Purpose: Educators rely on sufficient knowledge and skill to provide effective phonemic awareness instruction, an important component of early literacy instruction, particularly for children who experience difficulty learning to read. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare the phonemic awareness skill of several groups of educators, including speech-language pathologists (SLPs; n...

Is morphology a discrete and independent element of lexical structure or does it simply reflect a fine tuning of the system to the statistical correlation that exists among the orthographic and semantic properties of words? Imaging studies in English failed to show unequivocal morphological activation that is distinct from semantic or orthographic activation. Cognitive research in Hebrew has re...

Acquiring literacy establishes connections between the spoken and written system and modifies the functioning of the spoken system. As most evidence comes from on-line speech recognition tasks, it is still a matter of debate when and how these two systems interact in metaphonological tasks. The present event-related potentials study investigated the role and activation time course of the phonol...

The aim of this text-to-speech synthesis system is to convert the Estonian orthographic text to an orthoepically correct and natural-sounding spoken text for a wide range of practical application (especially for visual and speech disabled persons).

The purpose of this study was to compare three variables in terms of how well they predict orthographic functioning. To this end, the authors examined the relative contributions of rapid automatic naming, exposure to print, and visual processing to a composite measure of orthographic functioning in a heterogeneous group of 8- to 12-year-old children. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed th...

Numerous studies have demonstrated that orthographic knowledge is coded in an abstract format in English (e.g., the perceptually dissimilar words READ/read map onto a common abstract orthographic representation). However, it is unclear at present whether this mapping occurs at the letter or word level. Two experiments investigate this issue in a language (i.e., Japanese) where words can be writ...

Learning to read involves the acquisition of letter-sound relationships (i.e., decoding skills) and the ability to visually recognize words (i.e., orthographic knowledge). Although decoding skills are clearly human-unique, given they are seated in language, recent research and theory suggest that orthographic processing may derive from the exaptation or recycling of visual circuits that evolved...

Many children with reading difficulties display phonological deficits and struggle to acquire non-lexical reading skills. However, not all children with reading difficulties have these problems, such as children with selective letter position dyslexia (LPD), who make excessive migration errors (such as reading slime as "smile"). Previous research has explored three possible loci for the deficit...

The study assessed the eye movements of 60 adult German readers during silent reading of target words, consisting of 2 and 3 syllables, embedded in sentences. The first objective was to assess whether the inhibitory effect of first syllable frequency, which was up to now primarily shown for isolated words, generalizes to natural reading. The second objective was to assess the effect of orthogra...

The present fMRI study used a spelling task to investigate the hypothesis that the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) hosts neuronal representations of whole written words. Such an orthographic word lexicon is posited by cognitive dual-route theories of reading and spelling. In the scanner, participants performed a spelling task in which they had to indicate if a visually presented lett...