A dearth of research has investigated the language preference of bilingual childhood populations and its subsequent relationship to reading skills. The current study evaluated how a sequential bilingual student's choice of language, in a particular environmental context, predicted reading ability in English and Spanish. The participants were Latino children ranging in age from 7 years, 5 months, to 11 years, 6 months, with 43% born in the United States. Results showed a relationship between a child's higher English language preference for media and for communication with others outside the family and better reading skills in English. Language preference differences predicted reading abilities better for English than for Spanish. Results suggested that sequential bilingual children's language preference may be a useful marker of English language (second language [L2]) facility and use that is related to their reading proficiency or influences the development of English reading skills in such bilingual children in the United States. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.The number of students who speak other languages than English is vastly increasing in today's U.S. schools. Although much is known about what influences monolingual English children's ability to read, much less is known about what factors influence bilingual children's early reading development, particularly when a major portion of the reading instruction is in English. Because the largest bilingual school age population in the United States are those children who speak Spanish and are being schooled in English, understanding predictors of English reading development in this population is of growing importance.Spanish is considered to have transparent or shallow orthography (i.e., written language) that has a consistent mapping between its phonemes and graphemes. There is only one pronunciation for consonants and one grapheme-phoneme association for vowels in the Spanish language (Gottardo, 2002). In addition, differences exist within types of orthographies. Goswami, Gombert, and Fraca de Barrera (1998) noted that the most efficient strategy for children learning to read a very transparent orthography is initially to rely on letter-by-letter decoding. Although reading in this manner means that longer words are read at a slower pace, the consistency of the relationship between the graphemes and phonemes makes this initial method accurate on a regular basis and leads to fluent approaches.When the transparency of the language is more opaque, such as in French and English, children are confronted with variable or multiple orthographic-phonological relationships and are consequently less accurate at reading pseudowords or new words when they are unfamiliar. Goswami and associates (1998) noted that children who speak both English and French thus seem to cope with the ambiguity of the spelling-sound relationships by coding orthographic-phonological relations in terms of large spelling patterns, such as rimes.Researchers have also noted that phonological awareness ...

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between handedness, reading skills, and reading-related cognitive processes. Although lateralised differences in brain functioning are well known, research regarding handedness, specific reading skills, and reading-related cognitive processes is ambiguous at best because handedness is often measured as a dichotomous variable rather than a continuous variable. This methodological difference contributes to the diverse research findings, therefore the present investigation addressed these methodological limitations. A large normative sample of up to 1383 participants who ranged in age from 4 to 80 completed the Woodcock Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised (Woodcock & Johnson, 1989a, 1989b) or the Woodcock Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Third Edition (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) in combination with the Dean Woodcock Sensory Motor Battery (Dean & Woodcock, 2003) lateral preference scale, a continuous measure of handedness. Polynomial multiple regression analyses indicated curvilinear relationships between handedness and reading skills, along with handedness and auditory working memory. Individuals towards the extremes of the handedness continuum performed less well on the reading-related tasks. Therefore, just knowing a general classification of right, left, or mixed handed will not provide significant knowledge regarding lateralisation or potential cognitive and academic consequences but rather knowledge of an individual's hand preference on a continuum may well be useful for evaluative purposes.