While the importance of reading development for understanding Chinese literacy acquisition and impairment is well documented, what underlies Chinese spelling development is not well understood. Although some spelling development theories have been proposed and have provided rich and detailed descriptions of the processes and skills involved in…

Chinese coordinative compound words are common and unique in inter-character semantic and orthographic relationships. This study explored the inter-character orthographic similarity effects on the recognition of transparent two-morpheme coordinative compound words. Seventy-two native Chinese readers participated in a lexical decision task. The…

This article reports two experiments in which the artificial orthography paradigm was used to investigate the mechanisms underlying learning to read. In each experiment, participants were taught the meanings and pronunications of words written in an unfamiliar orthography, and the statistical structure of the mapping between written and spoken…

Because a large number of Chinese characters are commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese, Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it more challenging to learn Japanese functional expressions than to learn other Japanese vocabulary. To address this challenge, we have developed "Jastudy," a…

Knowing how to provide effective literacy instruction is important for all educators, but it is critically important for urban educators. This article is built on the assumption that deepening urban educators' understanding of the reading process will better equip them to facilitate students' reading development, and to diagnose and intervene if…

Previous studies have suggested that word processing in English as a second language (L2) is affected by first language (L1) orthographic features. However, little is known about what affects L2 Chinese character processing in adult Chinese learners with different L1 orthographies such as Japanese, Korean, and English. With a picture-character…

Most sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters) are phonograms (phonetic compounds). A phonogram is composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, with the former usually implying the meaning of the phonogram, and the latter providing cues to its pronunciation. This study focused on the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals which are…

Learning to read in any language requires learning to map among print, sound and meaning. Writing systems differ in a number of factors that influence both the ease and the rate with which reading skill can be acquired, as well as the eventual division of labor between phonological and semantic processes. Further, developmental reading disability…

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…

We describe a multiple-route model of reading development in which coarse-grained orthographic processing plays a key role in optimizing access to semantics via whole-word orthographic representations. This forms part of the direct orthographic route that gradually replaces phonological recoding during the initial phases of reading acquisition.…

Recent studies have found that masked word primes that are orthographic neighbors of the target inhibit lexical decision latencies (Davis & Lupker, 2006; Nakayama, Sears, & Lupker, 2008), consistent with the predictions of lexical competition models of visual word identification (e.g., Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). In contrast, using the…

Are words read visually (by means of a direct mapping from orthography to semantics) or phonologically (by mapping from orthography to phonology to semantics)? The authors addressed this long-standing debate by examining how a large-scale computational model based on connectionist principles would solve the problem and comparing the model's…

Purpose: This study addressed the effects of 3 different paradigms for scoring orthographic transcriptions of dysarthric speech on intelligibility scores. The study also examined whether there were differences in transcription accuracy among words from different linguistic classes. Method: Speech samples were collected from 12 speakers with…

Begins by discussing a number of problems in applying a levels-of-processing approach to memory as proposed in the late 1960s and then revised in 1972 by Craik and Lockhart, suggests that some of the basic assumptions are false, and argues for information-processing models devised to study working memory and reading, which aim to explore the…

Two experiments are presented to clarify the relationships among different information codes available to a fluent reader and the utilization of syntactic and semantic knowledge to facilitate word identification. Use of context is measured with a word boundary task on passages with either coherent or random organization. Orthographic pattern and…