Literacy influences all aspects of life. Unfortunately, a rising number of students struggle with reading and spelling, which can result in enormous educational barriers. Difficulties in literacy accompanied by learning-related problem behavior can create additional risk factors. Effective interventions for these students should consider…

The purpose of the current research is to assess the clinical utility of an invented spelling tool and determine whether invented spelling and word stress (supra-segmental level measures) can also be used to better identify reading difficulties. The proposed invented spelling tool incorporated linguistic manipulations to alter the difficulty…

Paired-associate learning is a dynamic measure of the ability to form new links between two items. This study aimed to investigate whether paired-associate learning ability is associated with success in orthographic learning, and if so, whether it accounts for unique variance beyond phonological decoding ability and orthographic knowledge. A group…

Some research on literacy acquisition suggests that implicit learning processes may be related to reading and writing proficiency in English, which is a deep orthography. However, little research has been done to determine if the same is true in shallow orthographies. Here, we investigated whether the implicit learning ability of third grade…

In transparent orthographies like German, isolated learning disabilities in either reading or spelling are common and occur as often as a combined reading and spelling disability. However, most issues surrounding the cognitive causes of these isolated or combined literacy difficulties are yet unresolved. Recently, working memory dysfunctions have…

In this study, we investigated the characteristics of cognitive abilities as predictors of Korean reading and spelling ability, and the characteristics of the cognition of reading difficulty in Korean. In 103 Korean third-grade children, we tested ability to read and spell, nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary size, phonological cognitive…

The Matthew effect is often used as a metaphor to describe a widening gap between good and poor readers over time. In this study we examined the development of individual differences in reading and cognitive functioning in children with reading difficulties and normal readers from Grades 1 to 3. Matthew effects were observed for individual…

A sample of 141 Canadian children in grades 3 through 6 wrote to dictation 24 short sentences sampling 90 lexical items representing 10 inflectional morphological categories to study their relation to the written spelling of 40 sight words. The children were encouraged in 3, 30-minute teaching sessions to use multiple strategies of retrieval,…