Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies show age-related effects of density on children's performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological awareness. To further investigate density…

Comparison of Italian and English-speaking children's (N=200) segmentation abilities indicated that the discrepancies between the language groups reflected the children's phonologic and orthographic differences. (CB)

Reponses of poor, average, and good spellers at different age levels to a phonemic segmentation test containing nondigraph pseudowords and to an experimental spelling test containing exception, ambiguous, regular, and pseudowords suggested that the average and good spellers made fewer and more phonetically accurate errors than the poor spellers.…

Compares the different criteria used to identify poor spellers and readers from good spellers and readers. Findings reveal that visual memory of orthographic sequences may help to differentiate between poor and good spellers. (CB)