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…

This study investigated how experience with a first language (L1) writing system affects the development of the second language (L2) word recognition subskills and how L2 linguistic knowledge constrains such L1 impacts. In this study, word recognition is conceptualized as a complex construct that entails multiple subskills necessary for…

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…

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…

This paper investigates whether or not lexical stress is used for lexical access in Spanish. A lexical decision task and a masking priming procedure were used to compare correctly-versus-incorrectly stressed words (e.g., "tecla-TECLA vs. tecla-TECLA"). SOA (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony) was manipulated at 33, 66, 100, and 143 ms. The results showed…

The Korean alphabetic script ("Hangul") depicts alphabetic characters in syllable blocks. The present experiments investigate whether, as a consequence of this printing convention, the syllable has a special processing status in naming printed Korean stimuli, independent of lexical and subsyllabic sources of information. In the first experiment it…