Studies of early reading in the home indicate the relevance of these experiences for young children's later reading development when they start school. The study reported here followed twenty children through 2 years prior to starting school and assessed their reading progress at the start of school. Audio/tape-recordings of their home experiences…

We investigated the longitudinal associations among maternal pre- and postnatal depression, maternal anxiety, and children's language and cognitive development followed from 15 to 61 months. Furthermore, we assessed the protective role of children's early print experiences with books against the adverse effect of maternal depression on language…

The rhetoric of the reading wars has become more than just an armchair academic debate, but is encoded now in the very laws, house and senate bills, and legislative policies of the majority of the states. In turn, these policies are powered by staggering sums of money such as the 90-million-dollar investment of Fulton County, Georgia in a revamp…

Maryanne Wolf's early literacy knowledge is based on her research into deep reading and on periods of enlightened linguistic processes. In her own rich language of conveyance, she brought great inspiration to the Montessori teachers at the Columbia, South Carolina conference. Her presentation on the research of early reading, the acquisition of…

Previous work on the long-term effects of early reading focuses on whether children can read early (i.e. capability) not on whether this is beneficial (i.e. optimality). The Luke Effect is introduced to predict long-term reading development as a function of when children learn to read. A review of correlational, intervention, and comparative…

Across all the domains of child development, we need to understand the temporal relationship between variables suspected to underpin growth; reading research is no exception. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of the direction of the relationship between children's morphological awareness, or the awareness of and ability to manipulate the…

Rural and suburban children account for the majority of poor children in the United States. Yet, most research examining poverty's associations with child development is focused on urban samples. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (N ˜ 6,600), this study examines whether the form and…

In the art educational therapy (AET) method introduced in this article, school coursework is integrated into art therapy with the aim of facilitating such learning and enhancing the emotional well-being of children with learning difficulties who have experienced stress or trauma. A grounded theory research study based on the cases of 5 middle…

The current study investigated the nature of Head Start children's home literacy environments and the associations between these resources and children's early-language and literacy skills. At the beginning of the preschool year, families of 302 children completed the Family Literacy Survey. In general, Head Start families reported providing a…

Scientific research is the systematic acquisition of knowledge by the scientific method. The scientific method begins with an idea, a hypothesis, about how things work. Next comes the systematic collection of evidence and the analysis of the evidence to see if it confirms or disconfirms the hypothesis. The more evidence there is that confirms a…

The present study examines the development of sight word reading in young children by examining changes in their self-reported reading strategies over time. A sample of 65 five to seven year olds were asked to read 40 real word items, all carefully matched for letter length and word frequency, on three separate occasions. Changes in the children's…

An investigation was conducted into the visual and auditory temporal processing profiles of two groups of 4- to 6-year-old children: "pre-alphabetic" children, who showed no alphabetic ability (failing to read any non-words in a test), and those who demonstrated some alphabetic ability. This "alphabetic" group showed higher scores in reading and…

Describes the development of one child's awareness of print and the stages he passed through while learning to read from birth to age two. (FL)

Little is known about the underlying causes and developmental patterns of stability and change in early reading abilities. In a longitudinal study of twins (n=4,291 pairs), individual differences in reading achievement assessed by teachers using U.K. National Curriculum (NC) criteria showed substantial heritabilities at ages 7, 9, and 10 years…

Takes issue with articles appearing in "Reading Teacher" entitled "Portrait of My Son as an Early Reader." Argues that parents who teach their children to read at an early age may neglect or overlook other essentials of their physical, emotional, and social growth. (FL)