The majority of research on the relationship between phonological awareness and written language focuses on demonstrating the influence of the former on the latter. However, the aim of this study is to analyse the effects of an Early Years written language programme on phonological awareness. The sample comprises 56 Spanish children aged 5-7 who…

We examined the predictive value of early spelling for later reading performance by analyzing data from 970 U.S. children whose spelling was assessed in the summer following the completion of kindergarten (M age = 6 years; 3 months). The word reading performance of most of the children was then tested after the completion of Grade 1 (age 7;5),…

In Kannada, visual features are arranged in blocks called "akshara," making this a visually more complex writing system than typical alphabetic orthographies. Akshara knowledge was assessed concurrently and 8 months later in 113 children in the first years of reading instruction (aged 4-7 years). Mixed effects logistic regression models…

When one effectively employs the strategies of exploratory-learning, wait-time, intervention, guided reading, meaning, and phonological-morphological-syntactical awareness-for infants and on up-to 3rd grade students-all-in a Montessori-like-learning-literacy-setting replete with semantical interactions with phonology, syllabology, morphology, and…

Results from a cluster randomized trial of the impact of the Tools of the Mind pre-kindergarten curriculum on preschoolers' achievement, self-regulation, and social behavior are reported. Sixty classrooms with four-year-old children (N=877) were assigned to implement either the Tools curriculum (N=32 classrooms; 498 children) or the usual pre-k…

There is a gap between "w..aa..sss" and "woz" ("was"). This is a gap between the output from a phonological recoding of a word and its lexical pronunciation. We suggest that ease of recognition of words from spelling pronunciations (like "w..aa..sss") contributes independent variance to word decoding ability…

The importance of phonological awareness for learning to read may depend on the linguistic properties of a language. This study provides a careful examination of this language-specific theory by exploring the role of phoneme-level awareness in Mandarin Chinese, a language with an orthography that, at its surface, appears to require little…

The current study developed a taxonomy of reading skills and compared this taxonomy with skills being trained in 30 commercially available software programs designed to teach emergent literacy or literacy-specific skills for children in preschool, kindergarten, and Grade 1. Outcomes suggest that, although some skills are being trained in a…

This study investigated kindergarten, preschool, and first-grade children who were typical or specific language impaired (SLI) to determine whether there were developmental differences in their phonological awareness abilities (i.e., syllable, onset/rime, phonemes). Results revealed a significant difference between children who were typical and…

The purpose of this research was to assess the development of phonological skills before and during learning to read. Thirty-four children were tested twice, in nursery school and in first grade with an epiphonological task (E), e.g. judgment of similarity, and two metaphonological tasks, one requiring the extraction of common units (M1) and one…