Rules and regularities of language are typically processed in an implicit and effortless way in the human brain. Individuals with developmental dyslexia have problems in implicit learning of regularities in sequential stimuli, but the neural basis of this deficit has not been studied. This study investigated extraction and utilization of a complex…

Reading difficulties of children growing up in poverty contexts have not received as much attention as those of children from middle-income families. This paper analyzes the reading-related cognitive profiles of Argentine, Spanish-speaking, low-SES children with reading difficulties (RD), by comparing them with chronological age- (CA) and reading…

When readers search for misspellings in a proofreading task or for a letter in a letter detection task, they are more likely to omit function words than content words. However, with misspelled words, previous findings for the letter detection task were mixed. In two experiments, the authors tested the functional equivalence of both tasks. Results…

Purpose: We sought to examine the contribution of visual cues in audiovisual identification of consonants and vowels--in terms of isolation points (the shortest time required for correct identification of a speech stimulus), accuracy, and cognitive demands--in listeners with hearing impairment using hearing aids. Method: The study comprised 199…

This essay is about the improbable emergence of written language six millennia ago that gave rise to the even more improbable, highly sophisticated reading brain of the twenty-first century. How it emerged and what it comprises--both in its most basic iteration in the very young reader and in its most elaborated iteration in the expert reader--is…

Among the cognitive causes of dyslexia, phonological and magnocellular deficits have attracted a substantial amount of research. Their role and their exact impact on reading ability are still a matter of debate, partly also because large samples of dyslexics are hard to recruit. Here, we report a new technique to simulate dyslexic symptoms in…

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item…

Recent neurological breakthroughs in our understanding of the Critical Period Hypothesis and prosody may suggest strategies on how phonics instruction could improve L2 language learning and in particular phoneme/grapheme decoding. We therefore conducted a randomised controlled-trial on the application of prosody and phonics techniques, to improve…

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were…

Recent studies have emphasized that developmental dyslexia is a multiple-deficit disorder, in contrast to the traditional single-deficit view. In this context, cognitive profiling of children with dyslexia may be a relevant contribution to this unresolved discussion. The aim of this study was to profile 36 Portuguese children with dyslexia from…

There is a gap between "w..aa..sss" and "woz" ("was"). This is a gap between the output from a phonological recoding of a word and its lexical pronunciation. We suggest that ease of recognition of words from spelling pronunciations (like "w..aa..sss") contributes independent variance to word decoding ability…

This study examines the concurrent relationships between phoneme awareness, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and reading skills in 7- to 11-year-old children. Path analyses showed that visual-verbal paired-associate learning and RAN, but not phoneme awareness, were unique predictors of word recognition,…

Background: Rhyme awareness is one of the earliest forms of phonological awareness to develop and is assessed in many developmental studies by means of a simple rhyme task. The influence of more demanding experimental paradigms on rhyme judgment performance is often neglected. Addressing this issue may also shed light on whether rhyme processing…

The issue of how information flows within the lexical system in written naming was investigated in five experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named target pictures that were accompanied by context pictures having phonologically and orthographically related or unrelated names (e.g., a picture of a "ball" superimposed on a picture of…

The effects of properties of words on their reading aloud response times (RTs) are 1 major source of evidence about the reading process. The precision with which such RTs could potentially be predicted by word properties is critical to evaluate our understanding of reading but is often underestimated due to contamination from individual…