This study of 40 4-year-olds investigated whether tests of phonological sensitivity, print awareness, or word awareness accounted for a significant amount of variability in preschool children's invented spellings. Subtest results from the "Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening-PreKindergarten" and two measures of individual word…

The DAPPLE (Dynamic Assessment of Preschoolers' Proficiency in Learning English) is currently being developed in response to a clinical need. Children exposed to English as an additional language may be referred to speech and language therapy because their proficiency in English is not the same as their monolingual peers. Some, but not all, of…

Two studies were conducted to investigate the correlates of hyperlexia in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Study 1 involved 3 groups of school age children individually matched for word reading ability: 6 ASD hyperlexic children, 6 ASD non-hyperlexic children, and 6 typically developing…

This study examined the ability of 20 preschool children with functional phonological delays and 34 age- and vocabulary-matched typical children to learn words differing in phonotactic probability (i.e., the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence) and neighborhood density (i.e., the number of words that differ from a target by one phoneme).…

Word familiarity judgment may be important for word learning, yet little is known about how children make this judgment. We hypothesized that preschool-age children differ in the judgment criteria that they use and that this difference derives from individual differences in basic memory processes. Those who have superior phonological working…

The purpose of this research was to assess the development of phonological skills before and during learning to read. Thirty-four children were tested twice, in nursery school and in first grade with an epiphonological task (E), e.g. judgment of similarity, and two metaphonological tasks, one requiring the extraction of common units (M1) and one…

Purpose: This study examined reading performance and morphological awareness development in 2 groups of children with speech impairment who had received differing types of intervention during their preschool years. Method: The children were aged between 7;6 and 9;5 (years;months) at the time of the study. Group 1 (n = 8) had received preschool…

Two experiments explore the activation of semantic information during spoken word recognition. Experiment 1 shows that as the name of an object unfolds (e.g., lock), eye movements are drawn to pictorial representations of both the named object and semantically related objects (e.g., key). Experiment 2 shows that objects semantically related to an…

This article explores young children's facility in phonological awareness tasks requiring either the detection or the articulation of head, coda, onset, and rime subsyllabic units shared in word pairs. Data are reported from 70 nonreading children and 21 precocious readers attending preschools. Prereading children were able to articulate shared…