Purpose: Phonological awareness (PA), the awareness of sounds in spoken words, is strongly linked to reading outcomes. However, there is an ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of PA instruction without including print (i.e. PA without exposure to words or letters). Specifically, is PA-only instruction just as effective in improving reading…

Studies have suggested that multiple features influence letter knowledge across different orthographies. Arabic offers a unique opportunity to investigate the relations of letter properties on letter knowledge, but research on Arabic letter knowledge is scarce. This study was designed to investigate (a) letter frequency, (b) letter sequence, (c)…

In this article, we provide a cross-linguistic perspective on the universals and particulars in learning to read across seventeen different orthographies. Starting from the assumption that reading reflects a learned sensitivity to the systematic relationships between the surface forms of words and their meanings, we chose a broad group of…

Learning to read and spell involves learning about the written forms of words and how these are linked to language. Writing systems include formal patterns, which pertain to the appearance of written words, and functional patterns, which pertain to links between units of writing and units of language. We review the evidence that learners of a…

Purpose: We report here, for the first time, on developmental surface dyslexia in Turkish, a very transparent orthography. Surface dyslexia is a deficit in the lexical route, which forces the reader to read words via the sublexical route, leading to regularization errors. Methods: To detect surface dyslexia, we used reading aloud of loanwords with…

Two methods of decoding instruction were compared. Participants were kindergartners who knew letter sounds but could not decode nonwords, M = 5.6 years. The segmented phonation treatment taught students to convert graphemes to phonemes by breaking the speech stream ("sss -- aaa -- nnn") before blending. The connected phonation treatment…

Purpose: Readers can draw on their knowledge of sound-to-letter mappings to form expectations about the spellings of known spoken words prior to seeing them in written sentences. The current study asked whether such orthographic expectancies are observed in the absence of contextual support at the point of reading. Method: Seventy-eight adults…

Purpose: Children make spelling errors despite classroom instruction on phoneme-grapheme connections and spelling rules. We examined whether additional practice helps to decrease the number of spelling errors for a morphological spelling rule. We distinguished explicit practice in applying a spelling rule from implicit exposure to correct word…

We assessed nonword repetition (NWR) skills in 7-9 year-old children with dyslexia (dyslexia-only), developmental language disorder (DLD-only), co-occurring DLD+dyslexia, and typical development (TD) with a norm-referenced and an experimental task. The experimental task manipulated phonemic variability (dissimilarity among consonant phonemes…

In early Finnish reading instruction, hyphens are used to denote syllable boundaries. However, this practice slows down reading already during the 1st grade. It has been hypothesized that hyphenation forces readers to rely more on phonology than orthography. Since hyphenation highlights the phonology of the word, it may facilitate reading during…

Purpose: This study was designed to assess the efficiency of a French version of "GraphoGame" (GG) against an equally engaging math intervention ("Fiete Math," FM) in a large school sample of children from socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in grade 1 (N = 921). Method: The intervention was implemented in two…

Visual-verbal-paired associate learning (PAL) is strongly related to reading acquisition, possibly indexing a distinct cross-modal mechanism for learning letter-sound associations. We measured linguistic abilities (nonword repetition, vocabulary size) longitudinally at 3.5 and 4.0 years, and visual-verbal PAL and letter knowledge at 4.0 and…

This study examined Spanish spelling errors among 166 native Spanish-speaking students from Kindergarten to Grade 3 based on a spelling-to-diction task. Fifteen types of spelling errors were analyzed in a latent class analysis. Results suggested three phases of spellers: Phase 1 students had a high chance of committing almost all types of errors.…

We review cognitive-linguistic approaches to conveying meaning, sound, and orthographic information across scripts in order to highlight the impact of variability in written and spoken language on learning to read and to write words. With examples of word recognition and word writing from different scripts, including Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and…

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…