A growing body of evidence indicates that the development of mathematics and literacy skills is highly related. The importance of literacy skills--specifically language--for mathematics development has been well rationalized. However, despite several prominent studies indicating that mathematics skills are highly predictive of literacy…

Although letter naming fluency (LNF) and letter sound fluency (LSF) measures are widely available to educators for assessing early literacy skills of kindergarten children, better understanding of the contributions of these skills to reading development can help improve the interpretation of LNF and LSF data for instructional decisions. This study…

The purpose of the current research is to assess the clinical utility of an invented spelling tool and determine whether invented spelling and word stress (supra-segmental level measures) can also be used to better identify reading difficulties. The proposed invented spelling tool incorporated linguistic manipulations to alter the difficulty…

Visual processes in Grade 1 were examined for their predictive influences in nonalphanumeric and alphanumeric rapid naming (RAN) in 51 poor early and 69 typical readers. In a lagged design, children were followed longitudinally from Grade 1 to Grade 3 over 5 testing occasions. RAN outcomes in early Grade 2 were predicted by speeded and nonspeeded…

Wolf and Bowers (1999) described a model in which phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed (NS) make independent contributions to reading ability. We tested this model in a sample of 201 Grade 3 Arabic-speaking children in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Measures of general cognitive ability, vocabulary, PA, NS, word reading, and reading…

This study explored the role and extent of the involvement of morphological awareness (MA) in contrast to rapid automatized naming (RAN) in word reading and comprehension of Arabic as a morphologically based orthography. We gave measures of word reading, reading comprehension, MA, and RAN in addition to a nonverbal mental ability test to 3 groups…

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item…

Four-year-old (n = 20) and five-year-old (n = 22) bilingual children were tested twice in six months on Armenian (minority language) and English (majority language) picture identification and picture naming tasks to examine receptive and expressive vocabulary growth in both languages. Parental education, Armenian/English language exposure, and…

Cognitive processes underlying a behavioural outcome (like reading ability) and the impact of familial risk (e.g., for dyslexia) have been studied in isolation. We present a novel design, linking the two avenues. How do familial influences impact on children's cognitive skills, which subsequently underlie reading development? Participants from the…

This study examined how well nonverbal IQ (or fluid intelligence), vocabulary, phonological awareness (PA), rapid autonomized naming (RAN), and phonological short-term memory (STM) predicted mathematics outcomes. The 208 participating kindergartners were administered tests of fluid intelligence, vocabulary, PA, RAN, STM, and numeracy in the fall…

This study examined the dynamic relationships among the components of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) in a transparent orthography (Finnish) and the predictive value of cognitive skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, rapid naming, and vocabulary) on the SVR components. Altogether, 1,815 Finnish children were followed from kindergarten…

Models of irregular word reading that take into account both child- and word-level predictors have not been evaluated in typically developing children and children with reading difficulty (RD). The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in irregular word reading ability among 5th grade children (N = 170), oversampled for…

We examined the developmental relationships between home literacy environment (parent teaching, shared book reading) and emergent literacy skills (phonological awareness, letter knowledge, vocabulary, rapid naming speed) in kindergarten, reading accuracy and fluency in Grade 1, and reading comprehension in Grades 2 and 3 in a sample of Canadian…

In this study word reading (WR) fluency was used to dichotomously classify 1,598 Dutch children at different cutoffs, indicating (very) poor or (very) good reading performance. Analysis of variance and receiver operating characteristics were used to investigate the effects of rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonemic awareness (PA) in predicting…

This study analysed the effects of a classroom intervention focusing on phonological awareness and/or automatized word recognition in children with a deficit in the domains of phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming ("double deficit"). According to the double-deficit hypothesis (Wolf & Bowers, 1999), these children belong…