When reading in a second language, a reader's first language may be involved. For word reading, the question is how and at what level: lexical, pre-lexical, or both. In three experiments, we employed an implicit reading task (color judgment) and an explicit reading task (word naming) to test whether a Chinese meaning equivalent character and its…

Share (1995) proposed "phonological recoding" (the translation of letters into sounds) as a self-teaching mechanism through which readers establish complete lexical representations. More recently, McKague et al. (2008) proposed a similar role for "orthographic recoding", that is, feedback from sounds to letters, in building and…

The visual complexity of orthographies varies across writing systems. Prior research has shown that complexity strongly influences the initial stage of reading development: the perceptual learning of grapheme forms. This study presents a computational simulation that examines the degree to which visual complexity leads to grapheme learning…