Early first-language reading and spelling skills predict later second-language reading and spelling skills.

This prospective study examined early first-language (L1) predictors of later second-language (L2) reading (word decoding, comprehension) and spelling skills by conducting a series of multiple regressions. Measures of L1 word decoding, spelling, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, and listening comprehension administered in the 1st through 5th grades were used as predictors of L2 reading (word decoding, comprehension) and spelling skills in high school. The best predictor of L2 decoding skill was a measure of L1 decoding, and the best predictors of L2 spelling were L1 spelling and L1 phonological awareness. The best predictor of L2 reading comprehension was a measure of L1 reading comprehension. When L2 word decoding skill replaced L1 word decoding as a predictor variable for L2 reading comprehension, results showed that L2 word decoding was an important predictor of L2 reading comprehension. The findings suggest that even several years after students learn to read and spell their L1, word decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension skills transfer from L1 to L2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

From reading to spelling and spelling to reading: Transfer goes both ways.

This study compares the effects of practice spelling and reading specific words on the orthographic representations in memory involved in reading both practiced words and new, unfamiliar words. Typically developing readers in Grade 2 (mean age = 7 years, 7 months) participated in a training study examining whether transfer can occur between reading and spelling following a series of reading and spelling practice sessions. Practice consisted of either repeated reading or repeated spelling of words with shared orthographic rime patterns. A series of mixed analyses of variance was used to examine generalization within skill and transfer across skill. Following practice, word-specific transfer across skill was found. Specifically, children were better able to spell words they had practiced reading and to read words they had practiced spelling. In addition, generalization to new words with practiced rime units was found both within a skill and across skills. However, transfer from spelling to reading was greater than transfer from reading to spelling. Results indicate that the orthographic representations established through practice can be used for both reading and spelling. Subsequently, reading and spelling curricula should be coordinated to benefit children maximally. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of word reading fluency and spelling in a consistent orthography: An 8-year follow-up.

In a longitudinal study, development of word reading fluency and spelling were followed for almost 8 years. In a group of 115 students (65 girls, 50 boys) acquiring the phonologically transparent German orthography, prediction measures (letter knowledge, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and nonverbal IQ) were assessed at the beginning of Grade 1; reading fluency and spelling were tested at the end of Grade 1 as well as in Grades 4 and 8. Reading accuracy was close to ceiling in all reading assessments, such that reading fluency was not heavily influenced by differences in reading accuracy. High stability was observed for word reading fluency development. Of the dysfluent readers in Grade 1, 70% were still poor readers in Grade 8. For spelling, children who at the end of Grade 1 still had problems translating spoken words into phonologically plausible letter sequences developed problems with orthographic spelling later on. The strongest specific predictors were rapid automatized naming for reading fluency and phonological awareness for spelling. Word recognition speed was a relevant and highly stable indicator of reading skills and the only indicator that discriminated reading skill levels in consistent orthographies. Its long-term development was more strongly influenced by early naming speed than by phonological awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predictors of reading comprehension for struggling readers: The case of Spanish-speaking language minority learners.

This longitudinal study examined the process of English reading comprehension at age 11 years for 173 low-achieving Spanish-speaking children. The influence of growth rates, from early childhood (age 4.5 years) to pre-adolescence (age 11 years), in vocabulary and word reading skills on this complex process were evaluated with structural equation modeling. Standardized measures of word reading accuracy and productive vocabulary were administered annually, in English and Spanish, and English reading comprehension measures were administered at age 11 years. Latent growth curve analyses revealed that English skills accounted for all unique variance in English reading comprehension outcomes. Further, expected developmental shifts in the influence of word reading and vocabulary skills over time were not shown, likely on account of students' below-grade-level reading comprehension achievement. This work underscores the need for theoretical models of comprehension to account for students' skill profiles and abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contribution of spelling instruction to the spelling, writing, and reading of poor spellers.

