We outline how research into predictors of literacy underpins the development of increasingly accurate and informative assessments. We report three studies that emphasize the crucial role of speech and auditory skills on literacy development throughout primary and secondary school. Our first study addresses the effects of early childhood middle…

At the end of first grade, TM did not know the alphabet and could read no words. He could not tap syllables in words, had difficulty producing rhyming words and retrieving the phonological representations of words, and he could not discriminate many phoneme contrasts. He learned letter-sound correspondences first for single-consonant onsets and…

This study aims to show that training using a computer game incorporating an audio-visual phoneme discrimination task with phonological units, presented simultaneously with orthographic units, might improve literacy skills. Two experiments were conducted, one in secondary schools with dyslexic children (Experiment 1) and the other in a…