This study assessed the effects of four types of teaching instruction for Hangul learning in Korean kindergartners. Forty-five four-year-old children participated in a Hangul learning experiment where they were taught 6 new Korean Guljas (Korean written syllable) in each of four conditions--whole Gulja, alphabet letter, CV (consonant + vowel) body…

Language-specific features necessitate certain processes and skills in reading. The visually unmarked between-word boundaries in written Chinese render it critical that readers be able to segment words in the continuous texts. It may pose challenges for second language (L2) readers whose first language (L1) is word-spaced. In light of the lack of…

A substantial body of research has noted morphological priming effects in visual word recognition in deep orthographies, but it is still unclear whether similar effects exist in transparent orthographies. In the present experiment, we investigated the development of morphological decomposition in visual word recognition in the phonologically…

Measures of decoding and oral language have been shown to predict early reading comprehension across a wide variety of languages, though the timeframe and strength of the predictions vary by orthographic depth. This study is the first to examine predictors of early reading in Vietnamese, a transparent orthography of Romanized letters and…

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in…

During a school year, samples of words written by three groups of children of successive ages were collected. Two groups of children were in first and second year of Kindergarten (4 and 5 years of age), when alphabetic rules were not taught in a systematic way. The third group was in first year of Primary School (6 years of age), and was being…

Semitic writing systems such as that used to write Arabic are unique among st alphabetic writing systems in that in Semitic systems short vowels are represented as diacritics on consonant letters, and not represented at Allin text intended for skilled readers. Arabic is unique here in that the letter used to represent a consonant differs in shape…