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Serial naming speed and its association with reading ability was examined in a longitudinal investigation. Participants were 68 children aged between 4.0 and 4.5 years when the study began and between 5.0 and 5.5 years when the study ended. Serial naming speed was measured at three equidistant time points over the 12-month period as children progressed from a pre-literate to early-literate stage. Children's responses were digitally recorded to computer to enable analysis of the sound files. During analysis, the articulation time for each word and the length of each pause between the spoken words were measured independently. At the end of the study, children's word-level reading ability was measured. Results suggest that children aged 4.0 to 5.5 years show wide variability in serial naming speed that is predominately attributable to the length of the pauses between the articulated words. There appears to be a developmental association between the duration of the pauses and word-level reading ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phonological awareness and phonological memory have been cited separately as two cognitive skills thought to underpin literacy. Few studies, however, have investigated the relationship between these two skills and their relative contribution to early reading and spelling. The aims of this longitudinal study were to evaluate the developmental relationship between these two phonological processing skills and to consider their relative contributions to early literacy. This paper reports results from the first 12 months of the study, which monitored 80 preliterate children during their first year of formal schooling. The findings discussed here suggest that phonological awareness and phonological memory both make significant yet distinctive contributions to early literacy: while early phonological awareness may predict subsequent single-word reading, early phonological memory appears to play an important part in the development of the decoding strategies needed for later reading. Evidence that a qualitative change in phonological memory takes place during the first year of formal schooling confirms earlier claims that a phonological strategy for spelling may develop before a similar strategy for reading (Frith, 1985; Huxford, 1993). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on a study that assessed pre-school, pre-literate children on a battery of tests designed to provide a profile of pre-literate phonological awareness. Literature on phonemic awareness and literacy; Rationale; Methodology: Results.

Studies the visual sequential memory in two separate controlled experiments which compared the test performances of 13-year-old poor spellers and controls. Methods on how the two experiments were conducted; Findings and discussion of the experiments.

It is often considerably easier to obtain the value of the point biserial correlation coefficient for a given set of data than it is to obtain the biserial correlation coefficient. A table is presented that directly converts any known point biserial coefficient to the biserial coefficient providing the largest proportion of the dichotomous variable is also known. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tables are presented giving the critical values of the Biserial and the Point Biserial correlation coefficients (when the null hypothesis assumes a value of zero for the coefficient) at the 0.05 and the 0.01 levels of significance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]