Six data sets are included in this collection: (1)Cross-sectional data for a representative sample of 155 children (aged 5-7 years). Measures include performance on a letter-sound integration priming tasks and a range of measures tapping phonological awareness and reading. (2) A dataset that contain item-level data for the above cross-sectional study. (3) A dataset comparing the performance on a letter-sound integration priming task and a range of phonological awareness and reading measures for a group of dyslexic children and both chronologically age matched and reading age matched control groups (N = 131 total). (4) A dataset that contain item-level data for the above study with children with dyslexia. (5) Longitudinal data for a representative sample of 191 children (aged 4 – 5 years). Measures include performance on a letter-sound integration priming task and a range of measures tapping phonological awareness and reading, taken at 4 time points during the children’s first year in school. (6) Data assessing the performance of a representative sample of 97 children (aged 8 to 10 years) on reading and 6 paired associate learning tasks (phoneme phoneme; visual – phoneme; nonverbal – nonverbal; visual – nonverbal; non-word – nonword; and visual nonword). This grant funded a programme of research investigating the relationship between early reading development and a range of phonological language skills. In particular, it examined the theory that a proximal cause of difficulty in learning to read is a failure to establish automatic associations between speech sounds and letters. 1. A cross-sectional study of 155 children aged 5-7 years established that automatic activation of sounds by letters has already emerged following approximately one year of reading experience. 2. A subsequent longitudinal study of 191 children during their first year at school showed that strong associative links between printed letters and the speech sounds they represent are in evidence as soon as children have learned letter-sound correspondences. It also found that letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN are strong independent predictors of variations in reading. These results corroborate previous research highlighting the important causal role phonological language skills play in learning to read. Moreover, the study found a bi-directional relationship between reading development and both phoneme awareness and non-alphanumeric RAN. This finding suggests that not only is the development of phonemically structured phonological representations critical for learning to read, but that reading experience, in turn, exerts a positive influence on the development of such representations. 3. A study of children with developmental dyslexia (N (dyslexia) = 20) found evidence of equivalent levels of automatic letter-sound integration in children with dyslexia and both typically developing children matched for reading age and those matched for chronological age. 4. A study investigating the relationship between PAL and reading in 97 children aged 8 to 10 years. This study used six different PAL tasks to identify two distinct but correlated types of PAL; those involving auditory-articulatory associations and those involving visual-articulatory associations. Importantly, we showed that auditory-articulatory PAL was the stronger predictor of reading, providing evidence that the relationship between PAL and reading is driven by verbal, rather than visual-verbal, demands.

Quantitative data collection (mixture of computerised and pen and paper assessments measuring learning and language-related attainment). 1:1 testing of children in school environment.