The authors examined whether exposing young students to spellings as they learn proper names would facilitate memory for the spoken names when tested without the spellings present (i.e., orthographic facilitation), whether emergent readers with letter knowledge would show this effect, and whether phonemic segmentation (PS) training would enhance…

Phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are well-known kindergarten predictors of later word recognition skills, but it is not clear whether they predict developments in accuracy or speed, or both. The present longitudinal study of 172 Danish beginning readers found that speed of word recognition mainly developed…

A miniature linguistic system was used to study acquisition of recombinative symbolic behavior. Three studies evaluated the teaching conditions of conditional discriminations with printed and spoken pseudowords that could potentially generate recombinative reading. Fifty-four college students across all studies learned to match 12 printed…

Three hundred children from two metropolitan areas were studied for 1 year to determine (1) the relationship between letter-name knowledge and reading success, (2) the relationship between letter-name learning and phonic learning, and (3) the ease and efficiency of vowel identification. The study concluded that the sooner a child learns the letter…

Acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity are processes that are central to early reading development in several languages. The language-specific characteristics of the alphasyllabaries ( Bright, 1996), however, challenge the constructs of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity as discussed in the context of…

One of the most important skills for children to develop in the kindergarten year is the recognition that letters and sounds are related. It is often called "the alphabetic principle"--the notion that speech sounds can be connected to letters in a predictable way. To grasp the alphabetic principle, children need to understand that: (1) letters…

There is a wealth of evidence linking letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, but there is little research examining the nature of this relationship. This article aims to elucidate this relationship by considering the links between letter knowledge and two sub-skills of phoneme awareness: phoneme segmentation and phoneme invariance. Two studies…

A Russian method of teaching beginning reading using auditory discrimination of phonemes training was shown to be superior to two American methods. (JH)

This study examined the psycholinguistic implications of using either of two different types of orthography--syllabic and roman--in Native language programs for Cree children with regard to readability, learnability, and the transfer of reading skills to and from reading in an official language (English or French). This study can also be applied…

Language analysis tasks (segmentation and rhyming) and rapid automatized naming tasks (objects, colors, and letters) were found to tap different linguistics-processing components in both kindergarteners and first graders. Children who could analyze letter names were more likely to be among the better readers at the end of first grade. (Author/BS)

Forty-eight kindergarten children were assigned to phoneme identity, phoneme manipulation, or language experience programs. Children in the manipulation program made greater gains in blending and segmentation, but children in the phoneme identity condition made greater gains on a test of phonetic cue reading. Implications for reading instruction…

The present study was designed to determine whether alphabet letters facilitate the acquisition of phoneme segmentation skill and to test the assumption that letters make it harder for prereaders to learn segmentation than nondistinctively marked visual aids. (Author/PN)

Strategies children use when they recognize words were explored. To measure the effectiveness of two different methods of training children to attend to the critical features of letters, 40 first-grade urban children were presented two pairs of letters (similar and dissimilar) simultaneously or successively. Unexpectedly, it was found that with…

This study investigated the development of alphabet knowledge among 91 nonreading children followed from the beginning of kindergarten through the middle of first grade. Findings suggested that alphabet knowledge consists of both letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, which have different developmental patterns and which have unique importance…

The Report of the National Reading Panel (2000) explains that phonemic awareness instruction and phonics instruction are highly beneficial for students learning to read. In the updated second edition, Edmund V. Starrett provides educators with guidance on teaching phonics as part of a well-planned reading program. This reference book presents the…