Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the direct and indirect relations between short-term memory (STM), reading, oral language, and writing at the letter, word, and discourse levels in young, developing writers both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Method: Participants were 449 English-speaking kindergarten students (52% female)…

This study examined whether different cognitive correlates are associated with spelling of different target types, such as phonologically consistent and inconsistent syllables, of Korean Hangul among 94 five-year-old first language (L1) Korean children and 41 foreign language (FL) learners who are Hong Kong Chinese college students. Korean…

This article describes the development and psychometric properties of a new Dyslexia Marker Test for Children (Dysmate-C). The test was designed to identify Norwegian students who need special instructional attention. The computerized test includes measures of letter knowledge, phoneme awareness, rapid automatized naming, working memory, decoding,…

Boys' relatively poor progress in writing development is of particular concern in education with both cognitive and social factors proposed as possible accounts of this discrepancy. This study examined whether differences in cognitive skills such as handwriting and spelling or phonological processing abilities could explain gender differences in…

Working memory has been proposed to account for the differential rates in progress young children make in writing. One crucial aspect of learning to write is the encoding (i.e., integration) and retrieval of the correct phoneme-grapheme pairings, known as binding. In addition to executive functions, binding is regarded as central to the concept of…

A collection of cognitive, linguistic, and spelling measures were administered to third-grade English L1 and L2 learners. To capture formative assessments of children's developing mental graphemic representations (MGRs), spelling errors in isolation were subjected to analysis across three metrics: (1) Phonological constrained; (2)…

The present study examined phoneme awareness, phonological short term memory, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual-verbal paired associate learning (PAL) as longitudinal predictors of spelling skills in an early phase (Grade 2) and a later phase (Grade 5) of development in a sample of 140 children learning to spell in the…

Handwriting is a complex skill that, despite increasing use of computers, still plays a vital role in education. It is assumed that children will master letter formation at a relatively early stage in their school life, with handwriting fluency developing steadily until automaticity is attained. The capacity theory of writing suggests that as…

We examined the growth of spelling skills in a large sample of Norwegian children (N = 228) over the first 3 years in school. The roles of phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), visual-verbal paired-associate learning, and verbal short-term memory as predictors of later spelling skills were examined. Phoneme awareness…