What spelling errors can tell us about the development of processes involved in children's spelling.

Introduction: Spelling is an essential foundation for reading and writing. However, many children leave school with spelling difficulties. By understanding the processes children use when they spell, we can intervene with appropriate instruction tailored to their needs.

Orthographic forms affect speech perception in a second language: Consonant and vowel length in L2 English.

ItalianL1 speakers of EnglishL2 produce the same English sound as longer if spelled with two than with one letter, following Italian grapheme-phoneme conversion rules. Do Italian listeners perceive short and long sounds in English homophonic word pairs that are spelled with a single letter or a digraph (finish-Finnish; morning-mourning)? In Experiment 1, 50 ItalianL1-EnglishL2 bilinguals and 50 English controls performed a Consonant Perception task and a Vowel Perception Task. They heard English homophonic word pairs containing a target sound spelled with one or two letters and indicated whether the two words contained the same sounds or not.

Understanding differing outcomes from semantic and phonological interventions with children with word-finding difficulties: A group and case series study.

Developmental Language Disorder occurs in up to 10% of children and many of these children have difficulty retrieving words in their receptive vocabulary. Such word-finding difficulties (WFD) can impact social development and educational outcomes. This research aims to develop the evidence-base for supporting children with WFD and inform the design and analysis of intervention studies.

Computational modeling of interventions for developmental disorders.

We evaluate the potential of connectionist models of developmental disorders to offer insights into the efficacy of interventions. Based on a range of computational simulation results, we assess factors that influence the effectiveness of interventions for reading, language, and other cognitive developmental disorders. The analysis provides a level of mechanistic detail that is generally lacking in behavioral approaches to intervention.

Intervention for a lexical reading and spelling difficulty in two Greek-speaking primary age children.

An intervention study was carried out with two nine-year-old Greek-speaking dyslexic children. Both children were slow in reading single words and text and had difficulty in spelling irregularly spelled words. One child was also poor in non-word reading.

Intervention for children with word-finding difficulties: a parallel group randomised control trial.

Purpose: The study investigated the outcome of a word-web intervention for children diagnosed with word-finding difficulties (WFDs).

Method: Twenty children age 6-8 years with WFDs confirmed by a discrepancy between comprehension and production on the Test of Word Finding-2, were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 11) and waiting control (n = 9) groups. The intervention group had six sessions of intervention which used word-webs and targeted children's meta-cognitive awareness and word-retrieval.

Evidence for semantic involvement in regular and exception word reading in emergent readers of English.

We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-year-old children read words both in isolation and in context. Lexical knowledge was assessed using general and item-specific tasks.

HelexKids: A word frequency database for Greek and Cypriot primary school children.

In this article, we introduce HelexKids, an online written-word database for Greek-speaking children in primary education (Grades 1 to 6). The database is organized on a grade-by-grade basis, and on a cumulative basis by combining Grade 1 with Grades 2 to 6. It provides values for Zipf, frequency per million, dispersion, estimated word frequency per million, standard word frequency, contextual diversity, orthographic Levenshtein distance, and lemma frequency.

A sublexical training study for spelling in a biliterate Greek- and English-speaking child.

RI is an emergent trilingual boy, literate in Greek and English, with difficulties in reading and spelling in both languages. Assessment with non-literacy tests revealed a deficit in phonological ability and in visual memory for sequentially presented characters. RI took part in a training programme that targeted sublexical spelling processes.

Intervention for a multi-character processing deficit in a Greek-speaking child with surface dyslexia.

A case study with a 12-year-old boy, R.F., who was a monolingual speaker of Greek is reported.

Surface and phonological developmental dyslexia in Greek.

The present study examined whether equivalents of surface and phonological subtypes of developmental dyslexia could be found among a sample of 84 poor readers aged 9-12 years in Greece. Word reading latency was used as a measure of lexical skill, and nonword reading accuracy was used as a measure of nonlexical skill. A simple regression of word reading latencies on nonword reading accuracy scores was performed for 42 developing readers.

Feedforward, -backward, and neutral transparency measures for Grade 1 and Grade 2 Greek readers.

In the present study, orthographic metrics for Greek children's Grade 1 and Grade 2 reading materials were presented. Data for five transparency metrics--three of which being neither feedforward nor feedbackward--were presented and offered for use in the research of children's reading and spelling acquisition. The analysis demonstrated the complex relationships between metrics and compared the results with those obtained for the English language.

Children's printed word database: continuities and changes over time in children's early reading vocabulary.

In this paper we introduce a comprehensive database of the vocabulary in reading materials used by 5 - 9 year old children in the UK. The database is available on-line http://www.essex.

