Writing proficiency in English as L2 in Spanish children with dyslexia.

Different studies have demonstrated that people with dyslexia have difficulties in acquiring fluent reading and writing. These problems are also evident when they learn a second language. The aim of our study was to investigate if there is a linguistic transfer effect for writing in children with dyslexia when they face tasks in English (L2), as well as the possible influence of other linguistic skills (spelling, vocabulary and reading) in English (L2) and in Spanish (L1).

Dynamics of Sentence Handwriting in Dyslexia: The Impact of Frequency and Consistency.

Previous literature has indicated that linguistic and motor processes influence each other during written sentence production, and that the scope of this influence varies according to spelling ability or cognitive resources available. This study investigated how the spelling deficits associated with dyslexia affect the dynamics of the interaction between central and peripheral processes and the level of anticipation that can be observed in word spelling in the context of a sentence to dictation task. Children 9-12-year-olds with and without dyslexia wrote sentences to dictation in which the lexical frequency and phonology-to-orthography consistency of the last word (target) were manipulated.

Writing Impairments in Spanish Children With Developmental Dyslexia.

This study investigated which components of the writing production process are impaired in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia (DD) aged 8 to 12 years. Children with and without dyslexia ( = 60) were assessed in their use of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the orthographic working memory system by manipulating lexical frequency, phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency, and word length in a copying task and a spelling-to-dictation task. Results revealed that children with dyslexia produced longer written latencies than chronological age-matched (CA) controls, more errors than CA and reading age-matched (RA) controls, and writing durations similar to CA controls.

The Embodied Penman: Effector-Specific Motor-Language Integration During Handwriting.

Several studies have illuminated how processing manual action verbs (MaVs) affects the programming or execution of concurrent hand movements. Here, to circumvent key confounds in extant designs, we conducted the first assessment of motor-language integration during handwriting-a task in which linguistic and motoric processes are co-substantiated. Participants copied MaVs, non-manual action verbs, and non-action verbs as we collected measures of motor programming and motor execution.

Constituent frequency effects in the written production of Spanish compound words.

The debate about whether compound words are accessed as whole words or via their constituents remains unresolved, especially in the field of language production. In this study, three experiments used a copying task to examine whether compound words are accessed via their constituents in handwriting production. In Experiment 1, production of compound words and noncompounds was compared.

The impact of word frequency on peripheral processes during handwriting: A matter of age.

Although several studies have found that the sublexical route of spelling has an effect on handwriting movements, the ability of lexical variables to modulate peripheral processes during writing is less clear. This study addresses the hypothesis that word frequency affects writing durations only during writing acquisition, and that at some point of development, the handwriting system becomes a relatively autonomous system unaffected by lexical variables. Spanish children attending Grades 2, 4, and 6 performed a spelling-to-dictation and a copy task in which word frequency was manipulated.

Spelling impairments in Spanish dyslexic adults.

Spelling deficits have repeatedly been observed in children with dyslexia. However, the few studies addressing this issue in dyslexic adults have reported contradictory results. We investigated whether Spanish dyslexics show spelling deficits in adulthood and which components of the writing production process might be impaired in developmental dyslexia.

Effects of grapheme-to-phoneme probability on writing durations.

The relative involvement of the lexical and sublexical routes across different writing tasks remains a controversial topic in the field of handwriting production research. The present article reports two experiments examining whether or not the probability of a grapheme-to-phoneme (G-P) mapping affected production during copy of polyvalent graphemes embedded in French (Exps. 1a and 1b) and Spanish (Exp.

The interaction between central and peripheral processes in handwriting production.

Written production studies investigating central processing have ignored research on the peripheral components of movement execution, and vice versa. This study attempts to integrate both approaches and provide evidence that central and peripheral processes interact during word production. French participants wrote regular words (e.

Sublexical and lexico-syntactic factors in gender access in Spanish.

The influence of sublexical and lexico-syntactic factors during the grammatical gender assignment process in Spanish was studied in two experiments using the gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the regularity of the ending of gender-marked nouns (masculine nouns ended in -o and feminine nouns ended in -a) and of nouns with gender-correlated but unmarked word-endings (e.g.

Phonological effects in handwriting production: evidence from the implicit priming paradigm.

In the present article, we report 3 experiments using the odd-man-out variant of the implicit priming paradigm, aimed at determining the role played by phonological information during the handwriting process. Participants were asked to write a small set of words learned in response to prompts. Within each block, response words could share initial segments (constant homogeneous) or not (heterogeneous).

Qualitative differences in the representation of abstract versus concrete words: evidence from the visual-world paradigm.

In the present visual-world experiment, participants were presented with visual displays that included a target item that was a semantic associate of an abstract or a concrete word. This manipulation allowed us to test a basic prediction derived from the qualitatively different representational framework that supports the view of different organizational principles for concrete and abstract words in semantic memory. Our results confirm the assumption of a primary organizational principle based on association for abstract words, different from the semantic similarity principle proposed for concrete words, and provide the first piece of evidence in support of this view obtained from healthy participants.