The issue of how information flows within the lexical system in written naming was investigated in five experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named target pictures that were accompanied by context pictures having phonologically and orthographically related or unrelated names (e.g., a picture of a "ball" superimposed on a picture of…

We examined whether French third- and fifth-grade children rely on morphemes when recognizing words and whether this reliance depends on word familiarity. We manipulated the presence of bases and suffixes in words and pseudowords to compare their contribution in a lexical decision task. Both bases and suffixes facilitated word reading accuracy and…

In England, Higher Education institutions, together with the schools whose staff they train, are being required to incorporate synthetic phonics as one of the key approaches to the teaching of reading. Yet even if synthetic phonics can be identified as one of the component "skills" of reading, an assumption vigorously contested in this…

Despite the recent attention to text reading fluency, few studies have studied the construct of oral reading rate and accuracy in connected text in a model that simultaneously examines many of the important variables in a multi-leveled fashion with young readers. Using Structural Equation Modeling, this study examined the measurement and…

This qualitative study investigates the invented spellings of young EFL writers in terms of the relationship between phonological awareness and internalized grapheme-phoneme principles. Two kindergarteners and two first graders participated in weekly English writing tasks for 14 months. Results obtained from protocols of the students' free writing…

Can embedded mnemonics ease the task of learning a foreign alphabet? English-speaking preschoolers (N = 36, M = 5;2 years) were taught 10 Hebrew letter-sound relations. Experimental letters were learned with mnemonics that embedded letter shapes in drawings of objects whose shapes resembled the letters and whose English names began with the…

There is now a strong evidence base from theory and research providing a "template" to inform practice at Wave 2, guiding the design and implementation of time-limited effective early intervention programmes for pupils identified as "at risk" of reading difficulties following initial literacy instruction (Rose, 2009). In…

Targeted to children as young as 3 months old, there is a growing number of baby media products that claim to teach babies to read. This randomized controlled trial was designed to examine this claim by investigating the effects of a best-selling baby media product on reading development. One hundred and seventeen infants, ages 9 to 18 months,…

The processing of abbreviations in reading was examined with an eye movement experiment. Abbreviations were of 2 distinct types: acronyms (abbreviations that can be read with the normal grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations in which the GPCs are letter names, such as NCAA). Parafoveal and foveal…

Spelling is a subject that often opens a chasm between "haves" and "have-nots". Students with spelling power, the haves, pick up new spellings almost effortlessly, acing their spelling tests after a few minutes of review. In contrast, the have-nots may painstakingly copy out each word 10 times the night before the test and still fail the test the…

This article examines how it is possible to use the aesthetic process to enrich teaching practices in preschool and elementary school education. What is under scrutiny is the aesthetic dimension of a core curricular subject, the ultimate goal being to achieve an understanding of curricular content through aesthetic learning processes. For this…

Skilled readers were trained to recognise either the oral (n=44) or visual form (n=40) of a set of 32 novel words (oral and visual instantiation, respectively). Training involved learning the "meanings" for the instantiated words and was followed by a visual lexical decision task in which the instantiated words were mixed with real English words…

The present study investigated multiple componential skills for conventional spelling using data from 5-year-old Korean children (N = 77). Error analysis showed that 5-year-old Korean children primarily employed a phonological transcription strategy in spelling despite the absence of systematic and explicit instruction on phonological strategies…

The knowledge that reading and phonological awareness are mainly reciprocally related has hardly influenced the status of a phonological awareness deficit as the main cause of a reading deficit in dyslexia. Because direct proofs for this theory are still lacking we investigated children at familial risk for dyslexia in kindergarten and first…

A central focus in remedial teaching is the generalisation of responses to contexts in which a student has never been explicitly instructed. Remarkably little is known about how and when generalisation occurs. In this article we examine generalisation effects in the context of spelling. Three areas are discussed: generalisation between spelling…