The present study investigates the effects of neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency in reading Chinese two-character words. The neighborhood size of a word is defined as the summation of neighbors sharing the first constituent (neighborhood size 1) and the second constituent (neighborhood size 2) characters. The first experiment found two opposite neighborhood size effects in lexical dec...

Children’s failure to develop simple word decoding skills in early years is linked to future poor reading, school dropout, and poor health [1] [2]. Letter-sound knowledge is needed for word decoding development; however questions remain on what types of letter-sound knowledge help children decode simple words [3]. This study investigated the differences in mean number of consonant-vowel-consona...

The Reading Teacher, 62(5), pp. 384–392 © 2009 International Reading Association DOI:10.1598/RT.62.5.2 ISSN: 0034-0561 print / 1936-2714 online The most plausible explanation for vocabulary’s connection to better reading ability is that vocabulary is more than words. It is knowledge. To know a word’s meaning is to know what a word represents and to begin to understand the network of concepts th...

Hebrew-speaking students performed lexical decisions on Hebrew letter strings that appeared at different orientations. Response times evidenced a strong interaction between string length and orientation. At angular deviations of less than 60 degrees from the upright, neither orientation nor string length had any effect, suggesting that words were directly, and probably holistically, recognized....