The contribution of supplemental spelling instruction to spelling, writing, and reading was examined. Second-grade children experiencing difficulties learning to spell participated in 48 20-min sessions designed to improve their spelling skills. In comparison with peers in a contact control condition receiving mathematics instruction, students in the spelling condition made greater improvements on norm-referenced spelling measures, a writing-fluency test, and a reading word-attack measure following instruction. Six months later, students in the spelling treatment maintained their advantage in spelling but not on the writing-fluency and reading word-attack measures. However, spelling instruction had a positive effect at maintenance on the reading word-recognition skills of children who scored lowest on this measure at pretest. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of multimedia-enhanced instruction on the vocabulary of English-language learners and non-English-language learners in pre-kindergarten through second grade.

This study compared traditional and multimedia-enhanced read-aloud vocabulary instruction and investigated whether the effects differed for English-language learners (ELLs) and non-English-language learners (non-ELLs). Results indicate that although there was no added benefit of multimedia-enhanced instruction for non-ELLs, there was a positive effect for ELLs on a researcher-designed measure and on a measure of general vocabulary knowledge. Furthermore, for children in the multimedia-enhanced condition, the gap between non-ELLs and ELLs in knowledge of instructional words was closed, and the gap in general vocabulary knowledge was narrowed. The multimedia support did not negatively impact non-ELLs, indicating the potential of multimedia-enhanced vocabulary instruction for ELLs in inclusive settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An examination of predictive bias for second grade reading outcomes from measures of early literacy skills in kindergarten with respect to English-language learners and ethnic subgroups.

The assessment of early literacy skills during the kindergarten year can provide useful information about student performance in prereading skills, which are predictors of later reading achievement. This study examined the use of fluency-based prompts of student phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, and oral reading at the end of kindergarten for predicting later reading achievement at the end of second grade. Predictive validity and bias studies were undertaken with respect to English-language learners (ELLs) and four selected ethnic subgroups: European American (EA), African American (AA), Asian American (AsA), and Hispanic American (HA). Results indicated that the predictive validity of the early literacy measures was strong, and no evidence of predictive bias for ELL and non-ELL groups was found. However, evidence of a small amount of predictive bias was found between the EA and HA students with respect to intercept differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties: A specific disability in regular orthographies.

Two large studies identified substantial numbers of German-speaking children (Grade 3) with marked dissociations between reading and spelling difficulties. These dissociations were expected because German exhibits high regularity in the direction of graphemes to phonemes (forward regularity) but not in the direction of phonemes to graphemes (backward regularity). High forward regularity allows reliance on phonological processing in reading (even in advanced fluent reading), whereas low backward regularity requires reliance on orthographic memory representations in spelling. Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties was associated only with a naming speed deficit--assessed at school entrance--but not with phonological memory or phonological awareness deficits. In contrast, a specific spelling deficit was preceded by phonological deficits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The development of bilingual children's early spelling in English.

By using an extended version of R. Treiman, M. Cassar, and A. Zukowski's (1994) flaps spelling task (wa_er, is it t or d in water?), the authors investigated the metalinguistic awareness of 6-year-old bilingual children from 3 different language backgrounds (LBs): English-LB (English-L1, Mandarin-L2), Chinese-LB (Mandarin-L1, English L2), and Malay-LB (Bahasa Malaysia-L1, English-L2). Treiman et al. found that unilingual English-speaking children's performance was poorer on flapped words than on control words and better on /d/ flaps than on /t/ flaps, suggesting phonology is salient even for beginners. The data for bilinguals revealed predictable group differences in the use of orthographic and phonological awareness for early spellings, even though the children were all attending the same English-medium kindergarten. Possible educational implications for linguistic minority children are briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive–linguistic foundations of early spelling development in bilinguals.