Classroom implications of recent research into literacy development: from predictors to assessment.

We outline how research into predictors of literacy underpins the development of increasingly accurate and informative assessments. We report three studies that emphasize the crucial role of speech and auditory skills on literacy development throughout primary and secondary school. Our first study addresses the effects of early childhood middle ear infections, the potential consequences for speech processing difficulties and the impact on early literacy development.

Noun and verb differences in picture naming: past studies and new evidence.

We re-examine the double dissociation view of noun-verb differences by critically reviewing past lesion studies reporting selective noun or verb deficits in picture naming, and reporting the results of a new picture naming study carried out with aphasic patients and comparison participants. Since there are theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that verb processing is more demanding than noun processing, in the review we distinguished between cases that presented with large and small differences between nouns and verbs. We argued that the latter cases may be accounted for in terms of greater difficulty in processing verbs than nouns.

Reduced orthographic learning in dyslexic adult readers: evidence from patterns of letter search.

Visual letter search performance was investigated in a group of dyslexic adult readers using a task that required detection of a cued letter target embedded within a random five-letter string. Compared to a group of skilled readers, dyslexic readers were significantly slower at correctly identifying targets located in the first and second string position, illustrating significantly reduced leftward facilitation than is typically observed. Furthermore, compared to skilled readers, dyslexic readers showed reduced sensitivity to positional letter frequency.

Object and action picture naming in three- and five-year-old children.

The objectives were to explore the often reported noun advantage in children's language acquisition using a picture naming paradigm and to explore the variables that affect picture naming performance. Participants in Experiment 1 were aged three and five years, and in Experiment 2, five years. The stimuli were action and object pictures.

Selective naming (and comprehension) deficits in Alzheimer's disease?

The study addresses the issue of the selective preservation of verbs in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Twenty three AD patients and age-matched controls named pictures of objects and actions and took part in a word-picture verification task. The results for picture naming revealed that both patients and controls were faster and produced more target responses for objects than actions.

Is action naming better preserved (than object naming) in Alzheimer's disease and why should we ask?

The present study compared object and action naming in patients with Alzheimer's dementia. We tested the hypothesis put forward in (some) previous studies that in Alzheimer's dementia the production of verbs, that is required in action naming, is better preserved than the production of nouns, that is required in object naming. The possible reason for the dissociation is that verbs are supported predominantly by frontal brain structures that may remain relatively better preserved in early Alzheimer's disease.

How long do the advantages of learning to read a transparent orthography last? An investigation of the reading skills and reading impairment of Welsh children at 10 years of age.

Spencer and Hanley (2003) showed that Welsh-speaking children aged between 5 and 7 years who were learning to read Welsh (a transparent orthography) performed significantly better at reading both real words and nonwords than did English-speaking children living in Wales who were learning to read English (a deep orthography). In this study, the reading skills of these children were reexamined three years later, during their sixth year of formal reading instruction. The children learning to read English continued to perform poorly at reading low- and medium-frequency irregular words but no differences were observed in reading regular words or nonwords.

Children's early reading vocabulary: description and word frequency lists.

Background: When constructing stimuli for experimental investigations of cognitive processes in early reading development, researchers have to rely on adult or American children's word frequency counts, as no such counts exist for English children.

Aim: The present paper introduces a database of children's early reading vocabulary, for use by researchers and teachers.

Sample: Texts from 685 books from reading schemes and story books read by 5-7 year-old children were used in the construction of the database.

Paap and Noel revisited: individual differences in independent word recognition tasks in relation to the dual-task paradigm.

Paap and Noel (1991) found that participants' pronunciation latencies were faster for low-frequency irregular words when named under a concurrent high digit memory load than when named under a low load. The effects reported by Paap and Noel haveproved difficult to replicate in subsequent studies. The present research suggests that individual differences in word recognition skill relate to who will or will not show these effects.

Children's reading of words, pseudohomophones, and other nonwords.

In Experiment 1 children aged 8-9 and 9-10 years were tested for neighbourhood and pseudohomophone effects in nonword reading. Neighbourhood effects (N effects) were robust irrespective of group or type of nonword. Pseudohomophones were read more accurately than other nonwords but this finding was robust only for the younger 8-9-year-olds.

The effects of familiarity, orthographic neighbourhood density, letter-length and graphemic complexity on children's reading accuracy.

Six to seven year-old children, divided into two groups according to reading ability, read items designed to examine the effect of orthographic characteristics on reading accuracy. Two experiments were carried out using familiar words and nonwords as stimuli. The words and nonwords had comparable orthographic structures, and the number of orthographic neighbours was manipulated.