This longitudinal study examined (a) the second-grade reading outcomes of 368 children who participated in either experimental or school-designed supplemental intervention in kindergarten, and (b) the influence and interactions of learner variables and type of intervention on reading achievement. Descriptive findings indicated that percentages of…

Language and literacy skills are instrumental to success at school and early success with writing is a key factor in literacy development. By eight years of age, children spend up to half of their school day engaged in writing tasks suggesting that those who find learning to write difficult may be disadvantaged. The ability to hear and record…

The effects of a kindergarten training program in phonological awareness with 209 Swedish-speaking children were followed up until the end of Grade 9. Initial levels of letter knowledge and phonological awareness were positively associated with the level of decoding skill in Grade 3 but not with its growth afterward. The intervention group…

Because of their global clinical utility, phonemic fluency tests are frequently incorporated into neuropsychological assessment batteries. However, in heterogeneous societies their use is complicated by the lack of careful attention to using letters of equivalent difficulty across languages, and the paucity of norms stratified by relevant…

The visual recognition of letters dissociates from the recognition of numbers at both the behavioral and neural level. In this article, using fMRI, we investigate whether the visual recognition of numbers dissociates from letters, thereby establishing a double dissociation. In Experiment 1, participants viewed strings of consonants and Arabic…

Letter name knowledge (LNK) is a key predictor of later reading ability and has been emphasized strongly in recent educational policy. Studies of LNK have implicitly treated it as a unidimensional construct with all letters equally relevant to its measurement. However, some empirical research suggests that contextual factors can affect the…

It is harder to find the letter "N" among its mirror reversals than vice versa, an inconvenient finding for bottom-up saliency accounts based on primary visual cortex (V1) mechanisms. However, in line with this account, we found that in dense search arrays, gaze first landed on either target equally fast. Remarkably, after first landing,…

The process of word form encoding was investigated in primed word naming and word typing with Chinese monosyllabic words. The target words shared or did not share the onset consonants with the prime words. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 100 ms or 300 ms. Typing required the participants to enter the phonetic letters of the target word,…

The present study employed dynamic causal modeling to investigate the effective functional connectivity between regions of the neural network involved in top-down letter processing. We used an illusory letter detection paradigm in which participants detected letters while viewing pure noise images. When participants detected letters, the response…

We had 3 aims in the present study: (a) to examine the dimensionality of various evaluative approaches to scoring writing samples (e.g., quality, productivity, and curriculum-based measurement [CBM] writing scoring), (b) to investigate unique language and cognitive predictors of the identified dimensions, and (c) to examine gender gap in the…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the code-related features used in current methods of writing instruction in kindergarten classrooms transfer reading outcomes for kindergarten students. We randomly assigned kindergarten students to 3 instructional groups: a writing workshop group, an interactive writing group, and a control group.…

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…

Individuals who have difficult-to-understand speech and minimal reading skills are often limited to icon or picture-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategies. However, basic phonemic awareness skills could make strategies such as alphabet supplementation, in which the speaker selects the first letter of words they are…

The purpose of the current study was to characterize and compare the emergent-literacy skills, print interest, and home-literacy environment of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to their peers, as well as to examine the association between children's emergent-literacy skills and their home-literacy environment. Results indicated that…

Design of a screening test for identifying reading difficult students in Malayalam and validation thereof among boys is made to help schools proactively intervene with such students. A battery of tests developed based on extant literature on screening tests, reviewed difficulties in reading Malayalam, and discrimination power of the draft tests is…