Although much is known about supporting preschoolers' alphabet knowledge, less is known about instructional moves that support preschoolers' narrative comprehension or how preschoolers' developing cognitive skills may support their narrative comprehension development. This school-university partnership project examined relations of preschoolers'…

Phonological interference during written-word meaning judgments occurs in both Chinese and English, suggesting that word-level phonological activation is universal rather than dependent on the sublexical structures that vary with writing systems. To accommodate this universality, we distinguish two sources of phonological congruence between a…

This exploratory study aimed at developing a dyslexia assessment tool in the Amharic language and to collect initial reliability and validity data on the tool designed to identify dyslexia in Grade 3. The developed battery consists of 10 tests. Data were collected from 121 Amharic-speaking children, aged 9-12 years. Evidence of construct validity…

Studies investigating relations between morphological awareness and literacy in German, a language with a rather transparent but asymmetric orthography, are sparse. Little is known about the role of grade level for these relationships and of their relative strength compared to those between other language-related variables and literacy skills.…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

Relationships between attention/executive functions and language learning were investigated in students in Grades 4 to 9 (N = 88) with and without specific learning disabilities (SLDs) in multiword syntax in oral and written language (OWL LD), word reading and spelling (dyslexia), and subword letter writing (dysgraphia). Prior…

This nontechnical guide for parents and teachers examines learning to read from infants' babbling to the fluent reading of children reading independently for pleasure. Chapter 1, "Baby Speaks," describes language development in infancy. Chapter 2, "Our Alphabet: Language by Ear and by Eye," presents the alphabetic system and…