Many South African children struggle in acquiring literacy and reading skills. It seems as if caregivers may be missing an important aspect in guiding children's emergent reading development. The question is whether there are underlying concepts needed for emergent literacy and the acquisition of reading skills. The nature of the reading process…

Phonological decoding is central to learning to read, and deficits in its acquisition have been linked to reading disorders such as dyslexia. Understanding how this skill is acquired is therefore important for characterising reading difficulties. Decoding can be taught explicitly, or implicitly learned during instruction on whole word spellings…

Concept of word in print is the development of an understanding of how monosyllabic and multisyllabic words operate in print. Young children show evidence of this understanding when they are able to repeat a line of text while accurately pointing to each word as it is said. A small but robust line of work has examined the knowledge, skills, and…

In this experiment, the extent to which beginning readers process phonology during lexical identification in silent sentence reading was investigated. The eye movements of children aged seven to nine years and adults were recorded as they read sentences containing either a correctly spelled target word (e.g., girl), a pseudohomophone (e.g., gerl),…

Beginning readers and struggling readers need explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics (Adams, 2008; Ehri,1992, 1998; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, & Yaghoub-Zadeh, 2001; Gaskins et al., 1997; Moats, 2004; Morris, 2015; National Reading Panel, 2000; Reutzel, 2015). Ehri and McCormick's (2008) phases of word learning…

The direct, retention, and transfer effects of repeated word and pseudoword reading were studied in a pretest, training, posttest, retention design. First graders (48 good readers, 47 poor readers) read 25 CVC words and 25 CVC pseudowords in ten repeated word reading sessions, preceded and followed by a transfer task with a different set of items.…

The current study examined the effect of pointing to the words and using highlighted text by examining eye movements when children in preschool, Grade 1 and 2 were read storybooks of two levels of difficulty. For all children, pointing to and highlighting the text was observed to increase the amount of time and number of fixations on the printed…

We employed brain-behavior analyses to explore the relationship between performance on tasks measuring phonological awareness, pseudoword decoding, and rapid auditory processing (all predictors of reading (dis)ability) and brain organization for print and speech in beginning readers. For print-related activation, we observed a shared set of…

This article introduces a way of seeing miscue analysis data through a "spider chart", a readily available digital graphing tool that provides an effective way to visually represent readers' complex coordination of interrelated cueing systems. A spider chart is a standard feature in recent spreadsheet software that puts a new spin on miscue…

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as "chat-ure" ("cat-ish") composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real…

Neglect dyslexia--a peripheral reading disorder generally associated with left spatial neglect--is characterized by omissions or substitutions of the initial letters of words. Several observations suggest that neglect dyslexia errors are independent of viewer-centered coordinates; the disorder is therefore thought to reflect impairment at the…

We describe a multiple-route model of reading development in which coarse-grained orthographic processing plays a key role in optimizing access to semantics via whole-word orthographic representations. This forms part of the direct orthographic route that gradually replaces phonological recoding during the initial phases of reading acquisition.…

Learning to read is a complex process that develops normally in the majority of children and requires the mapping of graphemes to their corresponding phonemes. Problems with the mapping process nevertheless occur in about 5% of the population and are typically attributed to poor phonological representations, which are--in turn--attributed to…

This 2-year longitudinal study examined both concurrent and longitudinal relations of a variety of reading-related cognitive tasks and Chinese word reading and word dictation among 187 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners aged 4-6. Homophone awareness, visual skills and syllable awareness were all uniquely associated with Chinese word reading across…

Most theories of reading development assume a shift from slow sequential subword decoding to automatic processing of orthographic word forms. We hypothesized that this shift should be reflected in a concomitant shift in reading-related cognitive functions. The current study investigated the cognitive dynamics underlying reading development in a…