This paper presents a study of 88 British 10-12-year-old children's knowledge of text message (SMS) abbreviations ('textisms') and how it relates to their school literacy attainment. As a measure of textism knowledge, the children were asked to compose text messages they might write if they were in each of a set of scenarios. Their text messages were coded for types of text abbreviations (textisms) used, and the ratio of textisms to total words was calculated to indicate density of textism use. The children also completed a short questionnaire about their mobile phone use. The ratio of textisms to total words used was positively associated with word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness measures. Moreover, the children's textism use predicted word reading ability after controlling for individual differences in age, short-term memory, vocabulary, phonological awareness and how long they had owned a mobile phone. The nature of the contribution that textism knowledge makes to children's word reading attainment is discussed in terms of the notion of increased exposure to print, and Crystal's (2006a) notion of ludic language use.

This paper reports on two studies which investigated the relationship between children's texting behaviour, their knowledge of text abbreviations and their school attainment in written language skills. In Study One, 11-12-year-old children provided information on their texting behaviour. They were also asked to translate a standard English sentence into a text message and vice versa. The children's standardised verbal and nonverbal reasoning scores were also obtained. Children who used their mobiles to send three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores than children who sent none. However, the children who, when asked to write a text message, showed greater use of text abbreviations ('textisms') tended to have better performance on a measure of verbal reasoning ability, which is highly associated with Key Stage 2 (KS2) and 3 English scores. In Study Two, children's performance on writing measures was examined more specifically. Ten to eleven-year-old children were asked to complete another English to text message translation exercise. Spelling proficiency was also assessed, and KS2 Writing scores were obtained. Positive correlations between spelling ability and performance on the translation exercise were found, and group-based comparisons based on the children's writing scores also showed that good writing attainment was associated with greater use of textisms, although the direction of this association is nor clear. Overall, these findings suggest that children's knowledge of textisms is not associated with poor written language outcomes for children in this age range.

Recent research indicates that the rhythmic properties of speech may indicate to the infant listener where word boundaries are most likely to occur. However, rhythmic awareness is not included in present discussions of phonological awareness. It is suggested that skills which develop in early infancy to facilitate speech perception (i.e. awareness of rhythm) may have an impact upon later phonological development and literacy. This paper outlines a cross-sectional study, designed to examine whether poor readers do show a specific insensitivity to rhythm in speech, and whether they also exhibit signs of inefficient speech perception. Thirty primary school children identified as poor readers were matched for age and gender, and for reading age and gender with two groups of children reading at a level comparable with their chronological age ('normal' readers) ( N = 90). All children completed a battery of tasks, including an * Requests for reprints.

This paper reports two studies of young English-speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words, including words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed. The children were significantly worse at identifying words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed than words that were mispronounced in other ways. The second study was a cross-sectional comparison of 31 5, 6 and 7-year-old children's performance on the metrical stress reversal condition of the mispronunciation task. Measures of the children's written language skills and phonological awareness were also taken. The 7-year-old children outperformed the 5-year-olds on the metrical stress task. Performance on this measure was associated with most of the measures of phonological awareness and literacy, and was associated with rhyme awareness and spelling ability after age had been taken into account. Moreover, metrical stress sensitivity could account for variance in spelling ability after phonological awareness had been taken into account, and after vocabulary had been taken into account. This suggests that stress sensitivity may influence spelling development in a way that is independent of its contribution to phonological representations.

There is a growing literature demonstrating that speech rhythm sensitivity is related to children's reading development, independent of phonological awareness. However, the precise nature of this relationship is less well understood, and further research is warranted to investigate whether speech rhythm sensitivity predicts the different components of reading over time. In this 1-year longitudinal study, 69 five-to 8-year-old English-speaking children completed a speech rhythm assessment at Time 1 along with other cognitive assessments and then completed a variety of reading assessments at Time 2 (1 year later). A series of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that after controlling for individual differences in age, vocabulary, and phonological awareness, speech rhythm sensitivity was able to predict unique variance in word reading and the phrasing component of the reading fluency measure 1 year later. The findings emphasize the contribution of speech rhythm sensitivity in children's reading development, and the authors argue that speech rhythm sensitivity should now be included in current models of children's reading development.Keywords: speech rhythm, prosody, reading, phonological awarenessIt is now widely accepted that successful reading development is characterized by more complete phonological representations of words in the mental lexicon, and phonological processing deficits are consistently witnessed in children with reading difficulties (Vellutino & Fletcher, 2005). Phonological deficits are often accompanied by speech perception deficits (McBride-Chang, 1995), which may compromise the acquisition of phonological codes, interfere with the processing of oral language, and make it more difficult to segment the speech stream into interpretable units such as phonemes and syllables. This is problematic, given that segmental awareness is important for decoding and has been linked to successful reading development (Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Taylor, 1998).There are two types of phonology: Segmental phonology is primarily concerned with separable sound segments in speech, such as phonemes, whereas suprasegmental phonology (prosodic features such as stress, intonation, and timing) relates to overarching patterns or elements of the speech stream. According to Kitzen (2001, p. 42), deficits in speech perception might lead to underspecified representations of both phonemic (segmental) and prosodic (suprasegmental) phonological information, which might result in an underdeveloped system for mapping orthographic information onto phonological representations. However, as Kitzen noted, although a great deal of research has investigated the role of segmental phonology in children's reading development, the role of suprasegmental phonology is less well understood, and it is speculated that sensitivity to both phonemic and prosodic word structure is necessary for reading proficiency. A literature is now emerging to investigate the role of speech rhythm in reading, and this has led to the development of theoretical ...