Background: Learning to read is a complex process that involves phonological and orthographic processing abilities, broader language skills and cognitive processes across all writing systems. Although these components remain common, the pace of acquisition of phonological and orthographic processing and reading abilities differ across writing…

The writing system -- the transparency of orthography in alphabet-based systems and differences between logographic and phonetic-based systems -- can affect the efficiency of inferential word learning when words are introduced visually. It can also shape how people self-evaluate their learning success (we refer to such type of self-evaluation as…

When learning to read, the developing mind is likely to cluster letters into frequency-based chunks. In the current study, the authors investigated the extent to which such chunking takes place among preschoolers (N = 54) by examining the association between sensitivity to subword orthographic regularity and preschooler age. A version of the…

This study addressed two areas of inquiry: 1) the influence of enlisting three underlying cognitive learning processes (CLPs) in alphabet learning, and 2) order effects for letter name and letter sound instruction. Alphabet instruction was designed to enlist Paired Associate Learning (PAL) only, PAL plus Orthographic Learning (OL), or PAL plus…

In this paper, a Chinese character educational system based on Kinect is proposed for guiding beginners to learn the basics of Chinese characters in a more intuitive way. It extracts 19 common components, denoted as alphabets, from Chinese characters. Nineteen postures were designed according to the shapes of these alphabets. Instead of memorizing…

This study examined the effects of a 10 week invented writing program with five-year-old preschoolers (mean age 5.7 years) on their immediate post intervention literacy skills and also the facilitative effects of the intervention on the subsequent learning to read during the first 6 months of schooling. The study included 105 children (54 girls)…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, a study was devised to test the project's materials and procedures. Selected by a pretest, four kindergarten children, with no prior reading instruction, were taught the same reading content using the initial teaching alphabet for a…

As part of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, the second phase of a preliminary study was devised that modified the pretest, the instructional modes and format, the sequence and amount of information presented in the instructional sessions, and the procedures for testing and…

Summarizing the final phase of a two-year project that examined the processes by which children initially approach the reading task, this report presents both general and individual findings derived from the analyses of the children's performance over the course of a year. The first section discusses the following general topics related to the…

Two studies compared children's knowledge about the letters in their name with knowledge of other letters. Findings indicated that Australian first graders and U.S. kindergartners and preschoolers had superior knowledge of letter-name, but not letter-sound, for first letter of their first name. Also, U.S. preschoolers were better at printing the…