Background: This study evaluates the effects of a language and literacy intervention for children with Down syndrome. Methods: Teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to deliver a reading and language intervention to children in individual daily 40-min sessions. We used a waiting list control design, in which half the sample received the…

We examined the growth of spelling skills in a large sample of Norwegian children (N = 228) over the first 3 years in school. The roles of phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), visual-verbal paired-associate learning, and verbal short-term memory as predictors of later spelling skills were examined. Phoneme awareness…

This study investigated children's sensitivity to spelling consistency, and lexical and sublexical (rime) frequency, and their use of explicitly learned canonical vowel graphemes in the early stages of learning to spell. Vowel spellings produced by 78 British children at the end of reception year (mean age 5 years, 7 months) and 6 months later in…

Two studies examined six-year-olds' use of analogy in spelling: between visible clue words and similar sounding target words and when clue words are not visible. Both studies found that equal numbers of analogies were made between words sharing a rime unit, a consonant-vowel, or a vowel but were not made when only common letters were shared. (KDFB)

Background: It is widely recognized that effective interventions for poor reading involve training in phoneme awareness and letter-sound knowledge, linked in the context of reading books. From the applied perspective, it is important to gather data on the effectiveness of different forms of implementation of literacy support within this framework.…

We conducted a longitudinal study examining the role of phonemic awareness, phonological processing, and grammatical skills in the development of reading and spelling abilities in Greek. A battery of cognitive, linguistic, and literacy tasks was administered to 131 primary school children (65 7-year-olds and 66 9-year-olds) and was repeated in the…

Two studies investigated the importance of phoneme awareness relative to other predictors in the development of reading and spelling among children learning a consistent orthography (Czech) and an inconsistent orthography (English). In Study 1, structural equation models revealed that Czech (n=107) and English (n=71) data were fitted well by the…