Letter knowledge and word identification are key skills for reading and spelling. Letter knowledge facilitates the application of sublexical letter-sound mappings to decode words. With reading experience, word identification becomes a key lexical skill to support decoding. In transparent orthographies, however, letter knowledge might be an…

Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed that accented vowels seem to be processed as separate units. Here we examined whether this phenomenon is universal or language-specific. We chose Spanish…

Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically…

Phonological interference during written-word meaning judgments occurs in both Chinese and English, suggesting that word-level phonological activation is universal rather than dependent on the sublexical structures that vary with writing systems. To accommodate this universality, we distinguish two sources of phonological congruence between a…

This exploratory study aimed at developing a dyslexia assessment tool in the Amharic language and to collect initial reliability and validity data on the tool designed to identify dyslexia in Grade 3. The developed battery consists of 10 tests. Data were collected from 121 Amharic-speaking children, aged 9-12 years. Evidence of construct validity…

Three experiments using a spelling error detection task investigated the extent to which morphemes and pseudomorphemes affect word processing. We compared the processing of transparent compound words (e.g., doorbell), pseudocompound words (e.g., carpet), and matched control words (e.g., tomato). In half of the compound and pseudocompound words,…

"Tender Shoots" compared two book-reading and conversation approaches for parents and preschoolers to an activity-based control group. The "Rich Reading and Reminiscing" (RRR) condition taught parents to converse about the storyline; the "Strengthening Sound Sensitivity" (SSS) condition taught parents to converse…

In the quest to unveil the nature of the orthographic code, a useful strategy is to examine the transposed-letter effect (e.g., JUGDE is more confusable with its base word, JUDGE, than the replacement-letter nonword JUPTE). A leading explanation of this phenomenon, which is in line with models of visual attention, is that there is perceptual…

This study explored what kinds of phonological strategies are used by children and how they scaffold each other while they solve tasks in a digital literacy game. The theoretical basis of this study lies in Vygotsky's thoughts on the role of social interaction in learning and in the concept of peer scaffolding. The data included eight videotaped…

Masked transposed-letter (TL) priming effects have been used to index letter position processing over the course of reading development. Whereas some studies have reported an increase in TL priming over development, others have reported a decrease. These findings have led to the development of 2 somewhat contradictory accounts of letter position…

The Malay language writing system is alphabetic and orthographically transparent. This study aimed to determine whether phonological processing skills predict Malay word-level literacy acquisition in Chinese children from a national-type Chinese primary school in Malaysia. A correlational study among 113 Year 1 Chinese children who are non-native…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…

We used a typing task to measure the written production of compounds, pseudocompounds, and monomorphemic words on a letter-by-letter basis to determine whether written production (as measured by interletter typing speed) was affected by morphemic structure and semantic transparency of the constituents. Semantic transparency was analyzed using a…

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

This study explores the time-course of word processing by grammatical class (verbs vs. nouns) and meaning (action vs. non-action) by means of an ERP experiment. The morphology of Spanish words allows for a noun (e.g., "bail"-e [a dance]) or a verb (e.g., "bail"-ar [to dance]) to be formed by simply changing the suffix attached…