Educationally-oriented measures of handwriting fluency--tasks such as written alphabet recall and sentence copying--conflate graphomotor skill and various higher-level abilities. Direct measurement of pen control when forming letters requires analysis of pen-tip velocity associated with the production of sub-letter features that, in a skilled…

Letter names are some of the many preschool accomplishments that are of particular relevance to later academic challenges. However, many children enter school without having fluent letter name knowledge. The current study evaluated the effects of a taped-letter (TL) intervention delivered through PowerPoint on the accuracy of letter identification…

Although most studies in the field of literacy development suggest that writing and reading are two sides of the same coin, very little is known about writing in kindergarten in comparison to the vast number of studies on reading. In this study, we explored the connections between writing and reading using correlation and regression analyses…

This article presents the first meta-analysis on correlations of morphological awareness (MA) with reading-related abilities in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students (k = 14, N = 556). The results showed high mean correlations of MA with all three reading-related abilities: rs = 0.610, 0.712, and 0.669 (all ps < 0.001), respectively, for word…

Sign language is considered as the important communication means among the normal people and the deaf. Therefore, developing communication systems to help those people is an important issue. In this paper, the neutrosophic technique and fuzzy c-means are applied to detect and recognize the alphabet Arabic sign language. The proposed system starts…

It has long been understood that associations can form between items that are paired (Ebbinghaus, 1885), but it is commonly assumed that previously retrieved items are not used when remembering items in serial order. We present a series of experiments that test this assumption, using a serial learning procedure inspired by Ebenholtz (1963). In…

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

Knowing what kinds of patterns are easy for children to recognize early in their kindergarten year, and what kinds are difficult, can be a useful guide for patterning instruction. Hence, the ability of children to recognize complex patterns early in their kindergarten year was assessed in two experiments. One experiment showed that the children…

The orthographic choice (OC) task--requiring individuals to choose the correct spelling between a word and a pseudohomophone foil (e.g., "goat" vs. "gote")--has been used as an outcome measure of orthographic learning and as a predictor of individual differences in word reading development. Some consider the OC task a measure…

We investigated how and when French children in Grades 1-5 acquire orthographic representations for silent letters and double consonants. Linear mixed-effects modeling analyses on the spelling accuracy scores obtained for 2,519 French words were used to test our predictions. As predicted, the presence of a silent letter or double consonant had a…

This study examined whether different cognitive correlates are associated with spelling of different target types, such as phonologically consistent and inconsistent syllables, of Korean Hangul among 94 five-year-old first language (L1) Korean children and 41 foreign language (FL) learners who are Hong Kong Chinese college students. Korean…

The present study examined the strategies used by Greek novice readers in the initial phases of reading acquisition. Fifty (50) children were assessed at four successive testing periods throughout 1st grade of Primary School. Thus, 21 boys (42%) and 29 girls (58%) participated in this study. Their mean age at the beginning of the study was 74.43…

The present study explored whether phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA) and visual attention (VA) independently predict word and pseudoword reading accuracy in native Arabic-speaking children from grades 4 and 5. A total of 141 participants took part in the study, and were divided into two groups of readers with (n = 30) and…