Developing spelling skills in English is a particularly demanding task for Chinese speakers because, unlike many other bilinguals learning English as a second language, they must learn two languages with different orthography as well as phonology. To disentangle socioeconomic and pedagogical factors from the underlying cognitive–linguistic processes that predict the development of spelling, we used a 6-month longitudinal design and compared children with English as their first language (English-L1; n = 50) and children with Mandarin as their first language (Mandarin-L1; n = 50) from the same kindergarten. Both groups were tested on parallel versions of English and Mandarin tasks as predictors at Time 1, and their spelling sophistication scores were then computed from a 52-item experimental task administered at Time 2. After we controlled for nonverbal IQ, age, vocabulary, and spelling achievement on Wide Range Achievement Test 4 at Time 1, regression analyses showed that phoneme awareness was the strongest predictor of spelling sophistication for English-L1 children, but syllable awareness and letter-sound knowledge were also important for Mandarin-L1 children. The implications of these differences in the cognitive–linguistic processing of bilingual children learning two dissimilar languages are briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Left and right tracks in reading.

Reviews the book, The Psychology of Reading by I. Taylor and M. M. Taylor (1983). The reviewer provides an overview of the authors' Bilateral Cooperative Model of Reading (BLC), which is an attempt to integrate the divergent perspectives of wholistic and analytic theory. The BLC model serves as a framework for the 16 chapters of the book. The reviewer commends the authors for their detailed discussion of orthographies, perceptual and cognitive processes in reading, higher-order language processing, and developmental dyslexia. While the reviewer warns that the authors need to clarify the relevance of data from studies not specifically concerned with hemispheric differences, he believes that the book is worth reading because it develops the perspectives on reading within the context of cognitive psychology--an important step in the construction of a comprehensive theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Late-emerging reading disabilities.

Literacy, language, and cognitive skills were compared for 35 4th-5th graders with early-identified reading disabilities (RD), 31 with late-identified RD (first seen after 3rd grade), and 95 normally achieving students. Late-identified reading deficits were heterogeneous; some children were weak in both comprehension and word-level processing, whereas others had deficiencies in 1 component of reading but were unimpaired in the other. Although most reading skill deficits were about as severe for late- as for early-identified RD, and profiles of associated characteristics were similar, few of the former had yet been identified by their schools. Third-grade achievement, retrospectively examined, had been higher for the group with late-identified RD, suggesting that their reading difficulties were not just late identified but actually late emerging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Written spelling to dictation: Sound-to-spelling regularity affects both writing latencies and durations.

The authors examined the effect of sound-to-spelling regularity on written spelling latencies and writing durations in a dictation task in which participants had to write each target word 3 times in succession. The authors found that irregular words (i.e., those containing low-probability phoneme-to-grapheme mappings) were slower both to initially produce and to execute in writing than were regular words. The regularity effect was found both when participants could and could not see their writing (Experiments 1 and 2) and was larger for low- than for high-frequency words (Experiment 3). These results suggest that central processing of the conflict generated by lexically specific and assembled spelling information for irregular words is not entirely resolved when the more peripheral processes controlling handwriting begin. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prediction of first-grade reading in Spanish-speaking English-language learners.

Longitudinal prediction of English and Spanish reading skills was examined in a sample of 249 Spanish-speaking English-language learners at 3 time points in kindergarten through Grade 1. Phonological awareness transferred from Spanish to English and was predictive of word-identification skills, as in previous studies. Other variables showing cross-linguistic transfer were letter and word knowledge, print concepts, and sentence memory. Expressive vocabulary tended to show language-specific relationships to later reading. Oral-language variables predicted reading comprehension more highly than word identification. Classification of good and poor readers in 1st grade was found to be comparable with studies that used monolingual readers. Results broadened the range of variables showing cross-linguistic transfer, at the level of both predictor and outcome variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Literacy development in early French immersion programs.

Research findings on reading acquisition in early French immersion programs are reviewed. Findings on general reading outcomes, in English and French, are reviewed first, followed by a review of reading outcomes for students who are at risk for reading difficulty because of below-average levels of academic ability, poor first language abilities, disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, and minority language status. There follows a review of studies on individual differences in reading outcomes, including research on students with or at risk for reading difficulties, and on interventions to support students with reading difficulties in immersion. Conclusions along with suggestions for future research are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Variability in deaf children's spelling: The effect of language experience.

