Purpose: Morphological awareness is the ability to consciously manipulate the smallest units of meaning in language. Morphological awareness contributes to success with literacy skills for children with typical language and those with language impairment. However, little research has focused on the morphological awareness skills of children with…

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between selective visual attention (SVA), reading decoding, listening comprehension and reading comprehension in children with and without a reading disorder. Methods: We used longitudinal data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. We split children into four…

We examined the relation of morphological awareness with language and literacy skills, namely phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, vocabulary, word reading, spelling, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension. We also examined potential moderators of the relations (grade level, orthographic depth of language, receptive vs.…

Purpose: This was an investigation of the dimensionality of oral and written language to test the hypothesis that a two-factor model with sound/word and sentence/discourse language levels would best fit language and literacy data for a population-based sample in the school-age years. Method: A stratified secondary data set of 1,500 participants…

Models of irregular word reading that take into account both child- and word-level predictors have not been evaluated in typically developing children and children with reading difficulty (RD). The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in irregular word reading ability among 5th grade children (N = 170), oversampled for…

The paper reports on a study designed to develop a risk model that can best predict single-word spelling in seven-year-old children when they were aged 4 and 5. Test measures, personal characteristics and environmental influences were all considered as variables from a community sample of 971 children. Strong concurrent correlations were found…

Spelling is a prerequisite to expressing vocabulary in writing. Research has shown that children with dyslexia are hesitant spellers when composing. This study aimed to determine whether the hesitant spelling of children with dyslexia, evidenced by frequent pausing, affects vocabulary choices when writing. A total of 31 children with dyslexia,…

This article focuses on the development of a Literacy Assessment Battery for the diagnosis of Maltese children with specific learning difficulties. It forms part of a wider research study involving testing of 549 children in Malta as well as standardisation of the tool. Results of the children's performance and psychometric validation go beyond…