The Arabic writing system allows for two representations: vowelized or non-vowelized. The vowelized writing, which characterizes the writing in the Koran, classical literature and children's books, includes the long and short vowels and all the vowels, including the vowels that express syntax functions (the final vowels). In non-vowelized writing,…

Phonological awareness may be influenced by differences in the characteristics of the items studied. This hypothesis is considered particularly applicable to Arabic, which is a diglossic language. This study examined the impact of phonemic position and the affiliation of the items between spoken and standard languages on phonemic isolation tasks.…

This study examined the impact of the lexical distance (spoken, modern standard Arabic-MSA, shared, and pseudo-words) on phonological awareness (PA) and naming speed (RAN). The data from this longitudinal study were obtained from 261 native Arabic-speaking kindergarteners, which were then followed to first grade. The data revealed a significant…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…

We investigated the predictive power of cognitive skills and background variables of 769 first and second grade children learning to read two orthographically different languages Finnish and German in three countries Finland, Germany and Italy. Main results from stepwise regression models showed that in all countries word reading at first grade…

This study examined the orthographic transparency of Arabic by investigating the contribution of phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) to reading vowelized and unvowelized words. The results from first and second grade children showed that PA contribution was similar in the vowelized and unvowelized…

This study tested a hypothesized model examining reading proficiency across first grade. It addressed how alphabetics at the beginning of the year were mediated by applied and automated skills at the middle of the year to explain actualized reading at the end of the year. The alphabetic skills of 102 first graders were measured in October and the…

This article reports a lexical-decision experiment that was conducted to investigate the impact of word stress on visual word recognition in German. Reaction-time latencies and error rates of German readers on different levels of reading proficiency (i.e., third graders and fifth graders from primary school and university students) were compared…

The developmental sequence of the types of orthographic knowledge that children acquire early in reading development is unclear. Following findings of skilled reading, the orthographic constraints of positional frequency and feedback consistency were explored with a wordlikeness judgement task for grades 1-3 English-speaking children. The data…