The aim of this longitudinal study is to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to the prediction of reading and spelling in Greek. The target group (N = 404) consisted of children, aged 6-9 years at the start of the project, who learn literacy in Cyprus. Because there are no standardized measures of morphological awareness for Greek…

The current study aimed to examine teachers' reported spelling assessment and instruction practices. Analysis of the match between teachers' theoretical beliefs about spelling and their reported pedagogy was conducted to elucidate factors that may support or impede the use of evidence-based teaching strategies in the classroom. An…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate developmental differences in lexical processing and sensitivity to the positional information of constituent morphemes with reference to Chinese word-reading ability. One hundred mainland Chinese children (50 second graders and 50 third graders) and 22 high school students were tested with a…

The present study aimed to extend understanding of preschoolers' early spelling using the Vygotskian ("Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes," Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978) paradigm of child development. We assessed the contribution of maternal spelling support in predicting children's…

We examined the relative contribution of visual abilities, accessibility of letter names, and phonological awareness, to text reading speed and accuracy of Arabic in first, third, and fifth grades. The results revealed that for all levels of skill, phonological awareness contributes significantly to reading accuracy, to the same degree. For…

This study examined the longitudinal effects of an early literacy intervention in Kindergarten. A group of children completed reading and cognitive measures between Kindergarten (5-6 years old) and Grade 7 (12-13 years old). Our results showed that 22% of children were identified as at-risk for reading deficits in Kindergarten, but only 6% of…

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…

Students from Turkish-speaking families are the largest minority language group in Germany. Yet, little is known about this group's literacy development. Using data from a 3-year longitudinal study, we examined whether the same base reading skills are involved in early reading comprehension of 100 Turkish-German bilingual and 69 German…

The aim of this study was to collect data concerning the sensitivity of 2nd-6th grade Spanish-speaking children towards orthographic regularities. In a first experiment, children were asked to spell words that begin with /b/, a sound that is inconsistently spelled "b" or "v", depending on the lexeme. Low frequency words were…

The aim of this study was to identify the specific contribution of executive functions to pre-academic skills (emergent literacy, phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge, and emergent mathematic knowledge) over and above cognitive and linguistic underpinning abilities such as naming, short-term memory and vocabulary. The study was…

The aim of the present study was to empirically disentangle the interdependencies of the impact of nonverbal intelligence, working memory capacities, and phonological processing skills on early reading decoding and spelling within a latent variable approach. In a sample of 127 children, these cognitive preconditions were assessed before the onset…

This study examined if professional development with teachers would increase children's literacy skills in low socioeconomic early childhood settings in New Zealand and would lead to changes in teachers' beliefs and practices and children's abilities over an 8 week intervention period. Research indicates that children who have…

The purpose of this study was to examine African American children's performance on a phonological awareness task that included items reflecting differences between African American English (AAE) and mainstream American English. The relationship between spoken production of AAE forms and performance on phonological awareness, vocabulary, and…

The present study explored the early predictors of reading comprehension difficulties in Chinese children. We originally recruited 290 Beijing and 154 Hong Kong children and further selected from each sample those (30 from Beijing and 22 from Hong Kong sample) in the lowest 25% on reading comprehension tests across the last two consecutive testing…

In the present study we examined the relation between alphabet knowledge fluency (letter names and sounds) and letter writing automaticity, and unique relations of letter writing automaticity and semantic knowledge (i.e., vocabulary) to word reading and spelling over and above code-related skills such as phonological awareness and alphabet…