This study investigated the growth of word-decoding skills throughout the elementary school years for a representative sample of 2,819 Dutch children. Children's decoding abilities for (a) regular consonant-vowel-consonant words, (b) complex monosyllabic words with consonant clusters in prevocalic and postvocalic position, and (c) polysyllabic…

Background: Specific language impairment (SLI) is diagnosed when a child shows isolated structural language problems. The diagnosis of pragmatic language impairment (PLI) is given to children who show difficulties with the use of language in context. Unlike children with SLI, these children tend to show relatively intact structural language skills…

In this study an attempt was made to construct a multi-factor model predicting the development of reading literacy in the upper grades of primary school in the Netherlands for subgroups of 729 first language (L1) learners and 93 second language (L2) learners. Following a longitudinal design, it was explored to what extent the variation in reading…

The goal of the present study was to examine the precursors of verbal working memory in 52 children with cerebral palsy with varying degrees of speech impairments in the first grade of special education. Following Baddeley's model of working memory, children's verbal working memory was measured by means of a forced-recognition task. As precursors…

The purpose of the present study was to explore Dutch spelling development throughout the elementary grades. Two issues were considered (a) dimensional structure over time, and (b) rate of change. Whether the rate of change differs depending on gender, ethnicity, or word reading skill was examined in particular. A pseudolongitudinal dataset with…

The goal of this longitudinal study was to investigate the precursors of early reading development in 52 children with cerebral palsy at kindergarten level in comparison to 65 children without disabilities. Word Decoding was measured to investigate early reading skills, while Phonological Awareness, Phonological Short-term Memory (STM), Speech…

Background: Various aspects of the home literacy environment are considered to stimulate the emergent literacy development in children without disabilities. It is important to gain insight into the home literacy environment of children with cerebral palsy given that they have been shown to have difficulty acquiring literacy skills. Aims: The aims…

The purpose of this study was to describe the variations in literacy achievement among native and non-native upper primary school children (grades three to six) in the Netherlands. Various measures of word decoding, reading literacy and writing skill were collected from 1091 native Dutch children, 753 children with a former Dutch colonial…

Two experiments were carried out to explore the units of analysis used by children to read Dutch bisyllabic pseudowords. Although Dutch orthography is highly regular, several deviations from a one-to-one correspondence occur. In polysyllabic words, the grapheme e may represent three different vowels: /e/, /e/, or [/schwa/]. In Experiment 1, Grade…

Describes the first- and second-language literacy levels of a sample of Turkish children living in the Netherlands and identifies factors related to individual variation in literacy performance. Measures of school literacy were taken in both Turkish and Dutch. Results indicated that these children attained lower levels of literacy than did their…

The effects of computer-presented automatization exercises in a group of 14 poor readers were assessed in comparison to a matched control group of 14 poor readers that received computer-presented exercises aimed at the use of context for word identification and comprehension. Training took place three sessions a week for 15 minutes per session and…