Developing readers often make anagrammatical errors (e.g. misreading pirates as parties), suggesting they use letter position flexibly during word recognition. However, while it is widely assumed that the occurrence of these errors decreases with increases in reading skill, empirical evidence to support this distinction is lacking. Accordingly, we…

In this classic edition of their ground-breaking work, Usha Goswami and Peter Bryant revisit their influential theory about how phonological skills support the development of literacy. The book describes three causal factors which can account for children's reading and spelling development: (1) pre­school phonological knowledge of rhyme and…

In research on the acquisition of reading, there have been some cross-orthographic comparisons between alphabetic scripts and the hiragana syllabic script. One of the theoretical motives for these comparisons is the hypothesis that phonological awareness is related to the size of the phonological unit mapped by the orthography, with phoneme…

The present study used two letter detection tasks, the classic missing letter effect paradigm and a single word versus familiar word compound version of this paradigm, to study bottom-up and top-down processes involved in reading in normally achieving as compared to low achieving elementary school readers. The research participants were children…