Beginning reading instruction: Syllables or phonemes? An experimental training study with Arabic-speaking preliterate preschoolers.

This study addressed four research questions: (1) Does teaching using syllables or using phonemes lead to better progress in beginning reading and spelling? (2) Does the effectiveness of syllabic or phonemic instruction depend on children's preferences for these units as predicted by Ziegler and Goswami's (2005) "availability" hypothesis? (3) Do children taught via syllabic consonant-vowel (CV) units spontaneously develop insight into the phonemic basis of an alphabetic writing system, and (4) Do individual differences in reading and spelling gains in phoneme-based instruction depend more on working memory, short-term memory, and Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) owing to the greater number of units that must be rapidly retrieved and processed? To test these hypotheses, 104 preliterate preschool children were taught to read and spell using an unfamiliar script. Across 14 training sessions, children were taught using either whole CV units, phoneme units, or demiphoneme units. Retention and generalization were evaluated during training and 1 week later.

Insights from Eye Blinks into the Cognitive Processes Involved in Visual Word Recognition.

Behavioral differences in speed and accuracy between reading familiar and unfamiliar words are well-established in the empirical literature. However, these standard measures of skill proficiency are limited in their ability to capture the moment-to-moment processing involved in visual word recognition. In the present study, the effect of word familiarity was initially investigated using an eye blink rate among adults and children.

Language-universal and script-specific factors in the recognition of letters in visual crowding: The effects of lexicality, hemifield, and transitional probabilities in a right-to-left script.

Peripheral letter recognition is fundamentally limited not by the visibility of letters but by the spacing between them, i.e., 'crowding'.

A developmental study of eye movements in Hebrew word reading: the effects of word familiarity, word length, and reading proficiency.

Previous studies examining the link between visual word recognition and eye movements have shown that eye movements reflect the time-course of cognitive processes involved in reading. Whereas most studies have been undertaken in Western European languages written in the Roman alphabet, the present developmental study investigates a non-European language-Hebrew, which is written in a non-alphabetic (abjadic) script. We compared the eye-movements of children in Grades 4 to 6 ( = 30) and university students ( = 30) reading familiar real words and unfamiliar (pseudo)words of 3 letters and 5 letters in length.

Preschool morphological awareness contributes to word reading at the very earliest stages of learning to read in a transparent orthography.

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether morphological awareness measured before children are taught to read (Kindergarten in Israel) predicts reading accuracy and fluency in the middle of first grade, at the very beginning of the process of learning to read pointed Hebrew - a highly transparent orthography, and whether this contribution remains after controlling for phonemic awareness. In a longitudinal design, 680 Hebrew-speaking children were administered morphological and phonemic awareness measures at the end of the preschool year (before they were taught to read) then followed up into first grade when reading was tested in mid-year. The results indicated that even at this early point in learning to read a transparent orthography, preschool morphological awareness contributes significantly to both reading accuracy and reading fluency, even after partialling out age, non-verbal general ability, and phonemic awareness.

A pupillometric study of developmental and individual differences in cognitive effort in visual word recognition.

Throughout the history of modern psychology, the neural basis of cognitive performance, and particularly its efficiency, has been assumed to be an essential determinant of developmental and individual differences in a wide range of human behaviors. Here, we examine one aspect of cognitive efficiency-cognitive effort, using pupillometry to examine differences in word reading among adults (N = 34) and children (N = 34). The developmental analyses confirmed that children invested more effort in reading than adults, as indicated by larger and sustained pupillary responses.

Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia.

In this discussion paper, I review a number of common misconceptions about the phonological deficit theory (PDH) of dyslexia. These include the common but mistaken idea that the PDH is simply about phonemic awareness (PA), and, consequently, is a circular "pseudo"-explanation or epiphenomenon of reading difficulties. I argue that PA is only the "tip of the phonological iceberg" and that "deeper" spoken-language phonological impairments among dyslexics appear well before the onset of reading and even at birth.

Keeping an Eye on Effort: A Pupillometric Investigation of Effort and Effortlessness in Visual Word Recognition.

Rapid and seemingly effortless word recognition is a virtually unquestioned characteristic of skilled reading, yet the definition and operationalization of the concept of cognitive effort have proven elusive. We investigated the cognitive effort involved in oral and silent word reading using pupillometry among adults (Experiment 1, = 30; Experiment 2, = 20) and fourth through sixth graders (Experiment 3, = 30; Experiment 4, = 18). We compared multiple pupillary measures (mean, peak, and peak latency) for reading familiar words (real words) and unfamiliar letter strings (pseudowords) varying in length.

Learning to Spell in Arabic: The Impact of Script-Specific Visual-Orthographic Features.

Learning to spell is a challenging process, especially for young learners, in part because it relies on multiple aspects of linguistic knowledge, primarily phonological and morphological. However, alongside these universals, there are significant writing system specifics, namely, language-specific and script-specific factors that may also challenge young readers and writers (Daniels and Share, 2018). The current study focuses on the impact of four distinctive visual-orthographic features of the Arabic abjad on spelling, namely, (i) the similarity of many basic letter-forms, (ii) allography (the positional variants of the letter forms), (iii) ligaturing (the joining of letters), and (iv) non-linearity (extra-linear diacritic-like signs used to mark consonantal, short vowel and morpho-syntactic distinctions).

