The nature and generality of the developmental association between phonological short-term memory and vocabulary knowledge was explored in two studies. Study 1 investigated whether the link between vocabulary and verbal memory arises from the requirement to articulate memory items at recall or from earlier processes involved in the encoding and storage of the verbal material. Four-year-old chil...

The current study examines whether associations exist between household chaos and children's early reading skills, after controlling for a comprehensive battery of home literacy environment characteristics. Our sample included 455 kindergarten and First-grade children who are enrolled in the Western Reserve Reading Project. We go on to test whether these associations are moderated by maternal r...

This study tested the effectiveness of audio-visual training in the discrimination of the phonetic feature of voicing on the recognition of written words by young children deemed to at risk of dyslexia (experiment 1) as well as on dyslexic children s phonological skills (experiment 2). In addition, the third experiment studied the effectiveness of this word recognition training in dyslexic chil...

The contribution of the three core components of working memory (WM) to the development of mathematical skills in young children is poorly understood. The relation between specific WM components and Numerical Operations, which emphasize computation and fact retrieval, and Mathematical Reasoning, which emphasizes verbal problem solving abilities in 48 2nd and 50 3rd graders was assessed using st...

Differences in literacy growth over the summer versus the school year were examined in order to isolate how schooling affects children's literacy development from preschool through second grade across four literacy skills. Children (n = 383) were tested individually twice each year for up to four years on measures of phonological awareness, decoding, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Growt...

BACKGROUND Children at family risk of dyslexia have been reported to show phonological deficits as well as broader language delays in the preschool years. METHOD The preschool language skills of 112 children at family risk of dyslexia (FR) at ages 3½ and 4½ were compared with those of children with SLI and typically developing (TD) controls. RESULTS Children at FR showed two different profi...

Language development entails four fundamental and interactive abilities: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Over the past four decades, a large body of evidence has indicated that reading acquisition is strongly associated with a child's listening skills, particularly the child's sensitivity to phonological structures of spoken language. Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that the cl...

Recent research has confirmed a positive relationship between levels of physical activity and academic achievement. Some of these studies have been informed by neurological models of Executive Functioning (EF). There is a general consensus within the literature that the three core EF skills are; working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. The development of these core EF skill...

Reading disability (RD), or dyslexia, is a complex cognitive disorder manifested by difficulties in learning to read, in otherwise normal individuals. Individuals with RD manifest deficits in several reading and language skills. Previous research has suggested the existence of a quantitative-trait locus (QTL) for RD on the short arm of chromosome 6. In the present study, RD subjects' performanc...

This study examined the development of literacy skills in children in a district that used a Response to Intervention (RTI) model. The district included children whose first language was English and children who were learning English as a second language (ESL). Tasks measuring phonological awareness, lexical access, and syntactic awareness were administered when the children entered school in k...