A study of acquisition of the alphabetic principle in 64 preliterate children, aged 3 to 5 years, is reported. It appears that phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowledge are needed in combination for acquisition of the alphabetic principle. Once gained, alphabetic insight proved relatively robust. (TJH)

We conducted behavior?genetic analyses of kindergarten reading, spelling, phonological awareness, rapid naming, and spoken sentence processing in 172 pairs of monozygotic and 153 pairs of same-sex dizygotic twin kindergarten children sampled in the United States and Australia. We also modeled progress from preschool to kindergarten in…

Reports on a study of Grade 5 children who had been trained in phoneme identity six years earlier. Results reveal that these children were superior to untrained controls on irregular word reading and on a composite list of nonwords, regular words, and irregular words. Preschool instruction in phonemic structure had modest but detectable effects on…

Examines the word-reading strategies of a sample of second- and third-grade students in normal classrooms, focusing on the students' relative reliance on decoding versus sight-word associations. Suggests that lack of efficient decoding skills will begin to take a toll on reading comprehension by grade 3. (SR)

Individual differences in measures of prereading skills and in questionnaire measures of 4-5-year-old twins' print environments in Australia, Scandinavia, and the United States were explored with a behavioral-genetic design. Modest phenotypic correlations were found between environmental measures and the twins' print knowledge, general verbal…