The relationship between the home environments of 66 children and their language and literacy development was examined. After accounting for child age, parent education, and child ability as indexed by scores on a rapid automatized naming task and Block Design of the WPPSI-R, shared book reading at home made no contribution to the prediction of the literacy skills of letter name and letter sound knowledge in kindergarten. In contrast, home activities involving letters predicted modest and statistically significant amounts of variance. For the areas of receptive vocabulary and phonological sensitivity, neither shared book reading nor letter activities were predictive. Follow-up to mid-Grade 2 underscored the importance of letter name/sound knowledge and phonological sensitivity in kindergarten in accounting for individual differences in later achievement in reading comprehension, phonological spelling, and conventional spelling.

In this study 149 kindergarten children were assessed for knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, phonological awareness, and cognitive abilities. Through this it examined child and letter characteristics influencing the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge in a naturalistic context, the relationship between letter-sound knowledge and letter-name knowledge, and the prediction of Grade 1 phonological awareness and word identification from these variables. Knowledge of letter sounds was better for vowels and for letters with consonant-vowel names than for those with vowel-consonant names or names bearing little relationship to their sounds. However, there were anomalies within each category reflecting characteristics of the individual letters. Structural equation modelling showed that cognitive ability, comprising receptive vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, rapid automatized naming of colours, and phonological memory significantly contributed to alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness. In turn, letter-name knowledge but not phonological awareness predicted letter-sound knowledge and subsequent reading skill.

The purpose of this study was to document the illness experiences of homeless youth. The research was a focused ethnography with 45 clinic- and street-based homeless youth aged 15 to 23 years. The authors noted gender differences for health-seeking behaviors, with most male youth reporting embarrassment about needing to seek care, and female youth reporting fears over safety issues while ill and homeless. Most youth under age 18 stated that they were often denied health care at hospitals because of their underage status, and youth over age 18 stated that health care bills contributed to their inability to obtain stable housing. Street-based youth reported more illnesses related to substance use and greater reliance on emergency departments for health care than clinic-based youth did. Policies and programs focused on improving the health of homeless youth need to address the differences in illness experiences by age, gender, and sampling site.

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