Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically…

Purpose: Readers can draw on their knowledge of sound-to-letter mappings to form expectations about the spellings of known spoken words prior to seeing them in written sentences. The current study asked whether such orthographic expectancies are observed in the absence of contextual support at the point of reading. Method: Seventy-eight adults…

Purpose: To assess strengths and weaknesses of the reading level (RL) match approach and its potential to generate insights regarding the cognitive foundations of reading ability and disability. Method: We applied RL-match design to a sample of 2nd-6th graders reading a consistent orthography, Russian, using an "extreme phenotype"…

The Spanish writing system has consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPC), rendering it more transparent than English. We compared first-language (L1) orthographic transparency on how monolingual English- and Spanish-readers learned a novel writing system with a 1:1 (LT) and a 1:2 (LO) GPC. Our dependent variables were learning time,…

Two prominent dual-route computational models of reading aloud are the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model, and the connectionist dual-process plus (CDP+) model. While sharing similarly designed lexical routes, the two models differ greatly in their respective nonlexical route architecture, such that they often differ on nonword pronunciation. Neither…

Severe enduring reading- and writing-accuracy difficulties seem a phenomenon largely restricted to nations using complex orthographies, notably Anglophone nations, given English's highly complex orthography (Geva and Siegel, "Read Writ" 12:1-30, 2000; Landerl et al., "Cognition" 63:315-334, 1997; Share, "Psychol Bul"l…

The degree to which orthographic knowledge accounts for the link between rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading is contested, with mixed results reported. This longitudinal study compared two groups of 10- and 11-year-old children, a low RAN group (N = 69) and matched controls (N = 74), on various measures of orthographic knowledge. The low…

An economics-driven discourse about early literacy (Trudell, 2009) in sub-Saharan African settings often includes a list of reasons for poor levels of literacy that remain mired in deficit thinking or a deficiencies model in which the problem lies within the non-literate people themselves. Meanwhile, the established post-colonial educational…

Reports the findings of a study that sought (1) to confirm for Australian children the pattern of print concept acquisition noted in North America and New Zealand and (2) to determine whether children of varying reading proficiency can be differentiated in terms of their print concepts. (FL)

Shows that Dutch children acquire and use lexical entries containing specific information about visual-orthographic structure quite early, even after only six months of formal training in reading. (FL)

Notes evidence that backward readers might have difficulties with spelling morphemes. Compares a group of backward readers' spellings with control groups matched on chronological age and reading level. Finds that backward reads are behind their age group in correct spelling but no worse than groups at the same reading level. (DSK)

Examines early difficulties with phonological coding/phonemic segmentation of German children diagnosed dyslexic after four years in school. States that phonics was used since German exhibits straightforward phoneme-grapheme correspondence; however, most students had difficulty with accurate reading of nonwords and unfamiliar words after seven…

Discusses the hazards that the English language contains for children learning to read, reports the Bullock Report's recommendation to judge I.T.A. on its merits, and describes research findings suggesting that the probability of reading failure is considerably greater when T.O. is used than when I.T.A. is used. (GT)

An interactive/cognitive model can account for the acquisition of a graphophonemic system by young children and be compatible with the cuing explanation, which posits that readers use their graphophonemic knowledge in coordination with their knowledge of language and the world to make sense of print. Explanations in the research literature of how…

Three studies examined sources of learning by which children, very early in learning to read, formed correspondences between letters and phonemes when these were not explicitly taught in the whole-language instruction they received. Findings of these studies have implications for the question of how early in learning to read children are able to…