The visual system is tuned by its inputs. The behavior of reading offers a unique way to examine tuning for visual representations (letters) because readers have massive experience recognizing letters in a systematic context (reading). One aspect of reading is that letters are highly crowded within words, which severely limits their…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

This dissertation provides evidence that reading is best explained as rational gathering of visual information to identify words efficiently. Although empirical evidence from human reading research suggests a close link between eye movements and cognitive process, it is not clear how readers decide when and where to move their eyes as a function…

Learning to read is an important milestone in children's development. Factors in the home environment is been linked to the behavioral and neural correlates of reading, but further work is needed to unpack the underlying mechanisms. The home literacy environment (HLE) plays a role in children's reading and language development, while parental…

This study analyzes the relationship between phonemic proficiency and orthographic learning in first and second-grade students. It is established in the empirical literature that phonemic skills play a crucial role in word-level reading. What is not thoroughly understood is why some children learn and remember words more efficiently than others.…

Prelingually and profoundly deaf individuals learn to read without complete access to the sounds of language. Nevertheless, many become proficient readers, and the neurocognitive underpinnings of deaf readers' processes differ from those of hearing readers, particularly in orthographic processing. In English, morphological structure is relatively…

This dissertation investigates the impact of cross-modal binding on word reading skills among English Language Learners (ELLs). Using Baddeley's updated working memory model, which includes the Episodic Buffer, this study examines how the ability to bind visual and phonological information in memory influences the reading development of ELL…

Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

Teaching young children to read is one of the most important aspects of education. There is a vast body of research examining the neuroscientific processes at work in learning to read, the many components of literacy, and the best instructional methods to support literacy. The purpose of this study was to collect perceptual data from teachers…

The purpose of this meta-synthesis is to formulate a hypothesis concerning the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition for typically developed Arabic readers. I propose that the importance of diacritical marks in Arabic word recognition varies as a function of grade level, stimuli frequency, and text affiliation. Stimuli…

Beginning readers and struggling readers need explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics (Adams, 2008; Ehri,1992, 1998; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, & Yaghoub-Zadeh, 2001; Gaskins et al., 1997; Moats, 2004; Morris, 2015; National Reading Panel, 2000; Reutzel, 2015). Ehri and McCormick's (2008) phases of word learning…

The attainment of basic early literacy skills at an early age is one way to ensure children become proficient readers as adults. Word recognition is an important basic early literacy skill that is related to reading fluency and overall reading competency. Incremental rehearsal (IR) is a flashcard technique that has produced strong outcomes for a…

Concern over worldwide literacy rates prompted the United Nations to establish the UN Literacy Decade (2003-2012) with one area of focus being to provide support to schools to develop effective literacy programs (UNESCO, 2005). This study addressed the area of providing support to schools to develop effective literacy programs by exploring the…

Current models of normal reading behavior emphasize not only the recognition and processing of the word being fixated (n) but also processing of the upcoming parafoveal word (n + 1). Gaze contingent displays employing the boundary paradigm often mask words in order to understand how much and what type of processing is completed on the parafoveal…

The purpose of this study was to compare the variety, complexity, and frequency of reading behaviors of three groups of first grade students--students who discontinued from Reading Recovery (D-RR), students who did not discontinue from Reading Recovery (ND-RR), and students who never needed Reading Recovery (A-NRR). Students were asked to read…