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 EnglishL2 to make a phonological contrast in their speech production that does not exist in English. Double consonants represent geminate (long) consonants i...

Neuropsychological studies have shown that both cerebral hemispheres process orthographic, phono-logical and semantic aspects of written words, al-beit in different ways. The Left Hemisphere (LH) is more influenced by the phonological aspect of written words whereas lexical processing in the Right Hemisphere (RH) is more sensitive to visual form. We explain this phenomenon by postulating that i...

Recent models of visual word recognition assume that sublexical orthographic-phonological information is organized according to an onset-nucleus-coda scheme (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Jacobs, Rey, Ziegler, & Grainger, 1998, but see Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins & Haller, 1993 for an alternative view). In this study we test the hypothesis that onsetnucleus-coda subsyllabic co...

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that word reading accuracy, not oral language, is associated with spelling performance in school-age children. We compared fourth grade spelling accuracy in children with specific language impairment (SLI), dyslexia or both (SLI/dyslexia) to their typically developing grade-matched peers. Results of the study revealed that children with SLI p...

The goal of the present study is to understand the role orthographic and semantic information play in the behavior of skilled readers. Reading latencies from a self-paced sentence reading experiment in which Russian near-synonymous verbs were manipulated appear well-predicted by a combination of bottom-up sublexical letter triplets (trigraphs) and top-down semantic generalizations, modeled usin...

The visual attention (VA) span deficit hypothesis was found to successfully account for variability in developmental dyslexia [Bosse, M.L., Tainturier, M.J. & Valdois, S. (2007), Developmental dyslexia: The visual attention span hypothesis. Cognition, 104, 198-230]. We conducted here a cross-sectional study on 417 typically developing children from first, third and fifth grades examining the ro...