This paper examines the understudied phenomenon of consonant gemination in the pronunciation of English among Levantine Arabic learners of English (LA learners). The very few studies that touched on gemination among LA learners attributed gemination to spelling in the target language (English). This study challenges this analysis and demonstrates…

In this article, we provide a cross-linguistic perspective on the universals and particulars in learning to read across seventeen different orthographies. Starting from the assumption that reading reflects a learned sensitivity to the systematic relationships between the surface forms of words and their meanings, we chose a broad group of…

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…

The French orthographic code is complex, and its acquisition is laborious (Catach, 2008; Fayol & Jaffré, 2008). Three hypotheses attempt to explain orthographic knowledge acquisition (OKA). For some, exposure to the code leads to OKA through a self-learning process (Share, 2004). For others, OKA benefits from graphophonological processes…

Purpose: Morphology, which is a bridge between phonology and orthography, plays an important role in the development of word-specific spellings. This study, which employed longitudinal sampling of typically developing students in Grades 3, 4, and 5, explored how the misspellings of words with derivational suffixes shed light on the interplay of…

This article offers a model of Arabic word reading according to which three conspicuous features of the Arabic language and orthography shape the development of word reading in this language: (a) vowelization/vocalization, or the use of diacritical marks to represent short vowels and other features of articulation; (b) morphological structure,…

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…

Research on what neural mechanisms facilitate word reading development in non-alphabetic scripts is relatively rare. The present study was among the first to adopt a multivariate pattern classification analysis to decode electroencephalographic signals recorded for primary school children (N = 236) while performing a Chinese character decision…

There is evidence that orthographic knowledge can influence on-line spoken-word recognition. Interestingly, when graphic and phonetic codes are not congruent due to the application of phonological alternation processes, people report hearing sounds that are matched to graphic (underlying), not phonetic codes (Hallé et al. in J Mem Lang 43:618-639,…

How people learn to read is an interesting question which has been investigated by many studies with various approaches. Some recent studies have related learning to read with domain-general abilities and have found a positive relationship between statistical learning and learning to read, as well as between procedural learning and learning to…

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…

The present study investigated the representation and processing of segmental and tonal information in visual Chinese word recognition in native and non-native Chinese readers. Two experiments using homophone judgement paradigm were conducted. When judging two Chinese characters (Experiment 1), both groups showed difficulties when the segmental…