Purpose: We examined the effect of character complexity on early Chinese literacy (word reading and writing). We also investigated whether cognitive skills (phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming [RAN]) could moderate the influence of character complexity on literacy outcomes. Method: Our pre-registered study…

This mini-review attempts to provide a capsule overview of the role of genetic factors in reading and its development across languages and writing systems. The review is conceived and executed with a scoping review approach, synthesizing the methods employed in the existing research rather than producing a summary of evidence to answer a discrete…

Purpose: Statistical learning (SL) approaches to reading maintain that proficient reading requires assimilation of the rich statistical regularities in the writing system. Reading skills in developing first- and second-language readers in English have been shown to be predicted by individual differences in sensitivity to regularities in mappings…

Referring to the "vital parts" of speech that do not appear in print, E. B. Huey (1908/1968) described prosody in reading as "the rise and fall of pitch and inflection, the hurrying here and slowing there, what we have called the melody of speech." In this paper, we discuss the role prosody plays in reading, contextualized in…

In this article, we provide a cross-linguistic perspective on the universals and particulars in learning to read across seventeen different orthographies. Starting from the assumption that reading reflects a learned sensitivity to the systematic relationships between the surface forms of words and their meanings, we chose a broad group of…

Purpose: We previously reported evidence of true double dissociation between reading accuracy and reading rate in a large unselected sample of Hebrew-speaking fourth graders and a large clinical sample of adult Hebrew-speakers with dyslexia. The present study aimed to replicate and extend these findings to Arabic, which is structurally similar to…

Learning to read and spell involves learning about the written forms of words and how these are linked to language. Writing systems include formal patterns, which pertain to the appearance of written words, and functional patterns, which pertain to links between units of writing and units of language. We review the evidence that learners of a…

Purpose: Punctuation is traditionally seen to represent grammatical structures in writing, but some authors argue that it can also reflect the intonation and pauses of speech. In two experiments, we examined the influence of grammar and prosody on adults' judgments of comma placement. Method: University students rated the appropriateness of commas…

Purpose: Morphological regularities are an important feature of the English writing system, and exposure to written morphology may be key in the development of skilled word recognition. Our aim was to investigate children's experiences of written morphology by analyzing a large-scale corpus of children's reading materials spanning a target age…

Purpose: Readers can draw on their knowledge of sound-to-letter mappings to form expectations about the spellings of known spoken words prior to seeing them in written sentences. The current study asked whether such orthographic expectancies are observed in the absence of contextual support at the point of reading. Method: Seventy-eight adults…

In this paper, we survey current evidence on cognitive precursors of reading in different orthographies by reviewing studies with a cross-linguistic research design. Graphic symbol knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming were found to be associated with reading acquisition in all orthographies…

The latest version of the connectionist dual process model of reading (CDP++.parser) was tested on a set of nonwords, many of which were orthographically strange (e.g., PSIZ). A grapheme-by-grapheme read-out strategy was used because the normal strategy produced many poor responses. The new strategy allowed the model to produce results similar to…

Most current theories of reading and dyslexia derive from a relatively narrow empirical base: research on English and a handful of other European alphabets. Furthermore, the two dominant theoretical frameworks for describing cross-script diversity--orthographic depth and psycholinguistic grain size theory--are also deeply entrenched in Anglophone…

We review cognitive-linguistic approaches to conveying meaning, sound, and orthographic information across scripts in order to highlight the impact of variability in written and spoken language on learning to read and to write words. With examples of word recognition and word writing from different scripts, including Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and…

This study examined whether visual-spatial attention could predict Chinese reading achievement longitudinally beyond some well-established reading precursors. A total of 257 second- and third-grade Hong Kong Chinese-speaking children participated in the study. Visual-spatial attention was measured by visual search tasks, which assessed the skills…