Our aim was to analyze the impact of the characteristics of occlusive versus fricative phonemes used in writing programs on the evolution of preschool children's writing. The participants were 39 5-year-old graphoperceptive children. Their intelligence, number of letters known, and phonological skills were controlled. Their writing was evaluated…

The current study investigated native English and native Arabic speakers' phonological short-term memory for sequences of consonants and vowels. Phonological short-term memory was assessed in immediate serial recall tasks conducted in Arabic and English for both groups. Participants (n = 39) heard series of six consonant-vowel syllables and wrote…

We investigated phonemic competence in production in three age groups of children (7 and 8, 10 and 11, 12 and 13 years) using rhyme and phoneme monitoring. Participants were required to name target pictures silently while monitoring covert speech for the presence or absence of a rhyme or phoneme match. Performance in the verbal tasks was compared…

Word production difficulties are well documented in dyslexia, whereas the results are mixed for receptive phonological processing. This asymmetry raises the possibility that the core phonological deficit of dyslexia is restricted to output processing stages. The present study investigated whether a group of dyslexics had word level receptive…

Four eye movement experiments investigated whether readers use parafoveal input to gain information about the phonological or orthographic forms of consonants, vowels, and tones in word recognition when reading Thai silently. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which consonant, vowel, or tone information was…

Two studies examined children's use of letter-name spelling strategies when target phoneme sequences match letter names with different degrees of precision. We examined Portuguese-speaking preschoolers' use of "h" (which is named /a'ga/ but which never represents those sounds) when spelling words beginning with /ga/ or variants of /ga/. We also…

This paper investigates the relationship between the ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 6-8 years who completed tasks involving reading words, reading pseudowords, stressing pseudowords, and reproducing pseudoword stress patterns. Results showed that the capacity to reproduce…

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which bilingual speakers maintain language-specific phonological contrasts for homorganic stops when a cue is shared across both languages. To this end, voice onset time (VOT) was investigated in three groups of participants: early bilinguals speakers of Canadian French and Canadian English (n =…

Our goal was to investigate auditory and speech perception abilities of children with and without reading disability (RD) and associations between auditory, speech perception, reading, and spelling skills. Participants were 9-year-old, Finnish-speaking children with RD (N = 30) and typically reading children (N = 30). Results showed significant…

To examine interactions between young children's vocabulary size and their phonological abilities, spontaneous language samples were collected from 24-month-olds with precocious lexicons, their age mates (24-month-olds with average-sized lexicons), and their vocabulary mates (30-month-olds with average-sized lexicons). Phonological ability was…

This study investigated the concurrent contributions of phonology, orthography, and morphology to biliteracy acquisition in 78 Grade 1 Chinese-English bilingual children. Conceptually comparable measures in English and Chinese tapping phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness were administered. Word reading skill in English and…

Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies show age-related effects of density on children's performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological awareness. To further investigate density…

The study tested the effect of three factors on Arab children's (N = 256) phoneme isolation: "phoneme's linguistic affiliation" (standard phonemes vs. spoken phonemes), phoneme position (initial vs. final), and linguistic context (singleton vs. cluster). Two groups of children speaking two different vernaculars were tested. The two vernaculars…

The influence of development and literacy upon syllabification in French was evaluated by comparing the segmental behavior of 4- to 5-year-old preliterate children and adults using a pause insertion task. Participants were required to repeat bisyllabic words such as "fourmi" ("ant") by inserting a pause between its two syllabic components…

In the current study, we explore the influence of orthographic knowledge on phonological awareness in children with cochlear implants and compare developmental associations to those found for hearing children matched for word reading level or chronological age. We show an influence of orthographic knowledge on syllable and phoneme awareness in…