Graphotactic as well as phonological factors influence native English speakers' decisions about consonant doubling in the spelling of nonwords, e.g., "zimen" versus "zimmen." This study examined the extent to which such influences apply to non-native speakers of English, who presumably have less knowledge of English…

The role of syllables as a sublexical unit in visual word recognition and reading is well established in deep and shallow syllable-timed languages such as French and Spanish, respectively. However, its role in intermediate stress-timed languages remains unclear. This paper aims to overcome this gap by studying for the first time the role of…

English language learners (ELLs) are the fastest growing population of students in U.S. schools, and, unfortunately often experience lower levels of reading and spelling achievement than native English-speaking students. There is growing evidence showing that early reading interventions, which have been effective with native English-speakers, can…

Orthographic knowledge, the general ability to learn, store, and use information about the orthographic form of words (Stanovich & West, 1989), is a crucial skill for supporting literacy. Although the development of first language (L1) orthographic awareness is impacted by the characteristics of a learner's L1 writing system, relatively little…

The current study is on second language acquisition (SLA), and the focus is on the process of visual word recognition in English by Arab learners of English as a second language (ESL). Arab ESL learners have poor performance in their visual word recognition in English, which has been explicated in terms of their poor spelling knowledge of English…

The present article investigates how phonotactic rules constrain oral reading in the Russian language. The pronunciation of letters in Russian is regular and consistent, but it is subject to substantial phonotactic influence: the position of a phoneme and its phonological context within a word can alter its pronunciation. In Part 1 of the article,…

Second languages (L2s) are often learned through spoken and written input, and L2 orthographic forms (spellings) can lead to non-native-like pronunciation. The present study investigated whether orthography can lead experienced learners of English[subscript L2] to make a phonological contrast in their speech production that does not exist in…

Spanish spelling, especially the use of written accent marks, is a major stumbling block for Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners (Carreira 2002). In fact, Mikulski (2006) found that most SHL learners ranked bettering their spelling and grammar as a very important learning goal. Despite its importance in literacy development and its perceived…

Recent research indicates that knowledge of words' spellings can influence knowledge of the phonological forms of second language (L2) words when the first and second languages use the same orthographic symbols. It is yet unknown whether learners can make similar use of unfamiliar orthographic symbols. In this study we investigate whether native…

This study examined the relationship among word reading efficiency, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension for adult English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Data from 185 adult Chinese EFL learners preparing to take the Test-of-English-as-a-Foreign-Language[TM] (TOEFL[R]) were analyzed in this study. The participants completed a…

This article provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of misspellings in the writing of fluent Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners enrolled in a university-level Spanish course. The corpus consisted of a total of 21,322 words and 2492 misspellings, which were divided into four main categories and several subcategories. This paper…

This study compared the English spelling of native Spanish-speaking children receiving English-only instruction with monolingual native English speaking children at the end of kindergarten. In invented spelling, young bilingual children can show us how they perceive the unique sounds of English by the way they map English letters onto non-Spanish…

The relationship between linguistic experience and phonemic representations in spelling was investigated in two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (aged 5-6 years) who spoke mostly Mandarin-L1 (n = 23) or mostly English-L1 (n = 27) at home. A 60-item cloze task including high- and low-frequency words with word-initial and word-final…

Vowels in Spanish have direct one-to-one letter-sound correspondences, whereas vowels in English usually have multiple spellings. For native Spanish-speaking children learning to spell in English, this transition from a shallow to a deep orthography could potentially cause difficulties. We examined whether the spelling of English vowel sounds was…

The study investigated the phenomenon of invented spelling in the original composition of 10 first grade and 10 second grade native Spanish speaking children enrolled in a bilingual program. From an examination of over 200 pieces of writing, categories of spelling have been suggested and examples of each are given. (Author/NQA)