Background: Letter knowledge is crucial in the first stages of reading development. It supports learning letter-sound mappings and the identification of the letters that make up words. Previous studies have investigated the longitudinal impact of early letter knowledge on children's further word reading abilities. This study employed an artificial…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

Set for variability (SfV) is an oral language task that requires an individual to disambiguate the mismatch between the decoded form of an irregular word and its actual lexical pronunciation. For example, in the task, the word wasp is pronounced to rhyme with clasp (i.e. /waesp/), and the individual must recognize the actual pronunciation of the…

It is well-established that allographs like the uppercase and lowercase forms of the Roman alphabet (e.g., a and A) map onto the same "abstract letter identity," orthographic representations that are independent of the visual form. Consistent with this, in the allograph match task ("Are 'a' and 'A' the same letter?"), priming…

A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

In research on the acquisition of reading, there have been cross-orthographic comparisons made between some alphabetic scripts and a few syllabic scripts. In the present study of Japanese Grade 1 children learning to read hiragana, a syllabic script, there was a comparison of assessments of oral word reading accuracy levels recorded by scorers…

The processes and the cues determining the orthographic structure of polysyllabic words remain far from clear. In the present study, we investigated the role of letter category (consonant vs. vowels) in the perceptual organization of letter strings. In the syllabic counting task, participants were presented with written words matched for the…

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…

Design of a screening test for identifying reading difficult students in Malayalam and validation thereof among boys is made to help schools proactively intervene with such students. A battery of tests developed based on extant literature on screening tests, reviewed difficulties in reading Malayalam, and discrimination power of the draft tests is…

The purpose of this study was to determine the part of a word upon which first and fifth graders depend most in word recognition and to determine whether any change occurs between grades one and five. Fifty-six first grade students and sixty-three fifth graders were tested. The children individually read sixty words from flash cards presented by…

Alphabetic orthographies vary in the (in)consistency of the relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling, in contrast to opaque orthographies such as English, where spelling-sound correspondences are often inconsistent. The pronunciation of English…

Results of a study of children's performance on pseudohomophone naming, similarity judgment, and lexical decision suggest that training in pinyin, a system for spelling Chinese words in Latin letters, helps child readers pronounce unfamiliar words, and makes them more responsive to visual information but less precise in word recognition.…

The literature dealing with the identification process in beginning reading is surveyed. The first major section presents a review of the basal, Language Experience Approach, Phonic Word Method, linguistic, and i/t/a programs. Questions are raised about the empirical investigation of the subject matter and the instructional procedures used in…

These exercises are intended for developing students' ability to recognize cognates commonly used in air technical communications. All exercises are to be conducted orally with emphasis on correct pronunciation. Each lesson is presented in two parts: (1) pronunciation drill, and (2) fill-in exercises (oral drills). Aside from English instructions…