In this study, we investigated effects of morphological processing on handwriting production in beginning writers of German. Children from Grades 3 and 4 were asked to copy words from a computer screen onto a pen tablet, while we recorded their handwriting with high spatiotemporal resolution. Words involved a syllable-congruent visual disruption…

Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a…

Purpose: This study examined the performance of Gulf Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) on a Gulf Arabic nonword repetition (GA-NWR) test and compared it to their age- and language-matched groups. We also investigated the role of syllable length, wordlikeness, and phonological complexity in light of NWR theories.…

This study explores whether activation and inhibition word processes contribute to the characteristic speed deficits found in transparent orthographies (Wimmer, "Appl Psycholinguist" 14:1-33, 1993). A second and fourth grade sample of normal school readers and dyslexic school readers participated in a lexical decision task. Words were…

The role of letters and syllables in typical and dysfluent second grade reading in Finnish, a transparent orthography, was assessed by lexical decision and naming tasks. Typical readers did not show reliable word length effects in lexical decision, suggesting establishment of parallel letter processing. However, there were small effects of word…

This research investigated the word reading performance of Persian speaking dyslexic children through the use of a reading test. For this reason, 15 Persian elementary developmental dyslexic student with the mean age of 9.6, (SD= 1.5) and 15 Persian unimpaired elementary student with the mean age of 9.6 (SD= 1.4) were compared. The performance of…

The current study investigated the relationship between the working memory tasks and the phonological processes of Arab dyslexics in the primary stage in the State of Kuwait. The researchers used the descriptive research design. The sample of the study consists of 500 pupils (250 males and 250 females), their ages range from (9.05 ± 0.49) years…

This study examined the theoretical controversy on the impact of syllables and bigrams in handwriting production. French children and adults wrote words on a digitizer so that we could collect data on the local, online processing of handwriting production. The words differed in the position of the lowest frequency bigram. In one condition, it…

The present study addressed the issue of syllable activation during visual recognition of French words. In addition, it was investigated whether word orthographic information underlies syllable effects. To do so, words were selected according to the frequency of their first syllable (high versus low) and the frequency of the orthographic…

French children program the words they write syllable by syllable. We examined whether the syllable the children use to segment words is determined phonologically (i.e., is derived from speech production processes) or orthographically. Third, 4th and 5th graders wrote on a digitiser words that were mono-syllables phonologically (e.g.…

This study investigates the syllable's role in the normal reading acquisition of French children at three grade levels (1st, 3rd, and 5th), using a modified version of Cole, Magnan, and Grainger's (1999) paradigm. We focused on the effects of syllable frequency and word frequency. The results suggest that from the first to third years of reading…

The study investigated reading in four African languages that use either syllabic Ge'ez (Tigrinya and Tigre languages) or alphabetic Latin scripts (Kunama and Saho). A sample of 385 Grade 1 children were given letter knowledge, word reading, and spelling tasks to investigate differences at the script and language levels. Results showed that the…

Dutch bisyllabic words containing open and closed syllables are particularly difficult to spell for children. What kind of support in spelling exercises improves the spelling of these words the most? Two extensions of a commonly used dictation exercise were tested: less skilled spellers in grade 2 (n = 50; 7 years and 10 months) either received…

We reported three experiments investigating subsyllabic unit preference in young Chinese children. In Experiment 1, a Chinese sound similarity judgment task was designed in which 48 pair of stimuli varied in terms of shared subsyllabic units (i.e., vowel, body, rime, onset-coda). Grade 1 Chinese-speaking monolingual children judged pairs with…