The current study explored a possible continuum of spelling features that children receiving literacy instruction in Spanish might be expected to master in Grades 1-3. We administered a developmental spelling inventory representing nine distinct Spanish spelling features to 864 students in bilingual and dual language schools across the U.S.…

One hypothesis raised by Newport and Aslin to explain how speakers learn dependencies between nonadjacent phonemes is that speakers track bigram probabilities between two segments that are adjacent to each other within a tier of their own. The hypothesis predicts that a dependency between segments separated from each other at the tier level cannot…

The phonological processes known as "lenition" have traditionally been explained as articulatory effort reduction. However, such a motivation for lenition has never been directly demonstrated; in addition, there are reasons to doubt the articulatory explanation.This paper focuses on a particular type of lenition (intervocalic…

In this technical report, we describe a study examining the internal structures of the easyCBM reading measures, Grades K-5. Data were gathered from a convenience sample of 114 Kindergarten students, 43 first graders, 82 second graders, 100 third graders, 109 fourth graders, and 71 fifth graders attending schools in Oregon, Georgia, South…

This study investigates whether a curriculum supplement organized as a sequence of teacher-led literacy activities using digital content from public educational television programs can improve early literacy outcomes of low-income preschoolers. The study sample was 436 children in 80 preschool classrooms in California and New York. Preschool…

The current study investigated the scope of bilingual language control differentiating between whole-language control involving control of an entire lexicon specific to 1 language and lexical-level control involving only a restricted set of recently activated lexical representations. To this end, we tested 60 Dutch-English (Experiment 1) and 64…

The processing of abbreviations in reading was examined with an eye movement experiment. Abbreviations were of 2 distinct types: acronyms (abbreviations that can be read with the normal grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations in which the GPCs are letter names, such as NCAA). Parafoveal and foveal…

The present study investigated whether (a) growth patterns related to cognitive processing (working memory, updating, inhibition) differed in subgroups of children with reading disabilities (RD) and (b) growth in working memory (executive processing) predicted growth in other cognitive areas, such as reading and math. Seventy-three children (ages…

The goal of this research programme was to evaluate the role of word lexicality in effecting phonological change in children's sound systems. Four children with functional speech sound disorders (SSDs) were enrolled in an across-subjects multiple baseline single-subject design; two were treated using high-frequency real words (RWs) and two were…

A study examined the degree to which children with limited English proficiency can benefit from English instruction in phonemic awareness and phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Subjects were 27 kindergarten children in a suburban northern California school--16 spoke Hmong as their primary language and the rest were monolingual English speakers. The…