Holistic processing (HP) is an expertise marker in visual perception; nevertheless, it can be modulated by writing experience (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2014). We have recently found that HP also indicates expertise in Cantonese speech perception (Liu & Hsiao, 2014). Nevertheless, Cantonese has a logographic writing system where one syllable corresponds to one character, whereas in alphabetic languages...

Learning about letters is an important component of emergent literacy. We explored the possibility that parent speech provides information about letters, and also that children's speech reflects their own letter knowledge. By studying conversations transcribed in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) between parents and children aged one to five, we found that alphabetic order influenced use of individual...

Visual event-related potentials were recorded from a group of 10 normal subjects while they judged the proximity of two letters of the alphabet. Subjects viewed singly the letters A, D, G, L, N, T, W and Z and indicated by button press whether the letter displayed occurred before or after the comparison letter M. Reaction times to close letters (L and N) were longer than ordinally more distant ...

[7-bit encoding, transliteration] We propose a general strategy for deriving 7-bit encodings for texts in languages which use an alphabetic non-Roman script, like Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and many other Indic scripts, and for which there is some transliteration convention using Roman letters with additional diacritical marks. These schemes, which we will call \meta-transliterations", are based...

Letters have a position in the alphabet and they have a position on standard personal computer keyboards. The present study explored the consequences of compatibility between spatial codes representing letter position in the alphabet and on the keyboard. In Experiment 1, participants responded faster to letter dyads in an alphabetic order judgment task, when the letters' alphabetical order matc...

Predictive keyboards are software keyboards that, to conserve screen real estate, display a subset of the full set of alphabetic keys at any one time, predicting the letters to display on the basis of tables of letters’ transitional probabilities. Using different types of test texts (names, words, random strings), we evaluated the influence of various manipulations on the efficiency of letter s...

The relationship between orthography (spelling) and phonology (speech sounds) varies across alphabetic languages. Consequently, learning to read a second alphabetic language, that uses the same letters as the first, increases the phonological associations that can be linked to the same orthographic units. In subjects with English as their first language, previous functional imaging studies have...

This paper proposes a solution to the problem of handling scribal abbreviations in TEI-conformant transcriptions of medieval texts, following a conservative editorial strategy. A key distinction is drawn between alphabetic abbreviations, which represent sequences of letters, and logographic abbreviations which represent whole words. The TEI elements and can be used systematical...

An algorithm of Knuth for finding an optimal binary tree is extended in several directions to solve related problems. The first case considered is restricting the depth of the tree by some predetermined integer K, and a Kn algorithm is given. Next, for trees of degree tr, rather than binary trees, Kn log tr and n log tr algorithms are found for the restricted and nonrestricted cases, respective...