Learning to Read a Semitic Abjad: The Triplex Model of Hebrew Reading Development.

We introduce a model of Hebrew reading development that emphasizes both the universal and script-specific aspects of learning to read a Semitic abjad. At the universal level, the study of Hebrew reading acquisition offers valuable insights into the fundamental dilemmas of all writing systems-balancing the competing needs of the novice versus the expert reader (Share, 2008). At the script-specific level, pointed Hebrew initially employs supplementary vowel signs, providing the beginning reader a consistent, phonologically well-specified script while helping the expert-to-be unitize words and morphemes via (consonantal) spelling constancy.

Orthographic learning and self-teaching in a bilingual and biliterate context.

The aim of this study was to examine self-teaching in the context of English as a foreign language literacy acquisition. Three groups comprising 88 sixth-grade children participated. The first group consisted of Russian-Hebrew-speaking bilinguals who had acquired basic reading skills in Russian as their first language (L1) and literacy and who were literate in Hebrew as a second language.

Frost and fogs, or sunny skies? Orthography, reading, and misplaced optimalism.

I argue that the study of variability rather than invariance should head the reading research agenda, and that strong claims of orthographic "optimality" are unwarranted. I also expand briefly on Frost's assertion that an efficient orthography must represent sound and meaning, by considering writing systems as dual-purpose devices that must provide decipherability for novice readers and automatizability for the expert.

Subtypes of reading disability in a shallow orthography: a double dissociation between accuracy-disabled and rate-disabled readers of Hebrew.

Whereas most English language sub-typing schemes for dyslexia (e.g., Castles & Coltheart, 1993) have focused on reading accuracy for words varying in regularity, such an approach may have limited utility for reading disability sub-typing beyond English in which fluency rather than accuracy is the key discriminator of developmental and individual differences in reading ability.

On the Anglocentricities of current reading research and practice: the perils of overreliance on an "outlier" orthography.

In this critique of current reading research and practice, the author contends that the extreme ambiguity of English spelling-sound correspondence has confined reading science to an insular, Anglocentric research agenda addressing theoretical and applied issues with limited relevance for a universal science of reading. The unique problems posed by this "outlier" orthography, the author argues, have focused disproportionate attention on oral reading accuracy at the expense of silent reading, meaning access, and fluency, and have significantly distorted theorizing with regard to many issues-including phonological awareness, early reading instruction, the architecture of stage models of reading development, the definition and remediation of reading disability, and the role of lexical-semantic and supralexical information in word recognition. The dominant theoretical paradigm in contemporary (word) reading research--the Coltheart/Baron dual-route model (see, e.

Syllable splitting in literate and preliterate Hebrew speakers: onsets and rimes or bodies and codas?

This study examined consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllable splitting among literate (Grade 2) and preliterate (kindergarten) Hebrew speakers. Consideration of both the architecture of Hebrew orthography and phonology led to the prediction that a body-coda rather than an onset-rime subdivision would predominate. Structured and unstructured tasks confirmed the claim that there exists a subsyllabic, supraphonemic level of phonological awareness that is more accessible than individual phonemes.

Gender bias in IQ-discrepancy and post-discrepancy definitions of reading disability.

The present study investigated the hypothesis that the higher prevalence of reading disability (RD) often observed among boys is partly an artifact of gender bias in the prediction of reading from IQ. The relevant regression statistics derived from a sample of more than 900 children revealed a statistically significant intercept bias. Predicted reading scores for boys were systematically overestimated, thereby inflating IQ-reading discrepancies; the converse was found for girls.

Knowing letter names and learning letter sounds: a causal connection.

Two experiments tested the common assumption that knowing the letter names helps children learn basic letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) relation because most names contain the relevant sounds. In Experiment 1 (n=45), children in an experimental group learned English letter names for letter-like symbols. Some of these names contained the corresponding letter sounds, whereas others did not.

Orthographic learning at a glance: on the time course and developmental onset of self-teaching.

Experiment 1 examined the time course of orthographic learning among Grade 3 children. A single encounter with a novel orthographic string was sufficient to produce reliable recall of orthographic detail. Moreover, newly acquired orthographic information was retained 1 month later.

Cognitive antecedents of early reading ability: a test of the modularity hypothesis.

This study tested the hypothesis that the cognitive antecedents of word recognition are uniquely domain-specific and unrelated to higher-order domain-general cognitive abilities. This hypothesis was evaluated in a longitudinal study of 349 Hebrew-speaking children (mean age: 6.0 years) who were tested on a battery of domain-specific (phonological awareness, phonological memory, visual-orthographic processing, and early literacy) and domain-general tasks (general intelligence, higher-order reasoning, and language) at the end of kindergarten.

Orthographic learning during reading: examining the role of self-teaching.

Thirty-four second grade children read target homophonic pseudowords (e.g., slurst/slirst) in the context of real stories in a test of the self-teaching theory of early reading acquisition.