Play is well documented as a purposeful, authentic way for children to engage in literacy practices. Although the benefits of play are widely agreed upon, there is some debate regarding its place in school. In fact, play is often marginalized in place of "back to the basics" language instruction. For kindergartners, this means word…

This article examines the relationship between individual differences in speech perception and sublexical/phonological processing in reading. We used an auditory phoneme identification task in which a /ba/-/pa/ syllable continuum measured sensitivity to classify participants into three performance groups: poor, medium, and good categorizers. A…

Although spoken word recognition is more fundamental to human communication than text recognition, knowledge of word-processing in auditory cortex is comparatively impoverished. This dissertation synthesizes current models of auditory cortex, models of cortical pattern recognition, models of single-word reading, results in phonetics and results in…

Four experiments are reported that investigate processing of mispronounced words for which the phonological form is inconsistent with the graphemic form (words spelled with silent letters). Words produced as mispronunciations that are consistent with their spelling were more confusable with their citation form counterpart than mispronunciations…

This study examined the predictive validity of a computer-adaptive assessment for measuring kindergarten reading skills using the STAR Early Literacy (SEL) test. The findings showed that the results of SEL assessments administered during the fall, winter, and spring of kindergarten were moderate and statistically significant predictors of year-end…

Anagram solution tasks have been frequently used to assess word recognition processes and relevant research suggests that anagram solution ability is closely related to reading. Recently, the anagram paradigm was utilized to compare reading performance in the Greek language and was found to share significant positive correlation to reading…

Infants' abilities to discriminate native and non-native phonemes have been extensively investigated in monolingual learners, demonstrating a transition from language-general to language-specific sensitivities over the first year after birth. However, these studies have mostly been limited to the study of vowels and consonants in monolingual…

The influence of coarticulation cues on spoken word recognition is not yet well understood. This acoustic/phonetic variation may be processed early and recognized as sensory noise to be stripped away, or it may influence processing at a later prelexical stage. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) in a picture/spoken word matching…

The cross modal repetition priming paradigm was used to investigate how potential lexically ambiguous no-release variants are processed. In particular we focus on segmental regularities that affect the variant's frequency of occurrence (voicing of the critical segment) and phonological context in which the variant occurs (status of the following…

Two auditory lexical decision experiments document for morphologically complex words two points at which the probability of a target word given the evidence shifts dramatically. The first point is reached when morphologically unrelated competitors are no longer compatible with the evidence. Adapting terminology from Marslen-Wilson (1984), we refer…

This paper consists of three studies. The first study aimed to identify sub-types of students with learning disabilities in reading. Based on the dual-route model of reading, words may be read using either a lexical (words are recognized as wholes) or a sub-lexical (words are recognized through grapheme-phoneme correspondence) procedure. Castles…

It has been suggested that linguistic proximity affects the ease of acquisition between typologically similar languages, due to the fact that the languages have shared phonological and orthographic properties (Koda, 2008). Thus, a native Hebrew speaker learning Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) would be expected to easily develop linguistic…

The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently…

This study investigates the syllable's role in the normal reading acquisition of French children at three grade levels (1st, 3rd, and 5th), using a modified version of Cole, Magnan, and Grainger's (1999) paradigm. We focused on the effects of syllable frequency and word frequency. The results suggest that from the first to third years of reading…

Design of a screening test for identifying reading difficult students in Malayalam and validation thereof among boys is made to help schools proactively intervene with such students. A battery of tests developed based on extant literature on screening tests, reviewed difficulties in reading Malayalam, and discrimination power of the draft tests is…