A core difficulty in developmental dyslexia is the accurate specification and neural representation of speech. We argue that a likely perceptual cause of this difficulty is a deficit in the perceptual experience of rhythmic timing. Speech rhythm is one of the earliest cues used by infants to discriminate syllables and is determined principally by the acoustic structure of amplitude modulation at relatively low rates in the signal. We show significant differences between dyslexic and normally reading children, and between young early readers and normal developers, in amplitude envelope onset detection. We further show that individual differences in sensitivity to the shape of amplitude modulation account for 25% of the variance in reading and spelling acquisition even after controlling for individual differences in age, nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary. A possible causal explanation dependent on perceptual-center detection and the onset-rime representation of syllables is discussed.

In this 1-year longitudinal study, we examined the central component processes of reading fluency, spelling accuracy, reading comprehension, and narrative text writing skills of 103 Turkish Cypriot children. Two cohorts of children from 2nd and 4th grades were followed into 3rd and 5th grades, respectively. The testing battery included the measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), vocabulary, listening comprehension, and working memory. In line with previous research evidence from other transparent orthographies, such as German (Wimmer & Mayringer, 2002), we have also found that whereas phonological awareness was the strongest predictor of spelling, RAN was a powerful predictor of reading fluency. The overall pattern of relationships were broadly in line with the models of reading comprehension and writing in English and further highlighted the central role of oral language skills in children's comprehension and writing. The results have also underscored the complexity of the relationships between reading fluency and reading comprehension and likewise between transcription skills and writing quality. Finally, it has become clear from the findings that there is a need for an integrated and comprehensive approach to the study of reading comprehension and writing. Taken together, the overall results suggested that alongside many similarities, there are distinct differences in the ways in which different component processes are related to different literacy skills that can be further influenced by the nature of the input language and orthography.

Two studies investigated the degree to which the relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance and reading development is driven by shared phonological processes. Study 1 assessed RAN, phonological awareness, and reading performance in 1010 7- to 10-year-olds. Results showed that RAN deficits occurred in the absence of phonological awareness deficits. These were accompanied by modest reading delays. In structural equation modeling, solutions where RAN was subsumed within a phonological processing factor did not provide a good fit to the data, suggesting that processes outside phonology may drive RAN performance and its association with reading. Study 2 investigated Kail's proposal that speed of processing underlies this relationship. Children with single RAN deficits showed slower speed of processing than did closely matched controls performing normally on RAN. However, regression analysis revealed that RAN made a unique contribution to reading even after accounting for processing speed. Theoretical implications are discussed.

The study examined: (a) the role of phonological, grammatical, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) skills in reading and spelling development; and (b) the component processes of early narrative writing skills. Fifty-seven Turkish-speaking children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2. RAN was the most powerful longitudinal predictor of reading speed and its effect was evident even when previous reading skills were taken into account. Broadly, the phonological and grammatical skills made reliable contributions to spelling performance but their effects were completely mediated by previous spelling skills. Different aspects of the narrative writing skills were related to different processing skills. While handwriting speed predicted writing fluency, spelling accuracy predicted spelling error rate. Vocabulary and working memory were the only reliable longitudinal predictors of the quality of composition content. The overall model, however, failed to explain any reliable variance in the structural quality of the compositions. Likewise, our current understanding of the component processes of early narrative writing skills in consistent orthographies is very limited. Three central processing skills have been identified to underlie the early composition writing skills of children. These are the transcription (e.g., handwriting and spelling), verbal memory (e.g., short term memory and working memory), and text generation (e.g., oral language skills such as grammar and vocabulary) (Berninger, 1999;McCutchen, 2000). However, as the research evidence almost 4 exclusively comes from studies conducted in English, we do not know the relative importance of these processing skills in consistent writing systems.The present study seeks to address these issues and has two primary aims. First, to investigate the relative role of grammatical awareness, phonological awareness, and RAN in reading and spelling; second, to investigate the role of the three central component processes

The Rose Review into the teaching of early reading recommended that the conceptual framework incorporated into the National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching -the Searchlights model of reading and its development -should be replaced by the Simple View of Reading. In this paper, we demonstrate how these two frameworks relate to each other, and show that nothing has been lost in this transformation from Searchlights to Simple View: on the contrary, much has been gained. That nothing has been lost is demonstrated by consideration of the underlying complexity inherent in each of the two dimensions delineated in the Simple View. That much has been gained is demonstrated by the increased understanding of each dimension that follows from careful scientific investigation of each. The better we understand what is involved in each dimension, the better placed we are to unravel and understand the essential, complex and continual interactions between each dimension which underlie skilled reading. This has clear implications for further improving the early teaching of reading.