In this article, the position of the diverging letter effect has been used to investigate the interactions between lexical and sublexical information during reading acquisition. The position of the diverging letter effect refers to the fact that nonwords derived from words by changing a letter are read more quickly when the diverging letter is…

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)

Subjects instructed to circle misspellings while reading prose were less likely to detect misspellings in function than in content words. Misspellings that changed the shape of a word were more likely to be detected. It is not clear whether differences between function and content words are due to familiarity or redundancy. (Author/RD)

Reports a study that examined sixth- and 10th-grade students' ability to generate orthographic and phonetic derivatives for three predominant vowel-alternation patterns characteristic of internal derivational morphology. Results support the hypothesis that a productive knowledge of these patterns in orthography precedes a productive knowledge of…