Technology-assisted instruction has potential for helping students improve their reading skills. In the current studies, "PowerPoint" software was used to supplement teacher-led reading instruction for elementary-aged students with disabilities who struggled with phoneme blending to read words. The effectiveness of the intervention was…

Many states now mandate early screening for dyslexia, but vary in how they address these mandates. There is confusion about the nature of screening versus diagnostic assessments, risk versus diagnosis, concurrent versus predictive validity, and inattention to indices of classification accuracy as the basis for determining risk. To help define what…

Considerable evidence supports that close to two thirds of all fourth-grade students read at less than adequate levels on reading achievement tests and that the problem has persisted for decades. This study of 1,064 third-grade students at risk for reading failure uses path analytic techniques to measure a hypothesized model linking developmental…

There is some evidence that reading and spelling are complementary processes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which contextualized spelling (i.e., spelling activities within the context of reading instruction) is used to support reading in first-grade core reading programs. Analysis of 75 lessons across five programs…

We assessed the Swiss-German version of GraphoLearn, a computer game designed to support reading by training grapheme-phoneme correspondences. A group of 34 children at risk for dyslexia trained three times a week during 14 weeks, on top of their standard school instruction. The sample was divided into two groups of 18 and 16 children, who started…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Build a Word-Easy Spelling with Phonics, an electronic application of the word box intervention, on the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of letter-sound correspondences for Learners of English as an Additional Language (LEALs). A single-subject multiple probe experimental design…

Bilingual children with a limited command of the second language (L2) often yield unsatisfactory results in L2-based non-word repetition tasks (NWRT) for the assessment of working memory. In this study, monolinguals (MO) and bilinguals (BI) of preschool age acquiring German were compared in regard to their performance on German-based NWRT to…

The development of beginning decoding and encoding skills is influenced by linguistic skills as well as executive functions (EFs). These higher-level cognitive processes include working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, and individual differences in these EFs have been shown to contribute to early academic learning. The present study…

In this study, we examined the learning of letter-speech sound correspondences within an artificial script and performed an experimental analysis of letter-speech sound learning among dyslexic and normal readers vis-à-vis phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, reading, and spelling. Participants were provided with 20 min of training…

Purpose: This study examined the performance of Gulf Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) on a Gulf Arabic nonword repetition (GA-NWR) test and compared it to their age- and language-matched groups. We also investigated the role of syllable length, wordlikeness, and phonological complexity in light of NWR theories.…

This in-brief technical report documents the results from two different analytic approaches for examining the reliability of the slope for easyCBM® reading measures in Grades K-8. Results varied by grade, assessment measure, and the analytic approach. Results patterns are discussed.

This column provides background science information for elementary teachers. Many innovations with computer software begin with analysis of how humans do a task. This article takes a look at how humans recognize spoken words and explains the origins of speech-recognition software.

This study examined whether the phonological awareness (PA) deficit in Arabic speaking dyslexic children could be impacted by the presence vs. absence of verbal working memory (WM) as function of the sensory modality of administration (auditory vs. visual) of the phonological tests. Three phonological awareness (PA) tasks, i.e., phoneme…

We examined the contribution of rapid automatized naming (RAN) components (articulation time, pause time, and pause time consistency) to reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling in a sample of 257 German children (139 boys, 118 girls; M[subscript age] = 5.60 years, SD = 0.31) followed from kindergarten to Grade 1. In kindergarten,…

Purpose: This study examines the temporal organization of vocalic anticipation in German children from 3 to 7 years of age and adults. The main objective was to test for nonlinear processes in vocalic anticipation, which may result from the interaction between lingual gestural goals for individual vowels and those for their neighbors over time.…