Children's ability to correctly name letters is a key predictor of later reading abilities and skills, but research on letter naming from Scandinavian orthographies is scarce. The aim of this study is to explore how child- and letter-related factors (i.e., gender, child name, phonemic awareness, letter position in the alphabet and frequency, and…

The purpose of this article is to describe recommendations for providing evidence-based literacy instruction to students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), including students with comorbid autism spectrum disorder (autism). We identify six evidence-based practices, highlight key research that supports each practice, and then…

Although children develop categorical speech perception at a very young age, the maturation process remains unclear. A cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 4-, 6-, and 10-year-old children, 14-year-old adolescents, and adults (n = 104, 56 males, all Asians from mainland China) was conducted to investigate the development of categorical…

This systematic literature review aimed to study the effects of early reading interventions in early grades. Specifically, interventions in the early stages affect letter-sound recognition, phonemic awareness, and word identification. Many students may fail to reach the end-of-the-year standards, even with strong classroom teaching. Intervention…

For students to be able to read and comprehend, they must first develop phonological awareness, the ability to recognize and manipulate the segments of sound in words. To develop this ability, students must be able to identify the following: individual sounds (phonemes) in words; print letters of the alphabet; and corresponding sounds for each…

Purpose: The primary aim was to assess whether children have difficulty distinguishing similar-sounding novel words. The secondary aim was to assess what task characteristics might hinder or facilitate perceptual discrimination. Method: Three within-subjects experiments tested ninety-nine 3- to 5-year-old children total. Experiment 1 presented two…

Purpose: Phoneme categorization (PC) for voice onset time and second formant transition was studied in adult cochlear implant (CI) users with early-onset deafness and hearing controls. Method: Identification and discrimination tasks were administered to 30 participants implanted before 4 years of age, 21 participants implanted after 7 years of…

Reading is one of the most well-studied aspects of human learning. Since the 1950s, with more interest, research tools, and funding available, the body of reading research has exploded: Every year, hundreds of new scientific papers are published. However, there has been a detrimental lag in ensuring this science is understood by the people who…

Word segmentation is a crucial step in children's vocabulary learning. While computational models of word segmentation can capture infants' performance in small-scale artificial tasks, the examination of early word segmentation in naturalistic settings has been limited by the lack of measures that can relate models' performance to developmental…

Objective: Verbal fluency evaluation in bilingual speakers should include dual-language assessment to obtain a comprehensive profile of word retrieval abilities. This study is the first to compare classic semantic, action, emotional, and phonemic fluency in terms of the magnitude of their performance gaps between the dominant and nondominant…

In our first article, we outlined some of the reasons for reading failure at the Early Childhood level and beyond, discussed common challenges students face, and explored essential components for quality reading instruction. We'll revisit the students you met in the first article to provide a window into how the Science of Reading can be…

Since 2012, when preparatory grade (PG) became compulsory in Romania for 6-year olds, little understanding has been gained of how children's literacy evolves in PG, although over the same period, Romanian 15-year olds' reading performance has shown no signs of improvement (Noveanu et al., 2023). Children enter school with broadly varying literacy…

Background: Despite evidence that synthetic phonics teaching has increased reading attainments, a sizable minority of children struggle to acquire phonics skills and teachers lack clear principles for deciding what types of "additional" support are most beneficial. Synthetic phonics teaches children to read using a decoding strategy to…

Background: Failure to learn early reading skills leads to lower reading comprehension later in elementary school (Double et al., 2019; Paige et al., 2019), which can then lead to poverty, underemployment, and increased likelihood of being incarcerated (World Literacy Foundation, 2018). Early reading skills are best developed in kindergarten…

Fluency with skills that operate below the word level (i.e., sublexical), such as phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge, may ease the acquisition of decoding skills (Ritchey & Speece, 2006). Measures of sublexical fluency such as phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF), letter naming fluency (LNF), and letter sound fluency (LSF) are widely…