Perceptual span, the effective visual field in reading covered in a single fixation, varies across orthographies. The perceptual span for reading English covers 3-4-character spaces to the left of fixation and around 14-15-character spaces to the right of the fixation while for Chinese it is one character space to the left and 3-character spaces…

The automatization of handwriting and typing is sustained by both sensorimotor and linguistic abilities that support the integration of central-linguistic processes with modality-specific peripheral-motor programs. How this integration evolves when handwriting and, especially, typing is not fully automatized has not been well-understood yet. In…

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have consistently showed poor performances in reading comprehension. Extending from previous studies that presented pure-text, this study aims to test the performances of graphic novel reading. We tested 24 Chinese children who have been diagnosed as DLD and 24 typical readers matched with age…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in audiovisual speech perception and temporal processing. The current study has examined the relationship between the audiovisual speech perception deficits and temporal processing deficits in children with and without ASD. To this end, using the McGurk paradigm, we implemented two…

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…

New research suggests that mechanisms involved in fine motor skills play an important role in reading and writing development. Extending past work that focused on fine motor skills measured in adolescence, the present study followed children longitudinally from ages 5 to 7 to examine early literacy and associated sets of fine motor skills,…

We examined the cognitive, language, and instructional predictors of early word-reading ability in a sample of children with Williams syndrome longitudinally. At Time 1, sixty-nine 6-7-year-olds (mean age = 6.53 years) completed standardized measures of phonological awareness, visual-spatial perception, vocabulary, and overall intellectual…

This study provides evidence connecting two aspects of visual-orthographic skills (orthographic awareness and delayed copying) to the common variance shared by Chinese word reading and arithmetic calculation, as well as in identifying positional knowledge of numbers as a potential mediator of these connections in Chinese primary school students (N…

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of verbal and visuospatial memory in Chinese reading comprehension. One hundred twenty-eight Cantonese-speaking children participated in the study at the end of their 3rd year of kindergarten in Hong Kong. Both verbal and visuospatial memory were found to be significantly associated with…

The French orthographic code is complex, and its acquisition is laborious (Catach, 2008; Fayol & Jaffré, 2008). Three hypotheses attempt to explain orthographic knowledge acquisition (OKA). For some, exposure to the code leads to OKA through a self-learning process (Share, 2004). For others, OKA benefits from graphophonological processes…

Visual-motor integration is an ability to coordinate the visual information and limb movement, which has direct relevance to Chinese handwriting ability. Interestingly handwriting practice can also improve Chinese reading. However, the relationship between visual-motor integration and reading ability in Chinese is unclear. The present study…

The relationships between phonological awareness, rapid naming, short term verbal memory, letter knowledge, visual skills and word reading in kindergarten, and the predictive patterns from kindergarten to first grade were examined in 41 Chinese-Dutch bilingual children living in the Netherlands in both their first language (Chinese) and second…

The present study explored the mediating effect of word detection on the relationship between visual-spatial attention and reading comprehension in Chinese. The participants included 287 Hong Kong Chinese children (167 third graders, 84 girls, "mean age" = 8.73, SD = 0.49, and 120 fourth graders, 45 girls, "mean age" = 9.93, SD…

We examined the cognitive, language, and instructional factors associated with reading ability in Williams syndrome (WS). Seventy 9-year-olds with WS completed standardized measures of real-word reading, pseudoword decoding, reading comprehension, phonological skills, listening comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, visual-spatial ability, verbal…

The present research studied the role of the non-executive and executive components of working memory in the detection of phonological, orthographical, and grammatical spelling errors. Before performing error detection tasks, undergraduate participants completed a battery of tasks to evaluate their non-executive (verbal and visuospatial storage)…