The main aim of this study was to develop standardised tests that assess some of the most important spelling skills for children in primary school: sound-letter mappings (non-lexical spelling) and word spelling accuracy (lexical spelling). We present normative comparison data for children in Grades 1-7 as well as measures of validity and…

We examined the longitudinal predictors of nonword decoding, reading fluency, and spelling in three languages that vary in orthographic depth: Finnish, Greek, and English. Eighty-two English-speaking, 70 Greek, and 88 Finnish children were followed from the age of 5.5 years old until Grade 2. Prior to any reading instruction, they were…

Does the intensification of what can be called "language-specific speech perception" around reading onset occur as a function of maturation or experience? Preschool 5-year-olds with no school experience, 5-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, 6-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, and 6-year-olds with 18 months' schooling were tested on…

Reviews research on the question of how to best teach letter-sound correspondences in beginning reading instruction. Describes a new, child-friendly, research-based way of teaching letter-sound correspondences to English- and Spanish-speaking children, which is not only explicit, systematic, and extensive, but also context embedded and meaningful.…

Ninety pupils in grades one through three, half English speaking and half Spanish speaking, were administered informal reading inventories in their respective countries. Analysis of variance was used to determine whether significant differences existed between decoding errors of pupils in both countries. Results are discussed. (Author/MT)

This paper discusses some psycholinguistic and psychological bases of learning to read in two apparently disparate writing systems, English and Chinese. As an alphabet, English orthography has "more reason than rhyme"; relational units and markers (e.g., "hens" and "hence") are important. The combinatory properties of…

The phenomenon of "invented spelling" in young children, observed in many preschool age children who produce written messages using words that are generated through an original system of orthography, was researched with Spanish-speaking children. The following conclusions were made from previous research with English-speaking children concerning…

Examined the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills in eight-year olds from Britain, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Found that performance of Chinese children on phonological tests was not significantly related to their reading ability, in contrast to performance of English children, whose results continued to show a significant…

This study investigated phonological translation using a task designed to measure children's ability to map one phonological system onto another. Kindergarten and second-grade monolingual and bilingual students were evaluated. Results suggest that monolinguals generally performed poorly. Phonological translation is proposed as a tool with which to…

Assesses speed, accuracy, and types of errors in decoding lists of words and pseudo words and performance in two phonemic awareness tasks for first- and second-grade German and American children. Suggests that successful reading in English depends upon more complex grapheme to phoneme correspondence rules than does reading in German. (SC)

A study examined the phoneme-grapheme correspondence in native English-speaking kindergartners' spelling and compared it to the results of similar research with Spanish-speaking children. It tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children make their first grapheme-sound correspondences differently because of phonological differences in the…

Decoding and comprehension skills were assessed for Turkish and American first and third graders. Twenty students in each group were tested on a pseudoword vocalization task and on a paragraph comprehension task. The data suggest that languages with more regular letter-sound correspondences lead to faster acquisition of decoding skills. (Author/BS)

A study investigated the degree to which the pronunciation of English words in the child's home environment affected the acquisition or discrimination of phonological and orthographic correspondences of standard written English. Subjects were low-socioeconomic-status, inner-city African American kindergarten, first-, and second-grade students, who…