The relationships of different levels of phonological processing (sounds in heard and spoken words for whole words, syllables, phonemes, and rimes) to multi-leveled functional reading or writing systems were studied. Participants in this cross-sectional study were students in fourth-grade (n = 119, mean age 116.5 months) and sixth-grade (n = 105,…

Children in grades one to four completed two sentence construction tasks: (a) Write one complete sentence about a topic prompt (sentence integrity, Study 1); and (b) Integrate two sentences into one complete sentence without changing meaning (sentence combining, Study 2). Most, but not all, children in first through fourth grade could write just…

During fMRI imaging, 12 good and 8 poor writers aged 11 wrote a newly taught pseudoletter and a highly practiced letter. Both letters were formed from the same components, but the pseudoletter had a novel configuration not corresponding to a written English letter form. On the first fMRI contrast between the newly taught pseudoletter and highly…

Two instructional experiments used randomized, controlled designs to evaluate the effectiveness of writing instruction for students with carefully diagnosed dyslexia, which is both an oral reading and writing disorder, characterized by impaired "word" decoding, reading, and spelling. In Study 1 (4th to 6th grade sample and 7th to 9th grade…

Investigates whether a general or specific working memory (WM) system is related to writing and whether individual differences in reading and/or processing efficiency underlie correlations between WM and writing. Indicates that WM measures contribute variance to writing, and WM performance improves under gain conditions--this enhanced efficiency…

Finds greater interference for words than for single letters and letter-clusters in elementary students. Finds a developmental trend from relative skill in word-level orthographic-phonological correspondence in second graders to relative skill in subword-level correspondences in sixth graders. Notes that multiple orthographic codes were correlated…

Finds that the writing system and the reading system share many of the same orthographic, phonological, and working memory subprocesses but that the patterns of concurrent relationship between these subprocesses and writing and between these subprocesses and reading differ. Suggests that writing and reading draw upon the same as well as unique…