoretical position article presents the current state of the research on college-aged Spanish heritage language learners' (HL) spelling as well as the limitations of a descriptive approach to spelling research. The article also highlights the need to analyze and understand HLs' errors based on the underlying cognitive-linguistic processes…

Using a psycholinguistic and a holistic bilingual perspective, this study examined the writing conceptualization progressions in Spanish and English of 16 simultaneous bilinguals from preschool through kindergarten. The children were enrolled in a bilingual early childhood program where literacy instruction was primarily in Spanish. We adapted a…

Research Findings: It has been proposed that the home literacy environment may influence the development of early number skills. However, the results of studies examining the association between home literacy experiences and early number skills are mixed. This could be due to the way that the home literacy experiences are conceptualized and…