Background: Young children clearly know quite a bit about the conventions of written language; for instance, 5-year-old children are sensitive to the fact that words tend to include both consonants and vowels, rather than just one or the other. The core theoretical debate lies in whether this understanding of sub-lexical orthographic regularities…

English vowels are phonologically and orthographically more difficult than consonants when learning to map speech to print. We sought to determine if teaching young at-risk readers and spellers to use a visual vowel hand sign system to segment spoken words into their component phonemes contributed to improved grapheme-phoneme correspondence…

This study examined the comparative effect of recasts and prompts on EFL learners' pronunciation accuracy of consonants and vowels. Eighty-nine elementary EFL learners were selected among 117 through their performance on a piloted sample KET and were randomly assigned into two experimental groups (recast, prompt), and a control group. A piloted…

Learning to read in most alphabetic orthographies requires not only the acquisition of simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) but also the acquisition of context-sensitive GPCs, where surrounding letters change a grapheme's pronunciation. We aimed to explore the use and development of simple GPCs (e.g. a [right arrow] /ae/) and…

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French "aspirateur," Catalan "aspirador"…

The Arabic writing system allows for two representations: vowelized or non-vowelized. The vowelized writing, which characterizes the writing in the Koran, classical literature and children's books, includes the long and short vowels and all the vowels, including the vowels that express syntax functions (the final vowels). In non-vowelized writing,…

An insufficient number of studies investigated the criteria for Arabic letter teaching in schools. Teachers play an integral role in understanding Arabic letters among young children, as it is essential for acquiring reading in the Arabic language early in life. The criteria for teaching letters in a current study include ease of pronunciation,…

In this experiment, we examined whether beginning readers benefit more from grapheme-phoneme decoding (GPD) than from whole-syllable decoding (WSD) instruction in learning to read and write words. Sixty Brazilian Portuguese-speaking first graders (M age = 6 years 1 month) who knew letter names but could not read or write words were randomly…

This study was conducted with the following objectives: 1) to develop digital technology that supports learning in children with disabilities; 2) to test the effectiveness of digital technology used in children's learning. The sample selected to study the current context of and needs of digital technology consisted of a group of 46 teachers and…

Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic systems in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form…

Research reveals that although the effect of diacritics--the symbols that tell the reader how to pronounce a letter--on reading and reading comprehension was examined in a series of studies, the influence of diacritics on listening comprehension, especially in the Arabic orthography, was not examined. Therefore, this study attempted to examine…

The distinctive features of the Arabic language and orthography offer opportunities to investigate multiple word characteristics at the item level. The aim of this paper was to model differences in word reading at the item level among 3rd grade native Arabic-speaking children (n = 303) using cross-classified generalized random-effects (CCGRE)…

Purpose: This study investigated Icelandic-speaking children's acquisition of singleton consonants and consonant clusters. Method: Participants were 437 typically developing children aged 2;6-7;11 (years;months) acquiring Icelandic as their first language. Single-word speech samples of the 47 single consonants and 45 consonant clusters were…

Purpose: This article compares acoustic data of normally developing children from two dominant and one nondominant variety of English in order to determine phonetic proximity. Method: The study focuses on one variety of American English (AE), one British English (BE) variety, and one Jamaican English (JE) variety owing to the historical and…

Three novel experiments investigated the effectiveness of color-coded word-families flashcards for facilitating kindergarteners' word recognition skills. Flashcards were constructed with the rime of the word family (vowel and remaining consonant sounds) printed in black ink, indicating that words with this spelling pattern sound the same, and the…