A literacy-related color-specific deficit in rapid automatized naming: Evidence from neurotypical completely illiterate and literate adults.

There is a robust positive relationship between reading skills and the time to name aloud an array of letters, digits, objects, or colors as quickly as possible. A convincing and complete explanation for the direction and locus of this association remains, however, elusive. In this study, we investigated rapid automatized naming (RAN) of everyday objects and basic color patches in neurotypical illiterate and literate adults.

Literacy improves short-term serial recall of spoken verbal but not visuospatial items - Evidence from illiterate and literate adults.

It is widely accepted that specific memory processes, such as serial-order memory, are involved in written language development and predictive of reading and spelling abilities. The reverse question, namely whether orthographic abilities also affect serial-order memory, has hardly been investigated. In the current study, we compared 20 illiterate people with a group of 20 literate matched controls on a verbal and a visuospatial version of the Hebb paradigm, measuring both short- and long-term serial-order memory abilities.