Although several measures exist for frequently monitoring early reading progress, little research has specifically investigated their technical properties when administered on a frequent basis with kindergarten students. In this study, kindergarten students (N = 137) of whom the majority was receiving supplemental intervention for reading skills…

Purpose: Because the Ling six-sound test is based on American English phonemes, it can yield unreliable results when administered to non-English speakers. In this study, we aimed to improve specifically the diagnostic palette for Mandarin Chinese users by developing an adapted version of the Ling six-sound test. Method: To determine the set of…

This study examined the incidence of reading impairments, the reading profiles, and the outcomes of a reading intervention for youth involved in a comprehensive crime prevention program. Rates of reading impairments were between 55% and 61%. Reading profiles for participants with reading comprehension impairments showed deficits in phonological…

This study reports the dimensionality and measurement invariance of a modified version of the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening for Preschoolers (PALS PreK). Practical constraints of conducting child assessments created an opportunity to develop a modified PALS PreK. The sample consisted of 1,168 children tested in a Southwestern state in…

Purpose: Computer simulation was used to estimate the statistical properties of searches for maximum word recognition ability (PB max). These involve presenting multiple lists and discarding all scores but that of the 1 list that produced the highest score. The simulations, which model limitations inherent in the precision of word recognition…

We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented…

We examined the manifestation of dyslexia in a cross-linguistic study contrasting English and Greek children with dyslexia compared to chronological age and reading-level control groups on reading accuracy and fluency, phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, orthographic choice, and spelling. Materials were carefully matched…

Visual attention span (VAS) predicts reading performance over and above phonological skills. Given the growing number of studies that include VAS, it is surprising that indications of the stability of VAS performance and its relation with reading over time have not yet been reported. The current study addressed these important issues. Participants…

Mothers play a key role in scaffolding children's writing using traditional tools, such as paper and pencil. However, little is known about how mothers scaffold young children's writing using touch-screen tablets (e.g., iPads) and the associations between maternal scaffolding and emergent literacy. Mother-child dyads (N = 47; M child…

Language experience shapes infants' abilities to process speech sounds, with universal phonetic discrimination abilities narrowing in the second half of the first year. Brain measures reveal a corresponding change in neural discrimination as the infant brain becomes selectively sensitive to its native language(s). Whether and how bilingual…

Recently it has been proposed that sensitivity to nonarbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition. However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such nonarbitrary relationships. Here, the authors…

Studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a first language do not agree on the patterns and factors relevant for coda development. In order to shed light on the questions involved, a longitudinal study of coda development in Northern European Spanish was carried out to explore the relationship between accuracy, markedness and frequency. The study…

This article explores the role of transfer and Universal Grammar (UG) in second language (L2) phonology by investigating the L2 acquisition of stress/prominence in footless languages, such as Turkish and French, which have fixed word- and phrase-final prominence respectively. It is proposed that once the prosodic constituent Foot is projected in a…

The automatic letter-sound integration hypothesis proposes that the decoding difficulties seen in dyslexia arise from a specific deficit in establishing automatic letter-sound associations. We report the findings of 2 studies in which we used a priming task to assess automatic letter-sound integration. In Study 1, children between 5 and 7 years of…

This study examined the orthographic transparency of Arabic by investigating the contribution of phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary, and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) to reading vowelized and unvowelized words. The results from first and second grade children showed that PA contribution was similar in the vowelized and unvowelized…