Rhythm production in 53 children in grade 1 was investigated as a predictor of reading ability in the same children in grades 1-5. This paper reports the results of correlations and hierarchical regression analyses, controlling for shared variance between phonological awareness and naming speed. Rhythm was correlated significantly with both…

There is a wealth of evidence linking letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, but there is little research examining the nature of this relationship. This article aims to elucidate this relationship by considering the links between letter knowledge and two sub-skills of phoneme awareness: phoneme segmentation and phoneme invariance. Two studies…

This paper investigates the relationship between ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 7-8 years. Their tasks consisted of reading words, reading non-words, stressing non-words and reproducing sequences of two, three or four non-words by pressing the corresponding keys on the…

The present study sought to extend a recent study by Savage, Carless and Stuart, by looking at the pre-test phonological skills that predicted improvements in letter-sound knowledge and nonword reading. Results showed overall that phoneme manipulation predicted improvements in nonword reading and letter-sound knowledge even when pre-test scores on…

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…

Acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity are processes that are central to early reading development in several languages. The language-specific characteristics of the alphasyllabaries ( Bright, 1996), however, challenge the constructs of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity as discussed in the context of…

Letter sound knowledge, which, together with phonological awareness, is highly predictive of pre-school children's reading acquisition, derives from children's knowledge of their associated letter names and the phonological patterns of those names. In this study of 66 monolingual pre-school children we examined whether phonological patterns…

This longitudinal project identified young children at risk of literacy difficulties and asked why some of these children fail to benefit from phonologically based intervention. Reception class children were screened to identify a group at risk of literacy difficulties and a matched group of children not at risk. Profiles were compiled for each…

Previous research has established that the degree of "wordlikeness" of nonwords affects young children's nonword repetition performance. Experiment 1 examined the possibility that output processes are responsible for the wordlikeness effect by using a probed recall procedure. Wordlikeness was defined in terms of phonological neighbourhood density,…

Studies phoneme deletion and literacy in native and nonnative speakers of English. Finds that phoneme deletion is sensitive to degrees of literacy and to native language whereas the Measure of Adult English Proficiency test is not sensitive to native language variation. (MG)

Determines the pattern of errors in Spanish spelling. Analyzes and proposes a classification system for the errors made by children in the initial stages of the acquisition of spelling skills. Finds the diverse forms of only 20 Spanish words produces 36% of the spelling errors in Spanish; and substitution is the most frequent type of error. (RS)

Previous correlational and experimental research has found a positive association between phonological awareness and reading skills. This paper provides an overview of studies in this area and shows that many studies have neglected to control for extraneous variables such as ability, phonological memory, pre-existing reading skills and letter…

We investigated Dutch word stress acquisition in 3-year-old children at risk of dyslexia (children with at least one parent or older sibling with reading difficulties) and normally developing children, in order to shed light on language acquisition delays in children at risk of dyslexia, as well as to investigate further phonological deficits in…

Replicates a study of a "common unit" task which includes modifications to the original procedure. Confirms the pattern observed in the original study: beginning readers learning by a mixed method can identify shared phonemes but not shared rimes in the common unit task. Discusses implications. (RS)

Discusses the implications of Goswami and Bryant's (1990) theory about important causal connections in reading for classroom teaching, and reviews more recent "rhyme and analogy" research within this framework. Discusses new research on the nature of the English spelling system and the representation of linguistic knowledge. Emphasizes the…