A contemporary question is whether the script we read in affects our cognition, termed the script relativity hypothesis (Pae in: Script effects as the hidden drive of the mind, cognition, and culture, Springer, Berlin, 2020). The aim of this review is to examine variation in spatial layout (interword spaces and linear-nonlinear configuration) and…

This study analyses the impact of certain cognitive processes on the writing of words in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first and second years of Primary Education. One hundred twenty-eight schoolchildren from Ecuador and 109 from Algiers participated in this study. All the participants were aged…

This study analyzes the impact of certain cognitive processes on word and pseudoword reading in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first year of Primary Education. The study was conducted with a group of 113 pupils from Algeria and another group of 128 pupils from Ecuador, from a middle-class background…

We investigated the role of linguistic and cognitive processes in reading precocity from kindergarten to grade 2. A sample of 33 precocious readers was identified that did not differ on age, gender, and parental education to a control group of 259 typical readers. The effects of verbal ability were also controlled. All children were administered a…

According to some views of cognitive growth, the development of working memory capacity can account for increases in the complexity of cognition. It has been difficult to ascertain, though, that there actually is developmental growth in capacity that cannot be attributed to other developing factors. Here we assess the role of item familiarity. We…

Learning the structure of event sequences is a ubiquitous problem in cognition and particularly in language. One possible solution is to learn a probabilistic generative model of sequences that allows making predictions about upcoming events. Though appealing from a neurobiological standpoint, this approach is typically not pursued in…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

Printed words that have a transposed-letter (TL) neighbor (e.g., angel has the TL neighbor angle) have been shown to be more difficult to process, in a range of paradigms, than words that do not have a TL neighbor. However, eye movement evidence suggests that this processing difficulty may occur on only a subset of trials. To investigate this…

How can it be explained that early literacy and numeracy share variance? We specifically tested whether the correlation between four early literacy skills (rhyming, letter knowledge, emergent writing, and orthographic knowledge) and simple sums (non-symbolic and story condition) reduced after taking into account preschool attention control,…

A study of the constraints on word recognition errors (miscues) readers make when reading a passage printed conventionally and one printed in a regularized orthography such as the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.) was undertaken with 50 second-grade students divided equally between children taught according to the orthographies being studied. The…

It has been hypothesized that letters in orthographic strings (those that follow the rules of English) are more accurately identified than letters in nonorthographic strings because confusions about the positions of letters are more likely in nonorthographic strings. This hypothesis was tested by giving 16 college students a set of targets, one of…

Reports on experiments designed to explore the way the processing unit depends on the information in the component letters and the information contained in their arrangements in a familiar letter string. Hypotheses were tested by degrading the quality of individual letters and by spacing the letters irregularly. (CLK)

Hypotheses about the processes involved in word recognition are reviewed and assessed through four experiments. Overall results were compatible with criterion bias models. A version of this model attributes the advantage of words (over pseudowords and nonwords) to interfacilitation among single letter and lexical units in memory. (Author/RD)

A study assessed the role of orthographic structure in college students' perceptual recognition and judgment of letter strings. Lexical status, word frequency, bigram frequency, log bigram frequency, and regularity of letter sequencing were orthogonally varied across a series of experiments. Six-letter words and their anagrams were used as test…

Examined effects of orthographic context on the letter recognition skills of dyslexic children, comparing their performance to that of adults and of chronological and reading age-matched groups. Results showed that the two matched groups showed strong word superiority effect (WSE) for words and pseudowords over nonwords. Dyslexic readers did not…