Children's ability to correctly name letters is a key predictor of later reading abilities and skills, but research on letter naming from Scandinavian orthographies is scarce. The aim of this study is to explore how child- and letter-related factors (i.e., gender, child name, phonemic awareness, letter position in the alphabet and frequency, and…

Studies have suggested that multiple features influence letter knowledge across different orthographies. Arabic offers a unique opportunity to investigate the relations of letter properties on letter knowledge, but research on Arabic letter knowledge is scarce. This study was designed to investigate (a) letter frequency, (b) letter sequence, (c)…

This study investigates how Korean students produce and perceive single and double consonant letters in English words. To this end, twenty-eight Korean learners of English participated in the production and perception tests of English consonants /p, b, s, d, k, g/ with single and double letters. The participants were first asked to produce English…

The study's aims were to (a) evaluate preschoolers' use of private speech (overt talk to themselves) during spelling; and (b) study how it is affected by the nature of orthography. Participants were 197 Hebrew speaking Israeli preschoolers (109 girls and 88 boys) (M = 5.6 years). Children spelled 12 words (N =44 letters) that represented one of…

Purpose: We report here, for the first time, on developmental surface dyslexia in Turkish, a very transparent orthography. Surface dyslexia is a deficit in the lexical route, which forces the reader to read words via the sublexical route, leading to regularization errors. Methods: To detect surface dyslexia, we used reading aloud of loanwords with…

This study examined distributional statistical learning of positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities of an artificial orthography in Chinese children aged 8-10 years: 29 with dyslexia, 29 age-matched controls, and 30 reading-level matched controls. Despite having positional regularity learning performance comparable to the controls, the…

Since there are no spaces between words to mark word boundaries in Chinese, it is common to see 2 identical neighboring characters in natural text. Usually, this occurs when there are 2 adjacent words containing the same character (we will call such a coincidental sequence of 2 identical characters "repeated characters"). In the present…

There is increasing evidence for an association between both serial order short-term memory (STM) and the long-term learning (LTL) of serial order information and reading abilities. In this developmental study, we examined the hypothesis that STM for serial order supports online grapheme-to-phoneme conversion processes during the initial stages of…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…

This paper investigates the effect of foreignization and Englishization on business naming practices in Turkey. The question that is addressed is in what new ways foreign elements and English lexical items influence the naming of store signs in the language. In previous work, it was argued that there are roughly three main ways in which…

To examine the processing of phonological and configurational information in word recognition in discourse reading, we conducted two experiments using the self-paced reading paradigm. The materials were three-sentence discourses, in each of which the last word of the second sentence and the third word from the end of the last sentence formed a…

Research Findings: It has been proposed that the home literacy environment may influence the development of early number skills. However, the results of studies examining the association between home literacy experiences and early number skills are mixed. This could be due to the way that the home literacy experiences are conceptualized and…

In this study, we investigated developmental aspects of eye movements during reading of three languages (English, German, and Finnish) that vary widely in their orthographic complexity and predictability. Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are rather complex in English and German but relatively simple in Finnish. Despite their differences in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the profiles of nonresponders among native Chinese-speaking students struggling in English reading before and after an intensive intervention in phonological awareness as well as letter knowledge. Struggling English learners (n = 72) were screened from 668 Grade 4 students based on their English word…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…