Longitudinal results for a randomized-controlled trial (RCT) assessing the impact of increasing preschoolers' attention to print during reading are reported. Four-year-old children (N = 550) in 85 classrooms experienced a 30-week shared reading program implemented by their teachers. Children in experimental classrooms experienced shared-book readings 2 or 4 times per week during which their tea...

BACKGROUND Poor comprehenders have difficulty comprehending connected text, despite having age-appropriate levels of reading accuracy and fluency. We used a longitudinal design to examine earlier reading and language skills in children identified as poor comprehenders in mid-childhood. METHOD Two hundred and forty-two children began the study at age 5. Further assessments of language and read...

While metalinguistic awareness and speech perception have been found to each be related to numerous other linguistic processes, e.g. reading acquisition, phonological development, phonological disorders, it is only recently that the relationship between awareness and perception has been considered. Recent studies have demonstrated correlations between changes in perceptual weighting of acoustic...

A group of 1st-graders who were administered a battery of reading tasks in a previous study were followed up as 11th graders. Ten years later, they were administered measures of exposure to print, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and general knowledge. First-grade reading ability was a strong predictor of all of the 11th-grade outcomes and remained so even when measures of cognitive ability w...

Fine motor skills have long been recognized as an important foundation for development in other domains. However, more precise insights into the role of fine motor skills, and their relationships to other skills in mediating early educational achievements, are needed to support the development of optimal educational interventions. We explored concurrent relationships between two components of f...

BACKGROUND Early prediction of reading disabilities in Chinese is important for early remediation efforts. In this 6-year longitudinal study, we investigated the early cognitive predictors of reading skill in a statistically representative sample of Chinese children from Beijing. METHOD Two hundred sixty-one (261) native Chinese children were administered seven language-related skills over th...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between Head Start children's receptive language development and their kindergarten reading outcomes. METHOD Eighty-eight bilingual children who were eligible to attend Head Start for 2 years participated in the study. Growth curve models were used to examine the relationship between children's language abilities during 2 y...

This study explored the development of children's early understanding of visual and orthographic aspects of print and how this is related to early reading acquisition. A total of 474 children, ages 48 to 83 months, completed standardized measures of phonological awareness and early reading skills. They also completed experimental tasks that tapped their understanding of what constitutes "readab...

The learning difficulties of Down Syndrome students are often related to limitation of their short term memory. They have constraints in separating the information received by the brain. This leads to difficulties in reading process. Therefore, they fail to focus when learning. Scaffolding is a systematic assistance used to ease the burden of the short term memory of the Down Syndrome students....

Phonological awareness is an early indicator of emergent reading skill that is known to be reliably related to eventual reading performance. This established research based coupled with federal and state requirements to measure phonological awareness as an indicator of early reading program success has heightened the attention toward phonological assessment tools. The purpose of this paper is t...