Teaching students the most frequent sounds of the alphabet letters is the first crucial step in good phonics instruction. But beginning letter and sound lessons, especially if poorly taught or too rapidly paced, can be overwhelming and confusing for some young children and struggling readers. How can we simplify the cognitive task for such…

Forty kindergarten children participated in a study to determine (1) whether significant relationships existed among children's scores on various word boundary tasks, (2) whether scores on the individual tasks were significantly related to the children's ability to represent phonemic segments in their spelling, and (3) whether different…

Cognitive psychology has provided an information processing model that distinguishes between input processes such as listening to speech or reading and output processes such as speaking or writing. It is useful for spelling reformers to consider reading (input) and writing (output) processes separately, because the demands of the reader and of the…

Ninety-three first grade children participated in a study that examined the relationship among instructional materials, other factors such as test scores, and the growth and application of letter-sound correspondence knowledge. The study also sought to determine the importance of letter-sound correspondence knowledge in the acquisition and…