A portion of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit a strength in early word reading referred to as hyperlexia (HPL), yet it remains unclear what mechanisms underlie this strength. Typically developing children (TD) acquire phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge and language skills as precursors to word reading. We compared these…

A key to reducing reading difficulty, particularly for children living in poverty, is to provide high quality, explicit, and well-planned instruction from the start of a child's school career. Preschools that provide quality language, literacy, and content instruction have produced promising positive effects on children's later academic…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

To evaluate the orthographic and phonological processing skills of developmental dyslexics, we (a) examined their abilities to exploit properties of orthographic redundancy and (b) tested whether their phonological deficit extends to spelling-to-sound connections for large-grain size units such as syllables. To assess the processing skills in…

Gaining facility with spelling is an important part of becoming a good writer. Here we review recent work on how children learn to spell in alphabetic writing systems. Statistical learning plays an important role in this process. Young children learn about some of the salient graphic characteristics of written texts and attempt to reproduce these…

Two hypotheses were tested: Similarity between first language (L1) and second language (L2) orthographic processing facilitates L2-decoding efficiency; and L2-decoding efficiency contributes to word-meaning inference to different degrees among L2 learners with diverse L1 orthographic backgrounds. The participants were college-level English as a…

This dissertation study seeks to understand how teachers who work in an ASL/English bilingual educational program for preschool children conceptualize and utilize phonological instruction of American Sign Language (ASL). While instruction that promotes phonological awareness of spoken English is thought to provide educational benefits to young…

The knowledge of letter names measured just before children enter school has been known for a long time as one of the best longitudinal predictors of learning to read in an alphabetic writing system. After a period during which the comprehensive investigation of this relationship was largely disregarded, there is now a growing interest in attempts…

Two experiments tested the common assumption that knowing the letter names helps children learn basic letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) relation because most names contain the relevant sounds. In Experiment 1 (n=45), children in an experimental group learned English letter names for letter-like symbols. Some of these names contained the…

Reports a study that examined sixth- and 10th-grade students' ability to generate orthographic and phonetic derivatives for three predominant vowel-alternation patterns characteristic of internal derivational morphology. Results support the hypothesis that a productive knowledge of these patterns in orthography precedes a productive knowledge of…

Compared speech of kindergartners and first-graders from Turkey and America to investigate how characteristics of their spoken languages affect development of phonological awareness and how the relationship between spoken language and orthography affect phonological awareness and word recognition. Results suggest that characteristics of a spoken…

Fifty-nine papers on language research and linguistic theory from the annual forum address these topics: correctness in language; aspects of neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics; historical linguistics and language evolution; linguistic philosophy; aspects of syntax; aspects of discourse analysis; lexicon and semantics; language contact and…

Fifty-three papers on linguistic theory and language research, including a number of prize-winning essays, address these topics: aspects of discourse analysis; bilingualism; Chinese modal verbs; early bilingual speech; linguistic metatheory; music and accent discrepancy; diphthongs; hiatus; vowel patterns; suprasegmentals; neologisms; aspects of…