Visual word recognition is facilitated by the presence of "orthographic neighbors" that mismatch the target word by a single letter substitution. However, researchers typically do not consider "where" neighbors mismatch the target. In light of evidence that some letter positions are more informative than others, we investigate…

Learning to read English requires learning the complex statistical dependencies between orthography and phonology. Previous research has focused on how these statistics are learned in neural network models provided with as much training as needed. Children, however, are expected to acquire this knowledge in a few years of school with only limited…

Concept of word in print is the development of an understanding of how monosyllabic and multisyllabic words operate in print. Young children show evidence of this understanding when they are able to repeat a line of text while accurately pointing to each word as it is said. A small but robust line of work has examined the knowledge, skills, and…

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 encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created…

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…

Models of irregular word reading that take into account both child- and word-level predictors have not been evaluated in typically developing children and children with reading difficulty (RD). The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in irregular word reading ability among 5th grade children (N = 170), oversampled for…

Printed words that have a transposed-letter (TL) neighbor (e.g., angel has the TL neighbor angle) have been shown to be more difficult to process, in a range of paradigms, than words that do not have a TL neighbor. However, eye movement evidence suggests that this processing difficulty may occur on only a subset of trials. To investigate this…

The purpose of this review was to update previous reviews on factors related to students' responsiveness to early literacy intervention. The 14 studies in this synthesis used experimental designs, provided small-group or one-on-one reading interventions, and analyzed factors related to responsiveness to those interventions. Participants were…

This study examined the relationships between concept of word development and other early literacy measures (rhyme awareness, beginning sound awareness, alphabet knowledge, letter sound knowledge, spelling, and word recognition in isolation) using data from the PALS-K. Supporting previous research by using a much larger data set than had been used…

In this study, the relationship between latent constructs of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) was investigated and related to later measures of reading and spelling in children learning to read in different alphabetic writing systems (i.e., Norwegian/Swedish vs. English). 750 U.S./Australian children and 230…

The present study used two letter detection tasks, the classic missing letter effect paradigm and a single word versus familiar word compound version of this paradigm, to study bottom-up and top-down processes involved in reading in normally achieving as compared to low achieving elementary school readers. The research participants were children…

It is commonly assumed that orthographical lexical access in visual word recognition takes place in parallel, with all letters activated at the same time. In contrast, in the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding, letters fire sequentially (Whitney, 2001). I present further support for such seriality on several fronts. (1) The reasons that led…

An encoding algorithm uses empirically determined confusion matrices to activate units in an alphabetum and a lexicon to predict performance of word, orthographically regular nonword, or irregular nonword recognition. Performance is enhanced when decisions are based on lexical information which constrains test letter identity. Word prediction…

Letters and words are better identified when there are fewer available choices. How do readers use choice-set restrictions? By analyzing new experimental data and previously reported data, the author shows that Bayes theorem-based models overestimate readers' use of choice-set restrictions. This result is discordant with choice-similarity models…