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…

Discusses studies of dyslexia in German- and English-speaking children. Argues that deficits in phoneme awareness are only evident in the early stages of reading acquisition, whereas rapid naming and phonological memory deficits are more persistent in dyslexic children. (Author/VWL)

Presents study exploring oral reading errors of normally developing readers to determine any developmental differences in learning phoneme-grapheme units; to discover if the grapheme representations of some phonemes are more difficult to read than others; and to replicate results reported by Fowler, et. al. Findings show most oral reading errors…

Presents longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3; and 5 years. Children were assessed at four-week intervals. Phoneme-acquisition data and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two…

Good and poor readers, 15- and 16-year-olds and adult literacy students, were compared in their ability to produce graphemic representations for four specific phonemes. Good readers were significantly better than poor readers at representing the critical phonemes, but intentional ambiguity had a similar effect on all. (MSE)

Reports a study that compared the spelling performance of a 17-year-old developmental dysgraphic of normal intelligence to that of an acquired dysgraphic. Findings indicate that both make phonologically valid errors and spell regular words better than irregular words. These performances reflect a phonological routine corresponding to that used by…

Focuses on the importance of phonology in establishing orthographic representations. In normal readers, phonological and orthographic representations of words are so closely connected that they are usually coactivated, whereas in dyslexics, this connection is less strong, so that orthographic representations interfere less with phonemic…