The science of reading has made genuine progress in understanding reading and the teaching of reading, but is the science of reading just the science of reading English? Worldwide, a majority of students learn to read and write in non-European, nonalphabetic orthographies such as abjads (e.g., Arabic), abugidas/alphasyllabaries (e.g., Hindi), or…

In this paper, we survey current evidence on cognitive precursors of reading in different orthographies by reviewing studies with a cross-linguistic research design. Graphic symbol knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming were found to be associated with reading acquisition in all orthographies…

Unlike alphabetic languages, Chinese text marks no word demarcation. Previous research inserted word-demarcating spaces into Chinese text but found inconsistent effects on reading efficiency. To address the potential trade-off effects of the additional length caused by inserted spaces, this study introduces color-and-font formatting as a word…

The current study aimed to explore the effect of first language (L1) orthography on second language (L2) Chinese morphological awareness. One hundred and twenty-nine students (61 L1 English readers and 68 L1 Thai readers) who studied Chinese as a second language participated in this study. They completed four tasks of morphological awareness…

Although phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are confirmed as early predictors of reading in a large number of orthographies, it is as yet unclear whether the predictive patterns are universal or language specific. This was examined in a longitudinal study across Grades 1 and 2 with 1,120 children acquiring one of five…

In this article in this "American Annals of the Deaf" special issue that also includes the present article, Grushkin (EJ1174123) argues that the writing difficulties of many deaf and hard of hearing children result primarily from the orthographic nature of the writing system; he proposes a new system based on features found in signed…

Differences in how writing systems represent language raise important questions about the extent to which the role of linguistic skills such as phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA) in reading is universal. In this meta-analysis, the authors examined the relationship between PA, MA, and reading (accuracy, fluency, and…

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…

The SERIOL model of orthographic analysis proposed mechanisms for converting visual input into a serial encoding of letter order, which involved hemisphere-specific processing at the retinotopic level. As a test of SERIOL predictions, we conducted a consonant trigram-identification experiment, where the trigrams were briefly presented at various…

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of…

In this paper, we argue that second language (L2) reading research, which has been informed by studies involving first language (L1) alphabetic English reading, may be less relevant to L2 readers with non-alphabetic reading backgrounds, such as Chinese readers with an L1 logographic (Chinese character) learning history. We provide both…

This dissertation is about Chinese loanwords. It is mainly divided into two parts. Part I is a general discussion about loanwords in Chinese; Chapter I and II belong to the first part. Part II is a discussion about the analyses of Mandarin loanwords originating from English. Chapter III, IV, and V are all related to the second part. Chapter VI is…

The goal of research on how letter identity and order are perceived during reading is often characterized as one of "cracking the orthographic code." Here, we suggest that there is no orthographic code to crack: Words are perceived and represented as sequences of letters, just as in a dictionary. Indeed, words are perceived and represented in…

Orthographic knowledge in Chinese was hypothesized to affect elementary Chinese text comprehension (four essays) by 80 twelve-year-old ethnic alphasyllabary language users compared with 74 native Chinese speakers at similar reading level. This was tested with two rapid automatized naming tasks; two working memory tasks; three orthographic…