An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

Given the well-documented consonant primacy established in Roman script, this study examined the role of consonants and vowels in lexical decision of Korean "Hangul" among skilled Korean readers in order to identify whether the salient role of consonants over vowels would be script-universal or script-specific. Three experiments were…

Interlanguage is the most fruitful issue in the field of second language acquisition. In the interlanguage phase, Indonesian learners of English tend to alternate between two forms of language features to express the same language function where a variation of language forms will be exhibited to mark the variable of linguistic function.…

The greatest difficulty in reading Arabic script for nonnatives has long been considered as the absence of short vowels, however there is more to be dealt with. While the correlation of 28 Arabic consonants pose no great difficulty in deciphering the script, the six vowel phonemes voiced only by three letters even with help of some relevant…

We introduce a model of Hebrew reading development that emphasizes both the universal and script-specific aspects of learning to read a Semitic abjad. At the universal level, the study of Hebrew reading acquisition offers valuable insights into the fundamental dilemmas of all writing systems--balancing the competing needs of the novice versus the…

Four eye movement experiments investigated whether readers use parafoveal input to gain information about the phonological or orthographic forms of consonants, vowels, and tones in word recognition when reading Thai silently. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which consonant, vowel, or tone information was…

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in…

Are the visual word-processing tasks of naming and lexical decision sensitive to systematic phonological properties that may or may not be specified in the spelling? Two experiments with Hangul, the alphabetic orthography of Korea, were directed at the effects of the phonological process of assimilation whereby one articulation changes to conform…

Reports a study concluding that first grade children did not have strong preconceptions of letter-sound relationships when they entered school but their year-end responses were significantly more like adult responses. No differences were found between speakers of black English and white English. (TO)

Words were used as the stimulus factors to test the two-stage reading process. The first stage is a decoding stage in which the words are perceived and translated into an acoustic code, and the second stage is a semantic matching stage in which words were categorized into three phonological factors (word length, vowel complexity, and regularity)…

THIS PAPER PRESENTS FIRST A SUMMARY OF RESEARCH INVESTIGATING THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE KINDERGARTEN CHILD HAS ABSTRACTED IMPLICIT REGULARITIES IN THE FORMATION OF PLURALS IN ENGLISH. PRODUCTION AND RECOGNITION TASKS WERE USED. THE CHILDREN MADE MORE ERRORS WITH SYLLABLES REQUIRING THE ADDITION OR DELETION OF THE /IZ/ ALLOMORPH THAN WITH SYLLABLES…