This dissertation investigated whether specific music training components of pitch and rhythm had a differential effect on early literacy skills of phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and concept of word awareness. In addition, this study examined associations between musical aptitude and early literacy skills. The central element of this…

Objective: Executive Function (EF) is thought to be a core component of various cognitive processes. Two common ways to measure EF are through report-based measures that assess EF by collecting informant(s) reports on children's behaviors, and performance-based measures that assess EF through the completion of a task related to EF dimension(s).…

Children's approaches to learning (AtL) are widely recognized as a critical predictor of educational outcomes, especially in early childhood. Nevertheless, there remains a dearth of understanding regarding the dimensionality of AtL, the reciprocal dynamics between AtL and learning outcomes, and how AtL operates in non-Western contexts. This paper…

We examined the relation between home literacy environment (HLE), parents' reading skills, and children's emergent literacy skills (pinyin letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and vocabulary) and reading (word reading and reading comprehension) in a sample of 168 Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 74.26 months) followed from kindergarten to…

In Denmark there is an ongoing trend towards a more ambitious literacy instruction in the first school year (Kindergarten). This calls for a clarification of present-day reading levels, and for a profile of the students who become readers while attending the semi-formal literacy program. The present study examined the extent to which a group of…

The contribution of linguistic skills to reading has been reported in different languages; however, this contribution varies according to the specific features of each language. Arabic is characterized by diglossia, i.e. the existence of two distinct varieties: Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA). This study examined the extent to which…

The long-term negative consequences of learning difficulties have been acknowledged. Nonetheless, research is still scarce regarding the prediction of adolescent difficulties in reading and arithmetic skills. The present study examines at which age phase and with what kind of constellation of parent- and child-related factors can adolescent…

Cross-language transfer happens in bilingual reading development. However, little is known about whether L1 affects L2 spelling development. In addition, longitudinal studies are needed to examine the L1-L2 relations developmentally from the beginning of literacy learning. We tested whether and which Chinese (L1) literacy-related skill(s) in…

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between attention abilities, geometry, and phonological awareness skills of 60-72 months old children. The accessible population of the research in the relational scanning model consisted of 60-72 months old children attending to kindergartens and nursery classes of elementary schools in a…

Definitions of dyslexia typically make reference to unexpected poor reading, although how best to operationalize unexpected remains an issue. When operationally defined as reading below expectations based on the level of oral language, cases of unexpected poor reading make up fewer than half of cases of poor reading, and cases of unexpected poor…

Significant attention and legislation have been directed to assessment intervention for students with word-level reading disability (WLRD; i.e., dyslexia). Scholars have called for similar attention to prevention-oriented approaches in which intervention is provided to students at risk for WLRD from the earliest grades. Progress monitoring is a…

In this study (n = 1000, M[subscript age at K1entry] = 53.4 months, SD = 3.4; 53% females), we investigated the contributions of the family socioeconomic status (SES; maternal education and an income-related measure) and number and age of siblings to the development of children's math, reading, and working memory (WM) updating skills over the…

Using a longitudinal data set, this paper examines to what extent school-entry (N = 553; mean age 6.32 years) early mathematics and literacy skills predict students' later achievement in a lower-middle-income country, Kenya. Controlling for socioeconomic status, intervention status, rural versus urban settings and parental literacy, the findings…

We examined the cognitive predictors of early word reading skills in Japanese syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Eighty-three Japanese kindergarten children (M age = 75.6 months, SD = 3.4) were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological memory, morphological awareness, and…

Early identification of learning difficulties is a critical component of the Response to Intervention (RtI) model. In kindergarten, the screening of foundational reading skills can provide a data-based guideline for identifying students requiring a more intensive response-based intervention before starting elementary school. This study examines…