Early comprehension is an important, but not well-understood, contribution to early literacy and language development. Specifically, research regarding the nature of skills representative of early comprehension, including how they contribute to later reading success, is needed to support best practices to adequately prepare students. This article…

Early comprehension is an important, but not well-understood, contribution to early literacy and language development. Specifically, research regarding the nature of skills representative of early comprehension, including how they contribute to later reading success, is needed to support best practices to adequately prepare students. This article…

Provides an alternative explanation of the divergent findings appearing in the literature on conceptual tempo and reading acquisition. (HOD)

Documents children's acquisition of the following critical aspects of alphabet knowledge: letter recitation, naming, printing, and association of letters with sounds and words. Finds that performance improved with age and at different rates for different tasks. Finds no sex differences. (SR)

Indicates that the teaching of rhyming words is the most efficient initial presentation of consonant-vowel-consonant words for beginning readers. (RB)

Investigates the relationship between different levels of phonological awareness and literacy acquisition in Portuguese. Finds that phonemic awareness plays an important role in alphabetic literacy acquisition. Notes that both sensitivity to phonemic similarity and phonemic segmentation skills significantly predicted reading and spelling ability,…

Ninety kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade students participated in this study of ability to segment oral language into words and word units. Each child completed two individually administered oral segmentation tests and the Metropolitan Achievement Test. Results indicated that the ability to segment orally presented sentences developed…

In this paper, Piagetian stages are discussed in relation to the internalization of key vocabulary words by children. Research studies that indicate a parallel development using Sylvia Ashton-Warner's idea of key vocabulary of children are briefly discussed. The author agrees that three studies do not completely prove a hypothesis, however they…

Reviews research pertaining to metalinguistic awareness in young children; examines issues related to the direction of cause between metalinguistic abilities and reading, disparities in research methodology between studies, and commercial instruments perporting to measure metalinguistic knowledge; and offers implications for reading instruction…

Examines the relationship between syntactic maturity of oral language and reading achievement of first-grade students and compares this aspect of language competency to several traditional factors of reading readiness. (FL)

Investigates the internalization process of reading among 32 first graders. Finds that more of the experimental group students (who were allowed to "mumble read" during instructional and silent reading time) were reading silently as well as having higher reading placements than the control group (whose vocalizations were suppressed). (RS)

This study investigated kindergarten, first, and second grade children's ability to make linguistic judgments about sentneces that were either correct or disrupted along semantic or grammatical lines. Sentences on the judgment task were created according to clearly specified rules utilizing grammatical features that could be transformed into…

A study investigated the effects of the prompting procedure and the fading procedure upon the acquisition of word recognition skills in beginning readers. The prompting procedure is designed to overdetermine correct reading responses during word acquisition, while the gradual fading of the prompts results in transfer of control from the prompt to…