One implication of the double-deficit hypothesis for dyslexia is that there should be subtypes of dyslexic readers that exhibit rapid naming deficits with or without concomitant phonological processing problems. In the current study, we investigated the validity of this hypothesis for Portuguese orthography, which is more consistent than English orthography, by exploring different cognitive pro...

PURPOSE To investigate phonological awareness and working memory skills as well as their influence on the literacy process in a group of intellectually normal children. METHODS Forty intellectually normal children (7.6-8.0 years) from the second and third grades of elementary school participated. Children were organized in two groups (20 children each): one with and another without literacy d...

Phonological awareness skills are critical for reading acquisition, yet relatively little is known about the origins of phonological awareness. This study investigates one plausible source of the emergence of phonological awareness, phonological neighbourhood density. As vocabulary grows, the number of similar-sounding words in the child's mental lexicon increases. This could create development...

Although research has identified oral language, print knowledge, and phonological sensitivity as important emergent literacy skills for the development of reading, few studies have examined the relations between these aspects of emergent literacy or between these skills during preschool and during later reading. This study examined the joint and unique predictive significance of emergent litera...

In the present study, we report analyses of nonword repetition responses from 76 experienced pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users. Immediate repetition of a spoken nonword stimulus requires a child to correctly perceive a novel sound pattern, maintain a representation and rehearse it in phonological working memory, and then reproduce a phonological pattern as an output response. Nonword repeti...

PURPOSE Children with language impairment (LI) often demonstrate difficulties with word decoding. Research suggests that child-level (i.e., phonological processing) and environmental-level (i.e., classroom quality) factors both contribute to decoding skills in typically developing children. The present study examined the extent to which these same factors influence the decoding skills of childr...