Word segmentation is a crucial step in children's vocabulary learning. While computational models of word segmentation can capture infants' performance in small-scale artificial tasks, the examination of early word segmentation in naturalistic settings has been limited by the lack of measures that can relate models' performance to developmental…

Purpose: This article reports on the effectiveness of a novel tablet-based approach to phonological intervention and compares it to a traditional tabletop approach, targeting children with phonologically based speech sound disorders (SSD). Method: Twenty-two Portuguese children with phonologically based SSD were randomly assigned to 1 of 2…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the perception of correctly and incorrectly produced words in children with and without phonological speech sound disorder (SSD) with similar vocabulary and language skills. Method: Thirty-six monolingual English-speaking children aged 4 and 5 years, half with SSD and half with typical speech and…

Determining later academic achievement, early literacy skills are all of the prerequisite knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for successful reading and writing during formal education. Early literacy skills consist of several sub-skills including phonology knowledge that determine primary-level reading. The present article is prepared for…

Although research on cognitive correlates of spelling has been conducted, these studies generally do not distinguish between different types of targets that need to be spelled. Arguably, the contributions of these skills differ for words opposed to pseudowords and for targets that can be spelled on the basis of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion…

Background: This study examined the development of stress sensitivity and its relationship with word reading. Previous research has rarely measured phoneme and stress sensitivity in the same task, making a direct comparison of the contribution between the two in reading development difficult. Methods: Participants were native English-speaking…

The automatic letter-sound integration hypothesis proposes that the decoding difficulties seen in dyslexia arise from a specific deficit in establishing automatic letter-sound associations. We report the findings of 2 studies in which we used a priming task to assess automatic letter-sound integration. In Study 1, children between 5 and 7 years of…

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for…

Prosodic awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with…

In Kannada, visual features are arranged in blocks called "akshara," making this a visually more complex writing system than typical alphabetic orthographies. Akshara knowledge was assessed concurrently and 8 months later in 113 children in the first years of reading instruction (aged 4-7 years). Mixed effects logistic regression models…

Early literacy skills are critical for success in school, yet many children fail to obtain these skills in a timely manner leaving them unable to perform at minimal academic expectations. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of word box instruction, a research-based intervention designed to promote phonemic awareness, on the…

This study investigated (1) the role of syllable awareness in word reading and spelling after accounting for the effects of print-related skills (letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, and rapid serial naming), and (2) unique contributions of orthographic, semantic (vocabulary and morphological awareness), phonological, and print-related…

The aim of the present study was to provide more insight in the relative difficulty of four tasks testing phonemic awareness: (a) blending, (b) isolation, (c) segmentation, and (d) deletion. At the same time the roles of phoneme position and phoneme class were taken into account in a fully balanced way. To this purpose, 141 kindergartners were…

The study investigated cognitive deficits associated with dyslexia and familial risk of dyslexia (endophenotypes) by comparing children from families with and without a history of dyslexia. Eighty-eight school-aged children were assessed on measures of phonology, language and rapid automatized naming. A series of regression analyses with family…

In this study, we examined the influence of word-level phonological and lexical characteristics on early phoneme awareness. Typically developing children, ages 61 to 78 months, completed a phoneme-based, odd-one-out task that included consonant-vowel-consonant word sets (e.g., "chair-chain-ship") that varied orthogonally by a phonological…