Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Introduces the articles in this special issue. Reviews research on linguistic processes in reading across orthographies. Concludes that these articles contribute to the understanding of factors affecting development of efficient reading in first and second languages; they also help to ameliorate the relative silence in the reading literature about…

Reviews recent research that investigates second language performance from the perspective of sentence processing (on-line comprehension studies) and word recognition. Concentrates on describing methods that employ reaction time measures as correlates of processing difficulty or knowledge representation. (Author/VWL)

In some psycholinguistic models, processing is characterized by generation of multiple outputs using information from higher processing levels. Such models are considered autonomous in word recognition domain but interactive in sentence processing domain. This confusion arises not from differences between lexical and syntactic processing, but from…

Presents an abbreviated version of a large scale investigation of second language attrition covering 50 years. Results yield benefits to teachers and students of foreign languages by leading to an understanding of how various procedures of acquisition affect the rate of loss and ultimately minimize the potential for later attrition. (SL)

The domain of second language reading is a rich source for insights into bilingual cognitive processing. Most cross-language transfer research has been carried out on acquisition and production of second-language (L2) structures. Relatively little work has been done on cross-language transfer in bilingual reading. An overreliance on top-down,…

In the hope of filling in a missing link for experimental psychologists' research on reading, this paper provides a general review of research on the issue of orthography and its relation to reading. The traditional classification of logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic modes are examined to see how much orthographic variations affect the…

Three recent studies have focused upon prereading children's concepts of written language, what they think words are, and how they understand the concept of a word. These explorations of young children's early attempts to understand and produce writing have important implications for the preschool and primary classroom. R. D. Morris found that…

Cloze procedure, a testing method which systematically deletes words in written prose and then measures the accuracy of the information is reviewed from a historical viewpoint. Redundancy is placed in a verbal context and can be noted on three separate levels of language: (1) surface syntactic structure; (2) deep syntactic structure; and (3)…

The emphasis of this book is on theory and research in spelling. It also includes practical information for the classroom teacher by noting teaching principles and generalizations that can guide spelling instruction. The book contains 12 chapters dealing with the following topics: (1) developmental concepts of word; (2) what a word is; (3)…

Four approaches to the teaching of second language (L2) reading are described (grammar-translation, comprehension questions/exercises, skills and strategies, and extensive reading) and their status in the reading classroom is examined, and important issues in L2 reading are then discussed, including word recognition, affective and sociocultural…