When a child does not seem to be ready for primary school, a popular practice is to grant the child more time by letting it repeat kindergarten. However, previous quasi-experimental research demonstrated negative, though diminishing, effects of kindergarten retention on academic learning during the first years of primary school. The present study…

Purpose: The authors examined initial acquisition of mental graphemic representations (MGRs) for a set of pseudowords in children with language impairment (LI). They also determined whether the linguistic properties of the words (i.e., phonotactic and orthotactic probabilities) influenced MGR learning and whether the ability to acquire initial…

In the present study, we investigated critical factors in letter-sound acquisition (i.e., letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness) with data from 653 English-speaking kindergartners in the beginning of the year. We examined (a) the contribution of phonological awareness to facilitating letter-sound acquisition from letter names and (b)…