Sarah Critten

The Open University (UK)

IntroductionRepresentations activated during handwriting production code information on morphological structure and reflect decomposition of the root and suffix. Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) have significant difficulties in spelling morphologically complex words, but previous research has not sought evidence for a morphologic...

Art workshops have been looked at before in terms of impact for people with dementia but never those conducted remotely during a pandemic lockdown. Two artists, working with local museums, provided Art workshops for people with dementia and their caregivers. Due to the first Covid 19 lockdown in the UK, the artists set up a weekly delivery service...

Prosodic sensitivity—the rhythmic patterning of speech—is theorized to influence reading and spelling via vocabulary knowledge, phonological, and morphological awareness. Previously this conceptual model has been evidenced with children who can already read, however as orthographic knowledge can be used to complete phonological awareness tasks it c...

In this paper we discuss the need to find suitable methods for eliciting the voices of children with communication, speech and language needs in order to gain insights into their experiences of school, especially in the context of renewed legal requirements to involve children in decisions about their education. A critical review of existing method...

This article reports the development and evaluation of a toolkit‐based approach to eliciting children's experiences of educational support, where the children in question experience speech and communication needs. The ‘Your Voice Your Choice’ approach was evaluated using a cross‐case analysis methodology, which represents a novel approach to critic...

Recent UK research suggests that around 10% of children show significant language difficulties at school entry. While some of these children have other developmental difficulties such as autism or Down syndrome, around 7% of the population have unexplained language difficulties or developmental language disorder (DLD). The language of children with...

This paper employs a mixed methods multiple case study approach to offer an insight into strategy-use in the teaching and learning of spelling within an Australian primary school context. Eight low-achieving spellers and eight high-achieving spellers aged between eight and 12 years were selected following completion of a normed dictation task compr...

Children with language difficulties very commonly have additional literacy difficulties (MacArthur et al., 2000). However, most of the research investigating this comorbidity has focused on phonological awareness. The current project is a systematic investigation of the morphological skills of language impaired children, with and without additional...

This study was designed to examine the independent contribution of prosodic sensitivity—the rhythmic patterning of speech—to word reading and spelling in a sample of early readers. Ninety-three English-speaking children aged 5–6 years old (M = 69.28 months, SD = 3.67) were assessed for their prosodic sensitivity, vocabulary knowledge, phonological,...

While traditional models of spelling describe the skills and knowledge required for development, the underlying cognitive processes that drive spelling success are often overlooked. Ninety-six English-speaking children, aged 5-to-7 years, completed two tasks which provided a direct measure of their spelling recognition and spelling production, resp...

Dual-route theory, which emphasizes the importance of lexical and nonlexical routes, makes specific predictions about the kinds of strategies that young students might adopt when attempting to correctly read and spell regular and irregular words. The current study tests these predictions by assessing strategy choice on regular, irregular, and nonwo...

Within the literature, there has been growing attention to the relationship between the literacy disorder dyslexia and the language disorder specific language impairment (SLI). Although theoretically individuals with dyslexia should only have difficulties with their reading and SLI with only there language, it has been found that this is not always...

A growing literature has demonstrated that prosodic sensitivity is related to early literacy development; however, the precise nature of this relationship remains unclear. It has been speculated in recent theoretical models that the observed relationship between prosodic sensitivity and early literacy might be partially mediated by children's vocab...

Abstract The assessment of children’s writing raises technical and practical challenges. In this paper we examine the potential use of a curriculum based measure for writing (CBM-W) to assess the written texts of pupils in Key Stage 2 (M age 107 months, range 88 to 125). Two hundred and thirty six Year three, five and six pupils completed a standar...

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) are known to have difficulties with spelling but the factors that underpin these difficulties, are a matter of debate. The present study investigated the impact of oral language and literacy on the bound morpheme spelling abilities of children with SLI. Thirty-three children with SLI (9–10 years) and...

Conceptualizing the underlying representations and cognitive mechanisms of children's spelling development is a key challenge for literacy researchers. Using the Representational Redescription model (Karmiloff-Smith), Critten, Pine and Steffler (2007) demonstrated that the acquisition of phonological and morphological knowledge may be underpinned b...

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children (n = 33) and a group of younger, language...

Inflectional versus Derivational words: • Results for correct words and morphemes remained the same as the CA group scored the highest in each morpheme word set while the SLI and LA groups were still comparable. • However analyses of errors showed important differences across morpheme type. • Inflectional morphemes: SLI = CA for all categories, alt...

Two experiments explored children's spelling development in the context of the representational-redescription (RR) model (A. Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Fifty-one 5- to 7-year-old children (Experiment 1) and 44 5- to 6-year-old children (Experiment 2) were assessed, using spelling production and recognition tasks, for phonological to morphological spel...