In this article, the relationship between alphabet knowledge and reading development will be explored. Key topics will include how alphabet knowledge is not only a predictor for future reading success, but also how letters and their sounds serve as a bridge from a pre-alphabetic phase into a partial alphabetic phase, and beyond. Since each phase…

In the search for mechanisms that contribute to dyslexia, the term "attention" has been invoked to explain performance in a variety of tasks, creating confusion since all tasks do, indeed, demand "attention." Many studies lack an experimental manipulation of attention that would be necessary to determine its influence on task…

Background: Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children may experience difficulties in word decoding development. Aims: We aimed to compare and predict the incremental word decoding development in first grade in Dutch DHH and hearing children, as a function of kindergarten reading precursors. Methods and procedures: In this study, 25 DHH, and 41…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

Orthographic processing is a construct that encompasses the skills of recognizing, storing, accessing, and applying the print conventions of a writing system. Few studies have investigated orthographic processing in dyslexic children and it is not yet clear whether lexical and sublexical orthographic processing are both impaired in these children.…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

In the Jackson and Coltheart theory of acquisition of word reading it is claimed that, near the beginning of the partial alphabetic phase of development, children have full use of abstract letter units (ALUs). This claim and less exclusive alternatives were examined. In Experiment 1, normal progress children with on average 9 months of school…

This paper reports a study exploring the associations between measures of two levels of phonological representation: recognition (epi-linguistic) and production (meta-linguistic) tasks, and very early reading and writing skills. Thirty-eight pre-reading Ottawa-area children, aged 4-5 years, named environmental print (EP), wrote their own name,…

Investigated visual word recognition of first- through fifth-graders. Found that the "viewing position effect" typically seen in skilled readers and visual field asymmetries in recognizing individual letters in words emerged early at the end of the first year of reading instruction. Noted that findings support the view that basic reading…

In this paper, we argue that a complete understanding of language processing, in this case word-recognition processes, requires consideration both of multiple languages and of developmental processes. To illustrate these goals, we will summarize a 10-year research program exploring word-recognition processes in Korean adults and children. We…

The validity of the suggestion that dyslexic children make more letter reversal errors than other children was tested. Horizontal letter reversals of 8- to 11-year-old dyslexic children, nondyslexic speech- or language-impaired (SLI) children, and nonimpaired children in the context of individual letters, words, words spelled out letter-by-letter,…