Many children who neutralize phonemic contrasts in production exhibit diminished perception of the same contrasts. It is usually difficult to determine whether the perception deficit caused the production error, or vice versa; however, the direction of causation has implications for treatment planning. This study examines perception-production…

Phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are well-known kindergarten predictors of later word recognition skills, but it is not clear whether they predict developments in accuracy or speed, or both. The present longitudinal study of 172 Danish beginning readers found that speed of word recognition mainly developed…

Background: Intervention studies for children at risk of dyslexia have typically been delivered preschool, and show short-term effects on letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, with little transfer to literacy. Methods: This randomised controlled trial evaluated the effectiveness of a reading and language intervention for 6-year-old children…

This study investigates the effects and feasibility of an intervention for first-grade students at risk for reading difficulties or disabilities (RD). The intervention was provided by general education classroom teachers and consisted of 15 min whole-class comprehension lessons (Tier 1) and 30 min Tier 2 intervention sessions in word reading,…

Individuals with Down syndrome tend to have a marked impairment of verbal short-term memory. The chief aim of this study was to investigate whether phonemic discrimination contributes to this deficit. The secondary aim was to investigate whether phonological representations are degraded in verbal short-term memory in people with Down syndrome…

Spatial attention performance was investigated in adults with dyslexia. Groups with and without dyslexia completed literacy/phonological tasks as well as two spatial cueing tasks, in which attention was oriented in response to a centrally presented pictorial (arrow) or alphabetic (letter) cue. Cued response times and orienting effects were largely…

This investigation examined the influence of varying levels of Spanish receptive vocabulary and phonemic awareness ability on beginning English vocabulary, phonemic awareness, word reading fluency, and reading comprehension development across kindergarten through second grade. The 80 respondents were Spanish speaking children with no English…

This systematic review of research on early childhood programs seeks to identify effective approaches capable of improving literacy and language outcomes for preschoolers. It applies consistent standards to determine the strength of evidence supporting a variety of approaches, which fell into two main categories: "comprehensive…

It has been observed in Japanese children learning to read that there is an early and rapid shift from exclusive reading of hiragana as syllabograms to the dual-use convention in which some hiragana also represent phonemic elements. Such rapid initial learning appears contrary to the standard theories of reading acquisition that require…

Learning to read is a complex task for beginners of English. They must coordinate many cognitive processes to read accurately and fluently, including recognizing words, constructing the meanings of sentences and text, and retaining the information read in memory. An essential part of the process for beginners involves learning the alphabetic…

Although phonemic awareness is a well-known factor predicting early reading development, there is also evidence that Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is an independent factor that contributes to early reading. The aim of this study is to examine phonemic awareness and RAN as predictors of reading speed, reading comprehension and spelling for…

The direct, transfer and retention effects of a repeated reading intervention study of single CVC (consonant in the onset and a vowel and consonant in the rime) words in kindergartners with partial letter knowledge were examined. A total of 26 second-year kindergartners participated in this study. Participants were divided over two feedback…

This paper investigates whether children's academic self-beliefs are associated with reading achievement and whether the relationship is modified by gender and/or age. Data were collected from children at risk of reading failure, that is, emergent readers (6- to 8-year-olds) in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas reading at a level below…

We measured Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and naming times to picture targets preceded by masked words (stimulus onset asynchrony: 80 ms) that shared one of three different types of relationship with the names of the pictures: (1) Identity related, in which the prime was the name of the picture ("socks"--[picture of socks]), (2) Phonemic Onset…

The amount of oral language exposure a young child receives affects the child's reading-readiness skills. Factors that affect the increase of language and thus affect the reading success of children include oral language ability, learning opportunities, and behaviors that young children experience. Oral language development includes gaining…