Letter knowledge and word identification are key skills for reading and spelling. Letter knowledge facilitates the application of sublexical letter-sound mappings to decode words. With reading experience, word identification becomes a key lexical skill to support decoding. In transparent orthographies, however, letter knowledge might be an…

While the theoretical models of morphological processing in Roman alphabets indicate prelexical activation, a model established in Korean suggests postlexical activation. To extend the model of Korean morphological processing, this study examined within-scriptal (Hangul-Hangul prime-target pairs) and cross-scriptal (Hanja-Hangul prime-target…

Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; n[subscript female] = 264,…

Unfortunately, far too many American adolescents are unable to read proficiently. The science of reading suggests explicit instruction in both word identification and language processing skills should bolster reading proficiency, but most commercial reading interventions for secondary students focus exclusively on the latter skill area. This study…

Adult literacy learners are characterized by their diversity, both in terms of educational histories and cognitive skill sets. Accounting for the specific strengths and weaknesses of each learner is vital to the assessment of literacy gains and optimization of educational systems. We examined pre- and post-difference scores on a component reading…

Adult literacy learners are characterized by their diversity, both in terms of educational histories and cognitive skill sets. Accounting for the specific strengths and weaknesses of each learner is vital to the assessment of literacy gains and optimization of educational systems. We examined pre- and post-difference scores on a component reading…

The purpose of this follow-up study was to determine the specific contribution of phonological processing abilities, including phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN) and verbal short-term memory (VSTM), as well as visual perception (VP), in word reading accuracy. A sample of 62 native Arabic speaking children from Grade 1…

Gough and Tunmer's (1986) simple view of reading (SVR) proposed that reading comprehension (RC) is a function of language comprehension (LC) and word recognition/decoding. Braze et al. (2007) presented data suggesting an extension of the SVR in which knowledge of vocabulary (V) affected RC over and above the effects of LC. Tunmer and Chapman…

The importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension emphasizes the need to accurately assess an individual's familiarity with words. The present article highlights problems with using occurrence counts in corpora as an index of word familiarity, especially when studying individuals varying in reading experience. We demonstrate via computational…

The visual word form system (VWFS), located in the occipito-temporal cortex, is involved in orthographic processing of visually presented words (Cohen et al., 2002). Recent fMRI studies in children and adults have demonstrated a gradient of increasing word-selectivity along the posterior-to-anterior axis of this system (Vinckier et al., 2007), yet…

Many low-skill readers have problems with visual word recognition. In particular, low-skill readers show a substantial nonword reading deficit that is attributed to deficits in sub-lexical processing. In this study, I examined whether the nonword deficits of German 14-year-old low-skill readers were associated with inefficient use of multi-letter…

It is well established that speech, language and phonological skills are closely associated with literacy, and that children with a family risk of dyslexia (FRD) tend to show deficits in each of these areas in the preschool years. This paper examines what the relationships are between FRD and these skills, and whether deficits in speech, language…

This study investigated the effect of semantic inconsistency of roots on morphological processing to explore the development of morphological representations within the mental lexicon. We examined masked priming of Hebrew words of changing semantic transparency at two reading levels. The results revealed a disparity in the performance of fourth…

This study tested the theory that future poor comprehenders would show modest but pervasive deficits in both language comprehension and production during early childhood as compared with future poor decoders and typical readers. Using an existing database (NICHD ECCRN), fifth-grade students were identified as having poor comprehension skills…

Studies on L2 reading have provided extensive evidence for the significant contribution of lower-level processing skills in learning to read and the critical impact on the overall development of L2 reading of more accurate and fluent connections between three sub-lexical components: phonology, orthography and semantics. The broad consensus among…