There are multiple levels of processing relevant to reading that vary in their visual, sublexical, and lexical orthographic processing demands. Segregating distinct cortical sources for each of these levels has been challenging in EEG studies of early readers. To address this challenge, we applied recent advances in analyzing high-density EEG…

The developmental course of neural tuning to visual letter strings is unclear. Here we tested 39 children longitudinally, at the beginning of grade 1 (6.45 ± 0.33 years old) and 1 year after, with fast periodic visual stimulation in electroencephalography to assess the evolution of selective neural responses to letter strings and their…

The present study investigated whether morphological processing in reading is influenced by the orthographic consistency of a language or its morphological complexity. Developing readers in Grade 3 and skilled adult readers participated in a reading aloud task in four alphabetic orthographies (English, French, German, Italian), which differ in…

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to influence language skills, with children of lower SES backgrounds performing worse on language assessments compared to their higher SES peers. While there is abundant behavioral research on the effects of SES, whether there are differences in the neural mechanisms used to support language skill is less…

The present experiments focused on how orthographic processing develops during reading acquisition. Specifically, a large, cross-sectional sample of children from grade 2 to grade 4 was exposed to pairs of words, pseudowords, digit strings, and pseudo-letter (Armenian) strings while their sensitivity to transpositions (T) and substitutions (S) of…

Many Latino children in the U.S. speak primarily Spanish at home with few opportunities for exposure to English before entering school. For monolingual children, the strongest early predictor of later school success is oral language skill developed before kindergarten. Less is known about how early oral language skills support later learning in…

A commonly shared assumption in the field of visual-word recognition is that retinotopic representations are rapidly converted into abstract representations. Here we examine the role of visual form vs. abstract representations during the early stages of word processing--as measured by masked priming--in young children (3rd and 6th Graders) and…

Individual differences in nonword repetition are associated with language and literacy development, but few studies have considered the extent to which learning to read influences phonological skills as indexed by nonword repetition performance. We explored this question using a latent variable longitudinal design. Reading, oral language and…