Four experiments examined young children's knowledge about the visual characteristics of writing, specifically personal names. Children younger than 4 years of age, even those who could read no simple words, showed some knowledge about the horizontal orientation of English names, the Latin letters that make them up, and their left-to-right…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

Communication technology is changing things. Language is no exception. Some language researchers argue that language is deteriorating due to increased use in electronic communication. The present paper investigated 100 randomly selected electronic mails (e-mails) and 50 short messaging system (SMS) messages of a representative sample of…

When Algeria opened its markets to foreign investment starting from the early 2000s, a technological boom occurred, including the expansion of mobile phone use. New technologies have had a considerable impact on the Algerian diglossic situation, in recent decades, and have contributed in the democratisation of the local dialects, which are being…

What is environmental print? It is symbols all around. Environmental print is on signs, billboards, packages, junk mail, and everywhere. Young children easily recognize environmental print in their surroundings. Their everyday experiences with print are an important classroom tool to help children connect what they already know about written…

This study investigated visuo-orthographic knowledge in deaf readers of French compared to age-matched hearing subjects. More specifically, we were interested in knowledge related to the legal position of double consonants and to the fact that double consonants are much more frequent than double vowels in written French. We used a word-likeness…

This single-subject study assessed the effects of in-classroom coaching on early childhood teachers' use of emergent literacy teaching strategies. Teaching strategies were grouped into clusters related to oral language and comprehension of text, phonological awareness and alphabetic principle, and print concepts and written language, with coaching…

Previous research on children's drawing and writing focused on children's drawing and symbolization with syllabic languages, providing little information regarding young children's symbolization in drawing with a logo language. This study investigated children's emergent writing by examining qualitatively how children's writing takes place as…

Speaking, listening, reading, and writing are all language activities. The human capacity for speaking and listening has a biological foundation: wherever there are people, there is spoken language. Acquiring spoken language is an unconscious activity, and, barring any physical deformity or language learning disability, like severe autism, all…

An overview of research topics and findings from an interdisciplinary, programmatic line of research on writing over the past 25 years is presented. The cross-sectional assessment studies (grades 1 to 9) showed which measures uniquely explained variance in handwriting, spelling, and composing and thus validated their use in assessment. These and…

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in…

According to many views of literacy development, prereaders use a logographic approach when they attempt to link print and speech. If so, these children should find pairs in which the spelling-pronunciation links are consistent with their writing system no easier to learn than arbitrary pairs. We tested this idea by comparing the ability of U.S.…

We investigated the initial development of reading and spelling in European Portuguese. First-graders, tested in February and June, had to read and spell words and pseudowords. In February there were regularity and graphemic complexity effects, indicating that these children relied on grapheme-phoneme conversion. The lexicality effect found in…

In this paper it is proposed that the prefrontal lobe participates in two closely related but different executive function abilities: (1) "metacognitive executive functions": problem solving, planning, concept formation, strategy development and implementation, controlling attention, working memory, and the like; that is, executive functions as…

Purpose: This study describes written and spoken narrative skills of school-age individuals with Down syndrome (DS). Method: Twenty-one students with DS (age 6;6 [years;months]-19;10) and 17 reading-matched, typically developing (TD) controls (age 4;9-10;9) were matched using Word Identification subtest raw scores (Woodcock Reading Mastery…