Although children develop categorical speech perception at a very young age, the maturation process remains unclear. A cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 4-, 6-, and 10-year-old children, 14-year-old adolescents, and adults (n = 104, 56 males, all Asians from mainland China) was conducted to investigate the development of categorical…

This systematic literature review aimed to study the effects of early reading interventions in early grades. Specifically, interventions in the early stages affect letter-sound recognition, phonemic awareness, and word identification. Many students may fail to reach the end-of-the-year standards, even with strong classroom teaching. Intervention…

Purpose: The primary aim was to assess whether children have difficulty distinguishing similar-sounding novel words. The secondary aim was to assess what task characteristics might hinder or facilitate perceptual discrimination. Method: Three within-subjects experiments tested ninety-nine 3- to 5-year-old children total. Experiment 1 presented two…

Phonemic awareness is a key building block for later reading and spelling development. Students at risk for reading difficulties may have difficulties with phonemic awareness and need additional instruction or intervention to develop these skills. This column discusses evidence-based phonemic awareness instruction and the implementation of…

Purpose: Phoneme categorization (PC) for voice onset time and second formant transition was studied in adult cochlear implant (CI) users with early-onset deafness and hearing controls. Method: Identification and discrimination tasks were administered to 30 participants implanted before 4 years of age, 21 participants implanted after 7 years of…

Reading is one of the most well-studied aspects of human learning. Since the 1950s, with more interest, research tools, and funding available, the body of reading research has exploded: Every year, hundreds of new scientific papers are published. However, there has been a detrimental lag in ensuring this science is understood by the people who…

Across the nation the average allotted time, per school day for phonics instruction is 20-30 minutes for elementary students (Shanahan, 2019). Although this is an average, the aforementioned amount of time is not an adequate amount of time to include all of the necessary components of effective phonics instruction (Shanahan, 2019). Furthermore,…

The quantitative methods study examined and compared the knowledge of phonological awareness between preschool and kindergarten teachers. A multiple-choice knowledge survey was utilized to determine levels of understanding between the two groups of teachers. The knowledge survey consisted of questions pertaining to definitions of phonological…

Purpose: Research on how much early phonemic awareness (PA) instruction is optimal has produced inconclusive answers. We conducted a nonlinear meta-analysis to estimate the optimal cumulative dosage of early PA instruction on PA outcomes with an associated maximum effect size in preschool through first-grade students. Method: Sixteen experimental…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the implementation of the Wilson's Language Training program, Fundations, influences the reading growth of first-grade graders. Reading proficiency at the school in this study was quite low at six percent. During the intervention, emphasis was placed on phonemic awareness. The Wilson's Fundations…

The purpose of this causal-comparative quantitative study was to determine the knowledge of basic language constructs between novice and career teachers in upstate South Carolina regarding their differences in knowledge of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphology as measured by the Basic Language Constructs Survey among…

Phonological awareness (PA) is a word that has recently gained currency in the field of early literacy instruction. There is a large corpus of research on how to teach PA to young language learners. In spite of these relevant data, there is a dearth of literacy information on PA in Arabic, especially targeting Saudi students. The focus of this…

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder which is represented by a variety of deficits in all linguistic domains including phonology. Previous research, mainly conducted in the English language, has documented phonological deficits in early childhood in Down syndrome. Given the paucity of research in the area of phonology in the Greek language, the aim…

The Better Start Literacy Approach (BSLA) is a strengths-based approach to supporting children's literacy learning in their first year of school. Previous research has shown the approach is effective at accelerating foundational literacy knowledge in children with lower levels of oral language. This study examined the impact of the BSLA for…

Word segmentation is a crucial step in children's vocabulary learning. While computational models of word segmentation can capture infants' performance in small-scale artificial tasks, the examination of early word segmentation in naturalistic settings has been limited by the lack of measures that can relate models' performance to developmental…