This study investigated the effect of preschool-wide, teacher-implemented, phoneme-focused phonological awareness (PA) and letter-sound knowledge (LSK) instruction, on raising code-based school-entry reading readiness for children with Spoken Language Difficulties (SLD) and Typical Development (TD), when supported by weekly coaching by trainee…

Mother-child dyads (N = 35) were videoed as they wrote a shopping list in an environmental print-rich grocery shop play setting. The children (M age = 4.3 years) were assessed on emergent literacy skills (letter name and sound knowledge, print concepts, phonological awareness, and letter and name writing). Mothers' general level of print and…

Does the intensification of what can be called "language-specific speech perception" around reading onset occur as a function of maturation or experience? Preschool 5-year-olds with no school experience, 5-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, 6-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, and 6-year-olds with 18 months' schooling were tested on…

Research Findings: Environmental print provides children with their earliest print experiences. This observational study investigated the frequency of mother-child environmental print referencing and its relationship with emergent literacy. A total of 35 mothers and their children (ages 3-4 years) were videotaped interacting in an environmental…

Newly literate children have a tendency to spell s-stop sequences in words like "spin," "stop," "sky" with B, D, G (SBIN, SDOP, SGY), rather than with standard P, T, K. This observation potentially has implications for theories of English phonology as well as of language and literacy acquisition. Understanding these…

Two groups of sighted pre-school children were taught to name six braille letters: one group received phoneme instruction and the other grapheme instruction. Ten boys and ten girls (average age 4:5 years) participated. There was a statistically significant advantage for the phoneme group (Experiment 1). In a repeated measures design, 16 sighted…

Individual differences in measures of prereading skills and in questionnaire measures of 4-5-year-old twins' print environments in Australia, Scandinavia, and the United States were explored with a behavioral-genetic design. Modest phenotypic correlations were found between environmental measures and the twins' print knowledge, general verbal…