The aim of this paper is to support and foster the research on the Croatian Glagolitism within the digital humanities framework, by identifying and examining the features of a virtual research environment that would enhance the possibilities of an interdisciplinary collaborative research of Croatian Glagolitism in a digital environment, supported…

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…

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

Recent studies have examined Indigenous and mestizo communities that engage in social practices of transculturated, Amerindian and translingual literacies, often to resist efforts by powerful groups to oppress them. By drawing on data from studies conducted in Peru and the United States, we trace the trajectories of Amerindian and translingual…

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of…

The current study investigated whether Russian--English bilinguals activate knowledge of Russian when reading English sentences. Russian and English share only a few letters, but there are some interlingual homographs (e.g., POT, which means "mouth" in Russian). Critical sentences were written such that the Russian meaning of the…

This article reviews research on working memory (WM) and its use in second language (L2) acquisition research. Recent developments in the model and issues surrounding the operationalization of the construct itself are presented, followed by a discussion of various methods of measuring WM. These methods include word and digit span tasks, reading,…

Many adolescent and adult L2 learners in language classrooms, both in the US and other countries, have little or no alphabetic print literacy. Language teachers may turn to SLA research for assistance, yet almost all research on oral SLA has focused on educated, highly-literate learners (Bigelow & Tarone 2004; Tarone, Bigelow & Hansen 2009). The…

Reports on six experiments examining the relationships between language processing in the Roman v the Cyrillic alphabets, both of which are used to read Serbo-Croatian. Notes some of the problems involved in operating with two separately used symbol systems. (Author/RL)

Three lexical decision experiments show that Serbo-Croatian letter-strings are ascribed two phonological readings simultaneously. This phonologic bivalence may impede lexical decision making if the letter-string has a lexical entry in one of the alphabets (Roman and Cyrillic). (RL)

A practical orthography is presented for Kuuk Thaayorre, which is spoken by over 300 Aborigines in Australia. The phonemes in Thaayorre and the way they are symbolized in normal writing practice are presented. Frequent occurrence of six conventional digraphs for some Thaayorre consonants has given rise to complementary orthography as an initial…

This paper examines the prominence of written English on shop signs in Japan. Based on data from a larger empirical study into multilingual signs in Tokyo, the most common ways of using English and the roman alphabet on Japanese shops signs are identified. It is argued that the ambivalent nature of English loan words plays a key role in the ever…

Examines societies in which varieties and degrees of literacy are possible or ordinary, such as Japan and Korea. Finds that these societies have separate but functionally interrelated writing systems, used for communicatively disparate purposes, differential mastery of which, consequently, has social and economic repercussions. Finds that…

Three masked-prime naming experiments were conducted to examine the impact of morpheme boundaries on letter transposition confusability effects. In Experiment 1, the priming effects of primes containing letter transpositions within (sunhsine) and transpositions across (susnhine) the constituents of compound words were compared with correctly…

Preschool children's early understanding of letters was explored. Five tasks were designed to elicit information about children's conceptualizations of letters in their own names, and the children's responses were analyzed descriptively to determine general patterns. (Author/VWL)