The universal role of phonological processing skills for reading acquisition has been established in many different languages including Arabic. However, in Arabic little knowledge exists about the development of wide-range of phonological tasks and about the correlations between them. We longitudinally studied the developmental trends and…

The following semi-autobiographical essay tells a cautionary tale about the entrenched Anglocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Alphabetism in reading and reading disabilities (dyslexia) research. Having been born, raised, and educated in an entirely monolingual English-speaking environment, I later migrated to a country where non-European languages…

It is now widely accepted that phonological language skills are a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). This longitudinal study investigated the predictive relationship between a range of key phonological language skills and early reading development in a sample of 191 children in their first year at school. The study also explored…

Two experiments explored rates for introducing grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and the types of correspondences taught for optimal alphabet and early literacy skills learning. In both studies, children entered with minimal alphabet knowledge and were randomly assigned within classrooms to one of two treatments delivered individually over…

Recent research has established that 5- to 6-year-old typically developing children in a left-right writing culture spontaneously reverse left-oriented characters (e.g., they write a [reversed J] instead of J) when they write single characters. Thus, children seem to implicitly apply a right-writing rule (RWR: see Fischer & Koch, 2016a). In…

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate general spelling difficulties. This study investigated accuracy on and sensitivity to silent letters in spelling in children with and without DLD. Investigating silent-letter production provides a window into orthographic and morphological knowledge and enhances understanding…

In this study, northern Canadian rural and Indigenous parents provided valuable information about the self-initiated writing that their two- through nine-year-old children do at home. In interview responses, participating parents told stories about the writing materials and spaces they make available to children for writing. They talked about how…

One of the aims for compulsory education is to diminish or alleviate differences in children's skills existing prior to school entry. However, a growing gender gap in reading development has increasingly been documented. Regrettably, there is scant evidence on whether differences between genders (favouring girls) have their roots in pre-reading…

This study investigated the unique contribution of orthographic awareness, letter knowledge, and patterning skills to early literacy and arithmetic competence. A total of 145 third-year kindergarten (K3) children (M[subscript age]: 73.43 months, SD = 5.36; 70 boys, 48%) from Hong Kong participated in this study. Children were assessed on their…

We examined whether akshara knowledge, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and RAN predict variability in word and nonword reading skills in Grade 1-4 children (N = 200) learning to read Sinhala. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that akshara knowledge had the strongest unique association with both word and nonword reading accuracy…

Touch-screen tablets are used in the classroom for assessment. Little is known about the psychometric properties of tablet-based assessments. This study examined the validity and reliability of an expressive and receptive assessment app designed to measure literacy skills. Children (N = 45; 3-5 years) completed the app assessments for alphabet and…

This study set out to examine the range of legibility demonstrated by Western Australian students required to handwrite tasks of increasing intrinsic cognitive load. A representative sample of students in Years 1, 2 and 3 (N=437) was recruited for a cross sectional study and teachers administered handwriting tasks. Year 1 students were…

The present study addresses the scope of the writing difficulties observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Patients with AD, patients with MCI and healthy controls performed a written picture-naming task and a direct copy transcoding task in which phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency was…

Reading fluency has been acknowledged as a key component in the process of learning to read. As students enter kindergarten, many of them do not have the early or emergent literacy skills they need in order to become fluent readers. Kindergarten students in a Midwest suburban elementary school were studied focusing on their development of reading…

The authors investigated the influence of teaching letter names and sounds in isolation or in the context of storybook reading on preschool children's early literacy learning and engagement during instruction. Alphabet instruction incorporated paired-associate learning of correspondences between letter names and sounds. In decontextualized…