In light of the dramatic growth of Chinese learners worldwide and a need for a cross-linguistic research on Chinese literacy development, this study investigated (a) the effects of character properties (i.e., orthographic consistency and transparency) on character acquisition, and (b) the effects of individual learner differences (i.e.,…

The visual complexity of orthographies varies across writing systems. Prior research has shown that complexity strongly influences the initial stage of reading development: the perceptual learning of grapheme forms. This study presents a computational simulation that examines the degree to which visual complexity leads to grapheme learning…

Learning to read depends on eventual mastery of coding procedures, and even skilled reading depends on coding processes low in cost to processing resources. Reading disability may be understood as a point on an ability continuum or a wide range of coding ability. Instructional goals of word reading skill, including rapid and fluent word…

Word identification latencies and word prediction accuracy were compared for groups of skilled and less skilled fifth grade readers in three experiments. In each experiment, discourse context reduced identification latencies for less skilled as well as skilled readers. This was true both when context was heard and when it was read. The general…

One model of interactive processing useful in describing word identification processes in discourse context is of a weakly interactive type. This type assumes that the time to identify a word in context is an activation function, whereas the time to activate a word in memory beyond some criterial identification threshold is a multiplicative…