Background: Letter knowledge is crucial in the first stages of reading development. It supports learning letter-sound mappings and the identification of the letters that make up words. Previous studies have investigated the longitudinal impact of early letter knowledge on children's further word reading abilities. This study employed an artificial…

Purpose: This study aimed to elucidate the nature of the relationship between the development of decoding and encoding skills in the first year at school. Method: The foundational literacy skills of one hundred eighty 5-year-old children were examined on three occasions over their first year of literacy instruction. Participants received the same…

Irregular words cannot be read correctly by decoding letters into sounds using the most common letter-sound mapping relations. They are difficult to read and learn. Cognitive models of word reading and development as well as empirical data suggest that inhibitory control might be important for irregular word reading and its development. The…

Reading acquisition is based on a set of preliteracy skills that lay the foundation for future reading abilities. Phonological awareness--the ability to identify and manipulate the sound units of oral language--has been reported to play a central role in reading acquisition. However, current evidence is mixed with respect to its universal…

Since 2012, when preparatory grade (PG) became compulsory in Romania for 6-year olds, little understanding has been gained of how children's literacy evolves in PG, although over the same period, Romanian 15-year olds' reading performance has shown no signs of improvement (Noveanu et al., 2023). Children enter school with broadly varying literacy…

In Denmark there is an ongoing trend towards a more ambitious literacy instruction in the first school year (Kindergarten). This calls for a clarification of present-day reading levels, and for a profile of the students who become readers while attending the semi-formal literacy program. The present study examined the extent to which a group of…

We examined the response to a phonics through spelling intervention for children with developmental dyslexia in word and pseudoword reading efficiency and word spelling. Furthermore, we investigated to what extent the response to the intervention is robust across different cognitive profiles (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and…

Background: Research acknowledges the importance of phonological processing and orthographic processing for reading and spelling in both consistently and inconsistently written languages. While the focus has tended to be on the role of phonological processing in languages with consistent orthographies, the role of orthographic processing,…

This study explored whether a daytime nap aids children's acquisition of letter-sound knowledge, which is a fundamental component for learning to read. Thirty-two preschool children in Sydney, Australia (M[subscript age] = 4 years;3 months) were taught letter-sound mappings in two sessions: one followed by a nap and the other by a wakeful period.…

Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically…

Dyslexia is a neuro-sensory issue that makes reading challenging. However, Dyslexic Phonemic R[subscript 3] is a novel approach that improved the phonological development and resolved the reading challenges of dyslexia. The primary goal of the study was (1) to evaluate the current state of the phonemic and auditory symptoms of children with…

The study explores whether foundational skills of reading and spelling in preschool (age 5-6) predict literacy skills cross-linguistically in an additional language in Grade 1 (age 6-7). A sample of linguistically diverse preschool children completed tasks of phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, verbal-short term memory, rapid…

Previous studies have showed that early problems with word decoding can lead to poor performance in text reading and comprehension and suggest that poor readers often struggle with reading deficits throughout their school years. Therefore, early detection of those children who are at risk for slow reading development and/or who belong to the…

Early identification of learning difficulties is a critical component of the Response to Intervention (RtI) model. In kindergarten, the screening of foundational reading skills can provide a data-based guideline for identifying students requiring a more intensive response-based intervention before starting elementary school. This study examines…

The ultimate goal of reading is to comprehend written text, and this goal can only be attained if the reader can decode written words and understand their meanings. The science of reading has provided compelling evidence for the subskills that form the foundation of decoding. Decoding words requires understanding of the alphabetic principle and…