This mixed methods study explored the influence of an interactive writing intervention on preschoolers' skills of emergent literacy, as well as teacher perceptions of the intervention. Before the intervention assessment scores were collected on the subscales of letter name identification, letter sound identification, onset-rime blending, and…

This dissertation examines whether EFL and ESL Korean learners of English are able to produce and perceive two English phonological contrasts that depend on vowel duration differences, coda consonant voicing contrasts and the tense-lax distinction in vowels. For production, it examines differences in vowel duration and vowel quality associated…

Reading is an essential skill for daily life and academic success. According to the connectionist model of reading, word recognition involves orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, as well as the interactions among them. Language skill such as phonological processing, develops earlier than reading acquisition, and thus likely serves…

Speech sound disorder (SSD) puts children at risk for word reading difficulties but does not guarantee them. Research on early literacy skills in children with SSD has primarily focused on phonological awareness due to speech sound deficits associated with SSD. Researchers have begun to examine multiple factors beyond phonological awareness that…

In recent years, the number of English learners (ELs) in U.S. public schools has rapidly grown, with Hispanic children accounting for more than half of Texas public school students, including pre-kindergarten and early childhood education. ELs continue to demonstrate lower reading achievement in comparison to their native English-speaking peers.…

This study investigated English phonological awareness in adult native speakers of English (L1) and in relation to their phonological awareness skills and proficiency in their German (L2). Most research in L1 phonological awareness focuses on younger children, their phonological awareness development, the relationship between reading and…

The acquisition of literacy skills is a complex and multi-faceted process that begins long before typical school-based literacy instruction. The present study sought to examine and expand research regarding the independent and interactive contributions of neuropsychological development, movement, play, and music on the development of literacy…

The rapid growth of Mandarin Chinese and English dual-language (DL) programs and the differences between these two languages have fostered the need to investigate the early literacy performance of young students in a Mandarin/English DL program. This study used the interactive transfer framework (Chung et al., 2019) to understand the Mandarin and…

One of the aspects of L2 English phonology which poses a challenge for L2 learners is learning how to decode the language, especially as spoken by native speakers. This difficulty may be due to the way the native speakers speak by 'draw[ing] [the sounds] together' (Clarey & Dixson, 1963), which results in realization of consonants and vowels…

Models of speech perception suggest a dorsal stream connecting the temporal and inferior parietal lobe with the inferior frontal gyrus. This stream is thought to involve an auditory motor loop that translates acoustic information into motor/articulatory commands and is further influenced by decision making processes that involve maintenance of…

Individuals with acquired phonological dyslexia experience difficulty associating written letters with their corresponding sounds, especially in pseudowords. Several studies have attempted to improve reading in this population by training letter-to-sound correspondence, general phonological skills, or a combination of these approaches; however,…

A high percentage of individuals with dyslexia struggle to learn unfamiliar spoken words, creating a significant obstacle to foreign language learning after early childhood. The origin of spoken-word learning difficulties in this population, generally thought to be related to the underlying literacy deficit, is not well defined (e.g., Di Betta…

Siegler's (1996) overlapping waves model of strategy development applied to reading posits that children use multiple strategies to read words from the earliest stage of reading development, that these strategies coexist over a long period of time, and that experience results in gradual change in the strategies children use and the…

Fluent reading requires the effective integration of orthographic and phonological information in addition to intact processing of either type. The current study used a rhyme decision task to examine phono-orthographic interaction in children with reading disabilities (RD) as compared to typically achieving (TA) children. Word pairs were presented…

Although phonological awareness (PA) is an essential preliteracy skill with well-established predictive validity for elementary school reading success, previous research indicates that PA intervention does not demonstrate long term effects on reading. The theory of automaticity was the underlying foundation used to understand the importance of…