Skilled readers use information about which letters are where in a word (orthographic information) in order to access the sounds and meanings of printed words. We asked whether efficient processing of orthographic information could be achieved in the absence of prior language knowledge. To do so, we trained baboons to discriminate English words from nonsense combinations of letters that resembl...

Orthographic similarities across languages provide a strong signal for probabilistic decipherment, especially for closely related language pairs. The existing decipherment models, however, are not wellsuited for exploiting these orthographic similarities. We propose a log-linear model with latent variables that incorporates orthographic similarity features. Maximum likelihood training is comput...

The development of phonological and orthographic processing was studied from the middle of Grade 1 to the end of Grade 4 (age 6; 6-10 years) using the effects of regularity and of lexicality in reading aloud and in spelling tasks, and using the effect of pseudohomophony in a silent reading task. In all the tasks, signs of reliance on phonological processing were found even when indicators of re...

In this study, visual-orthographic skills were defined as the ability to recognize whether letters and numerals are correctly oriented. Aims were to investigate whether visual-orthographic skills would contribute independent variance to reading, and whether children with a visual-orthographic deficit would be more impaired readers than similar children without this deficit. Participants were 20...

Several current spelling models suggest that children cannot have any knowledge of orthographic form before they have acquired knowledge about orthographic function. We evaluated this proposition by using an orthographic choice task to inspect Finnish schoolchildren's knowledge of two aspects of consonant doublet use: the allowed doublet position (an aspect of orthographic form) and the type of...

This article describes a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli, including measures of word frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, age of acquisition, and imageability. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognit...

This article describes a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli in Spanish, including word frequency, syllable frequency, bigram and biphone frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, concreteness, familiarity, imageability, valence, arousal, and age-of-acquisition measures....

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of an abstract code (orthographic and/or morphophonemic) on the perception of the sounds in French spoken words. For this purpose, we used words whose surface phonology was not congruent either with both orthographic and morphophonemic codes or with orthographic code alone. Experiment 1 showed that the processing of spoken word is affected by a...