This study evaluates Reading Intervention--a 10-week supplementary reading programme emphasising the link between phonological awareness and reading--when delivered in a realistic educational setting. Twenty-nine 6-year-olds with reading difficulties participated in Reading Intervention and their progress and attainments were compared with those…

We present the results of an empirical test of the hypothesis that transfer of orthographic processing to reading occurs when the scripts under acquisition are written with the same unit (specifically, the same alphabet). We tested 97 Spanish-English bilingual children in Grades 4 and 7. We measured mother's education level, verbal and nonverbal…

We investigated the effects of morphological awareness on five measures of reading in 103 children from Grades 1 to 3. Morphological awareness was assessed with a word analogy task that included a wide range of morphological transformations. Results indicated that the new measure had satisfactory reliability, and that morphological awareness was a…

As children learn to read, they become sensitive to the patterns that exist in the ways in which their language(s) are represented in print. This skill is known as orthographic processing. We examined the nature of orthographic processing in English and French for children in the first grade of a French immersion program, and the relationship…

Phonological awareness has been repeatedly reported as important for learning to read in different orthographies. It is important to understand what specific levels of phonological awareness are involved in Chinese and English for Chinese children who learn English-as-a-second-language (ESL). Measures of phonological awareness, word reading,…

This study considered how far nonverbal cognitive, language and reading abilities are affected by common genetic influences in a sample of 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme…

One hundred twenty-one third-grade Chinese children were assessed with a new morphological awareness task involving open-ended lexical compounding, in addition to completing other measures. With children's age, nonverbal intelligence, phonological awareness, and previously established measures of morphological awareness statistically controlled,…

This study focused on the associations of general auditory processing, speech perception, phonological awareness and word reading in Cantonese-speaking children from Hong Kong learning to read both Chinese (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]). Children in Grades 2--4 ("N" = 133) participated and were administered…

The present study investigated the language development of 50 children with intellectual disabilities (ID) and 42 typically developing children from age 4 to 5 years, and was designed to shed more light on the respective roles of phonological working memory (WM) and nonverbal intelligence in vocabulary and syntax development. Results showed that…

This study examined whether there are processing differences between children with Down syndrome (DS; n = 22; 7 years 8 months to 13 years 10 months) and typically developing children (TD; n = 22; 6 years 6 months to 10 years 10 months), matched for receptive vocabulary. The TD children performed better on tests of nonverbal intelligence…

This study tested whether the association between temporal processing (TP) and reading is mediated by phonological awareness (PA) in a normative sample of 615 eight-year-olds. TP was measured with auditory and bimodal (visual-auditory) temporal order judgment tasks and PA with a phoneme deletion task. PA partially mediated the association between…

In this study, we investigated the characteristics of cognitive abilities as predictors of Korean reading and spelling ability, and the characteristics of the cognition of reading difficulty in Korean. In 103 Korean third-grade children, we tested ability to read and spell, nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary size, phonological cognitive…

Word finding difficulties (WFDs) occur in more than a quarter of children who are receiving speech and language therapy. This study provides the first investigation of the continuity in WFDs and investigates whether WFDs are associated with phonological or semantically related abilities. Thirty-eight children with WFDs were seen at age 7;0 and at…

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which teacher ratings of behavioral attention predicted responsiveness to word reading instruction in first-grade and third-grade reading comprehension performance. Participants were 110 first-grade students identified as at risk for reading difficulties who received 20 weeks of intensive…

Background: In the literature so far the limited research on specific language impairment (SLI) in bilingual children has concentrated on linguistic skills in the first language (L1) and/or the second language (L2) without paying attention to the relations between the two types of skills and to the issue of linguistic transfer. Aims: To examine…