French-speaking hearing and deaf children, ranging in age from 6 years 10 months to 14 years 7 months were required to spell words including phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences that were either statistically dominant or nondominant. Of interest was whether the nature of linguistic experience (cued speech vs. sign language) and the precocity of such experience (early vs. late exposure) determines accuracy in the use of phoneme-to-grapheme knowledge. Cued speech is a system delivering phonemically augmented speechreading through the visual modality. Hearing and deaf children exposed to cued speech early at home relied on accurate phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, whereas children exposed to cued speech later and at school only, and children exposed to sign language, did not. A critical factor in the development of the phonological route for spelling seems to be early and intensive exposure to a system making all phonological distinctions easily perceivable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of the interplay between automatic processes and cognitive resources in reading.

An account was tested of the development of the interplay between automatic processes and cognitive resources in reading. According to compensatory-encoding theory, with advancing skill, readers increasingly keep automatic processes from faltering and provide timely, accurate data to working memory by pausing, looking back, rereading, and compensating in other ways when automatic processes fail. Reading skill profiles (e.g., word naming, semantic access, working memory capacity) were obtained from 71 third graders, 68 fifth graders, and 72 seventh graders from a university lab school or a public school (ages 7 to 15; 146 Caucasians, 61 African Americans, 2 Native Americans, 2 Latino Americans). Children participated in an unrestricted reading task (no time or performance pressure) and were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 levels of 3 experimental manipulations of restriction on reading: time pressure or no pressure, constant reading rate or variable reading rate, read silently or read aloud. Regression analyses revealed that developmental level and restriction moderated the reading skill level-comprehension relationship, and restriction lowered comprehension when it overwhelmed skills, especially for younger readers. Verbally inefficient readers compensated most often, and older readers compensated most efficiently. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Development of Reading in Children Who Speak English as a Second Language.

Patterns of reading development were examined in native English-speaking (L1) children and children who spoke English as a second language (ESL). Participants were 978 (790 L1 speakers and 188 ESL speakers) Grade 2 children involved in a longitudinal study that began in kindergarten. In kindergarten and Grade 2, participants completed standardized and experimental measures including reading, spelling, phonological processing, and memory. All children received phonological awareness instruction in kindergarten and phonics instruction in Grade 1. By the end of Grade 2, the ESL speakers' reading skills were comparable to those of L1 speakers, and ESL speakers even outperformed L1 speakers on several measures. The findings demonstrate that a model of early identification and intervention for children at risk is beneficial for ESL speakers and also suggest that the effects of bilingualism on the acquisition of early reading skills are not negative and may be positive. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movements in reading: Perceptual and cognitive processes.

This article discusses the variability of eye movement behavior. The variability exists between readers, so that the average fixation duration for sonic readers my be around 200 ms and for other readers it may be closer to 300 ms; the average saccade length for some readers may be 6 letter spaces, while for others it may be closer lo 10 letter spaces; and some readers rarely regress while others regress quite frequently. These eye movement characteristics can also be influenced by text difficulty; more difficult text leads to longer fixation durations, shorter saccades, and more regressions. More important than the between reader variability is the within reader variability that exists with each of these measures. The article also discusses research on eye movement during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive development and reading: The relation of reading-specific multiple classification skill to reading comprehension in elementary school children.

Cognitive flexibility, the ability to consider multiple aspects of stimuli simultaneously, develops over the elementary school years and can be measured with a multiple classification task. Although prior research indicates a significant relation between domain-general multiple classification skill (e.g., classifying objects by shape and color simultaneously) and reading, a precise relation between these abilities has not been found. A reading-specific multiple classification task was designed that required children to classify printed words along phonological and semantic dimensions simultaneously. Reading-specific multiple classification skill made a unique contribution to children's reading comprehension over the contributions made by children's age, domain-general multiple classification skill, decoding skill, and verbal ability. Additionally, training in reading-specific multiple classification facilitated children's reading comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)