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Early Readers in Czech
Author(s) -
Matejcek Zdenek
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
dyslexia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.694
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1099-0909
pISSN - 1076-9242
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0909(199703)3:1<48::aid-dys50>3.0.co;2-s
Subject(s) - czech , spelling , dyslexia , reading (process) , psychology , population , coding (social sciences) , remedial education , consistency (knowledge bases) , linguistics , cognitive psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , mathematics education , philosophy , statistics , demography , mathematics , sociology
The phonetic consistency of the spelling system makes reading in Czech relatively easy. As soon as a Czech child learns to pronounce correctly one letter after another, he can read almost any word and any text. Reading speed is the best individual indicator of reading development. One to two per cent of school children are regarded as dyslexic and remedial provision is planned and available for about 4% of the child population. ‘Early readers’ are defined as those who have learnt to read before 4 years of age. Findings on 76 such children are presented. Four stages of acquisition of reading skill can be distinguished: (i) naming of letters; (ii) discovering letter–sound constant correlation; (iii) latent period of apparently no progress; (iv) synthesizing the sounds and letters into syllables and words (i.e. the processes of coding and decoding). The advance from one stage to another seems to be regular and ordered—extremely accelerated in our ‘early readers’ and extremely retarded in our dyslexics. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.