This study presents the results of a cross-sectional reading and spelling assessment conducted among 118 Spanish children in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade. The first aim was to explore whether children's use of orthographic knowledge was modulated by lexical variables--word frequency and orthographic neighborhood--or sublexical…

Conceptual models of early writing suggest multiple component skills support children's early writing development. Although research interest in early writing skills has grown in recent years, the majority of studies focus narrowly on procedural knowledge or transcription skills (i.e., handwriting and spelling) to the relative exclusion of how…

Despite a growing body of literature in English-speaking contexts documenting associations among children's early reading, executive function (EF), and early writing development, relatively few studies investigate the development of these skills in young Chinese children. Utilizing a longitudinal research design, this study followed 84 Chinese…

Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we…

Spelling skills have been identified as one of the major barriers to written text production in young English writers. By contrast oral language skills and text generation have been found to be less influential in the texts produced by beginning writers. To date, our understanding of the role of spelling skills in transparent orthographies is…

In Study 1, children in grades 4-9 (N = 88, 29 females and 59 males) with persisting reading and/or writing disabilities, despite considerable prior specialized instruction in and out of school, were given an evidence-based comprehensive assessment battery at the university while parents completed questionnaires regarding past and current history…

The purpose of this study was to concurrently examine the development of written language across different writing tasks and to investigate how writing features develop in preschool children. Emergent written language knowledge of 372 preschoolers was assessed using numerous writing tasks. The findings from this study indicate that children…

In a previous study [Schwartz et al. (2005). "Written Language and Literacy," 8, 179-207] we showed that early literacy in Russian (L1) facilitated decoding acquisition in Hebrew (L2) among Russian-Hebrew first graders. The present study examined two alternative explanations for this finding. The first account concerns the general…