In recent years, children's video viewing has shifted from television to online streaming platforms like YouTube. While such platforms include many educational videos for children, we know little about the educational value of the content in these videos. To understand the learning opportunities available to children when they watch videos online,…

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

Interest in the cognitive precursors of literacy has been increasing in recent years since reading and writing are essential components of functional learning in the first years of schooling and of school success in later educational stages. However, it can be observed that while studies on the relationship between cognitive variables and reading…

Skilled readers have developed a certain amount of tolerance to variations in the visual form of words (e.g., CAPTCHAs, handwritten text, etc.). To examine how visual distortion affects the mapping from the visual input onto abstract word representations during normal reading, we focused on a single type of distortion: letter rotation.…

There is considerable research regarding measures of early reading but much less in early writing. Nevertheless, writing is a critical skill for success in school and early difficulties in writing are likely to persist without intervention. A necessary step toward identifying those students who need additional support is the use of screening…

Examining the impact of reading instruction on writing can help to refine the theoretical models to better explain how skills in reading support skills in writing and inform the development of literacy curricula that leverage the synergies between reading and writing instruction. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to investigate if the…

Little evidence exists on how best to support children's alphabet knowledge, which is a foundational early literacy skill. In this study, I investigated the impact of multisensory alphabet instruction on the alphabet learning of English monolingual and emergent bilingual (EB) children aged 3:5 to 5 years old. My primary aim was to examine whether…

Teacher-facilitation of play is proposed as an effective method for supporting early literacy learning, however, educators remain uncertain how to balance child-autonomy in play while also directing play toward explicit academic objectives. In response, this study sought to understand how kindergarten teachers can successfully facilitate play to…

Understanding the early literacy abilities of children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is essential for designing and testing methods of reading intervention focused on printed orthography. School-based professionals need assessments that measure word reading skills of students with heterogenous speech and physical…

Shifting demographics in K-12 schools have increased Spanish-speaking Multi-Language Learners' (MLLs') enrollment across the United States. While literacy variations between MLLs and proficient English speakers have been studied predominantly with upper elementary students, there remains a need for more exploration among early elementary…

This study outlines how handwritten reflection cards lead to the retention of the Japanese kana alphabets. Handwriting is said to help improve retention of the Japanese alphabets. Currently, in-person classes provide most of the materials and assignments via the university's Learning Management System (LMS), and students have the choice to…

According to a statistical-learning view of literacy development, children begin to learn about the visual characteristics of writing from an early age. We used a delayed copying task to examine U.S. preschoolers' knowledge about how letters combine with one another. Children (n = 77, mean age 4 years, 8 months) were shown a series of 4-letter…

The purpose of this study was to examine the development and characteristics of invented notation for musical representation. A total of 168 young children aged 3, 4 and 5 years participated in this study. The children listened to rhythm and melody, which represented music, to reveal their use of invented notation. The Korean children used various…

This dissertation investigated whether specific music training components of pitch and rhythm had a differential effect on early literacy skills of phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and concept of word awareness. In addition, this study examined associations between musical aptitude and early literacy skills. The central element of this…

Letter knowledge and word identification are key skills for reading and spelling. Letter knowledge facilitates the application of sublexical letter-sound mappings to decode words. With reading experience, word identification becomes a key lexical skill to support decoding. In transparent orthographies, however, letter knowledge might be an…