As children learn to read, they become sensitive to context-dependent vowel pronunciations in words, considered a form of statistical learning. The work of Treiman and colleagues demonstrated that readers' vowel pronunciations depend on the consonantal context in which the vowel occurs and reading experience. Using explanatory item-response models…

Accurate and rapid word recognition requires highly-specified phonological, orthographic, and semantic word-specific representations. It has been established that children acquire these representations through phonological decoding in a process known as orthographic learning. Studies examining orthographic learning and its predictors have thus far…

The "script-dependence hypothesis" was tested through the examination of the impact of Russian and Hebrew literacy on English orthographic knowledge needed for spelling and decoding among fifth graders. We compared the performance of three groups: Russian-Hebrew-speaking emerging triliterates, Russian-Hebrew-speaking emerging biliterates who were…

The ability to identify stop consonants from brief onset spectra was compared between a group of Chinese children with phonological dyslexia (the PD group, with a mean age of 10 years 4 months) and a group of chronological age-matched control children. The linguistic context, which included vowels and speakers, and durations of stop onset spectra…

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset. We presented the nonwords used by Treiman and colleagues in their 2003 study to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school…

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between "ch" and "tch" is determined by the preceding vowel ("coach," "roach" vs. "catch," "hatch"). We investigated children's sensitivity to vowel context when spelling…