Despite the well-established involvement of both sensory ("bottom-up") and cognitive ("top-down") processes in literacy, the extent to which auditory or cognitive (memory or attention) learning transfers to phonological and reading skills remains unclear. Most research has demonstrated learning of the trained task or even learning transfer to a closely related task. However, few studies have re...

Forty children were studied as they began to learn to read at 5 years old and as they developed their skill up to 7 years old. At each year they were tested for ability on 44 variables which measured ability in reading, spelling, vocabulary, short-term memory, visual perception and discrimination, auditory-visual integration, language knowledge, phonological awareness, grammatical knowledge, ro...

Many deaf individuals do not develop the high-level reading skills that will allow them to fully take part into society. To attempt to explain this widespread difficulty in the deaf population, much research has honed in on the use of phonological codes during reading. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers, though not well suppo...

Recent evidence has suggested cerebellar anomalies in developmental dyslexia. Therefore, we investigated cerebellar morphology in subjects with documented reading disabilities. We obtained T1-weighted magnetic resonance images in the coronal and sagittal planes from 11 males with prior histories of developmental dyslexia, and nine similarly-aged male controls. Proton magnetic resonance spectra ...

The goal of this longitudinal study was to investigate the precursors of early reading development in 52 children with cerebral palsy at kindergarten level in comparison to 65 children without disabilities. Word Decoding was measured to investigate early reading skills, while Phonological Awareness, Phonological Short-term Memory (STM), Speech Perception, Speech Production and Nonverbal Reasoni...

This study investigates how children’s sensitivity to prosodic characteristics in speech is related to their processing of musical melody and rhythm, and how these are related to phonological awareness (PA), in a sample of 23 5-year-old pre-readers. Measures included non-word prosodic imitation, melody and rhythm discrimination, a battery of phonological awareness tasks, and general expressive ...

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of several specific neurocognitive functions in developmental dyslexia (DD). The performances of 60 dyslexic children and 65 age-matched normally reading children were compared on tests of phonological abilities, visual processing, selective and sustained attention, implicit learning, and executive functions. Results documented deficits in dysle...

Two aspects of dynamic systems approaches that are pertinent to developmental models of reading are the emergence of a system with self-organizing characteristics, and its evolution over time to a stable state that is not easily modified or perturbed. The effects of dynamic stability may be seen in the differences obtained in the processing of print by beginner readers taught by different appro...

PURPOSE Several empirical studies suggest that children who stutter, when compared to typically fluent peers, demonstrate relatively subtle, yet robust differences in phonological encoding. Phonological encoding can be measured through the use of tasks that reflect the underlying mechanisms of phonological processing, such as phonological awareness. This study investigated the phonological enco...

BACKGROUND This study compares the efficacy of two school-based intervention programmes (Phonology with Reading (P + R) and Oral Language (OL)) for children with poor oral language at school entry. METHODS Following screening of 960 children, 152 children (mean age 4;09) were selected from 19 schools on the basis of poor vocabulary and verbal reasoning skills and randomly allocated to either ...