Substantial research across Indo-European languages suggests that readers display a degree of uncertainty in letter position coding. For example, readers perceive transposedletter stimuli such as jugde as similar to their base words (e.g. judge). However, tolerance to disruptions of letter order is not apparent in all languages, suggesting that critical aspects of the writing system may shape the nature of position coding. We investigated readers' tolerance to these disruptions in Korean, a writing system characterized by a high degree of orthographic confusability. Results of three Korean masked priming experiments revealed robust identity priming effects, but no indication of priming due to shared letters or syllables in different positions. Two further masked priming experiments revealed where the Korean findings deviate from English. These results support the claim that the nature of the writing system influences the precision of orthographic representations used in reading. Public Significance StatementIt is widely reported that adults are tolerant to disruptions of letter order in reading. This research demonstrates that this tolerance does not extend to Korean reading. These data suggest that the reading system is shaped by fundamental characteristics of writing systems.

Despite some remarkable recent discoveries, the Mesozoic fossil record of salamanders remains limited, particularly for the Jurassic. Here we describe the first articulated salamander skeleton from the Jurassic of Euramerica, recovered from Upper Jurassic deposits of the Morrison Formation, Dinosaur National Monument, USA. The specimen was studied using both conventional methods and high-resolution computed tomography. It shows a combination of primitive and derived character states that distinguish it from all known Mesozoic salamanders and which permit the erection of a new genus and species, Iridotriton hechti . The derived states (including the presence of spinal nerve foramina in the tail) suggest a position on the stem of the Salamandroidea. Together with microvertebrate material from Britain, Portugal, and North America, this specimen confirms the presence of both stem-and crowngroup salamanders in Euramerica from the Middle Jurassic (Bathonian) onwards, paralleling their evolution in Central and eastern Asia. This, in turn, provides qualified support for the current vicariance model of salamander evolution whereby basal caudates on an undivided Laurasian plate became separated into two populations by the incursion of the Turgai Sea in the Middle Jurassic, yielding Cryptobranchoidea in Asia and Salamandroidea in Euramerica.

There is profound and long-standing debate over the role of explicit instruction in reading acquisition. In this research, we investigated the impact of teaching regularities in the writing system explicitly rather than relying on learners to discover these regularities through text experience alone. Over 10 days, 48 adults learned to read novel words printed in two artificial writing systems. One group learned spelling-to-sound and spelling-to-meaning regularities solely through experience with the novel words, whereas the other group received a brief session of explicit instruction on these regularities before training commenced. Results showed that virtually all participants who received instruction performed at ceiling on tests that probed generalization of underlying regularities. In contrast, despite up to 18 hr of training on the novel words, less than 25% of discovery learners performed on par with those who received instruction. These findings illustrate the dramatic impact of teaching method on outcomes during reading acquisition.

There is substantial debate around the nature of letter position coding in reading. Research on a variety of Indo-European languages suggests uncertainty in position coding; for example, readers perceive transposed-letter stimuli (jugde) as similar to their base words (judge). However, these effects are not apparent for all languages. We developed a powerful new method to delineate how specific properties of a writing system shape the representation of letter position. Two groups of 24 adults learned to read novel words printed in artificial scripts. One group learned a dense orthography (i.e. with many anagrams) and one group learned a sparse orthography (i.e. no anagrams). Following four days of training, participants showed a larger transposed-letter effect in the sparse orthography than in the dense orthography. These results challenge existing models of orthographic processing in reading, and support the claim that orthographic representations are shaped by the nature of the writing system.

Humans have a remarkable capacity to finely control the muscles of the larynx, via distinct patterns of cortical topography and innervation that may underpin our sophisticated vocal capabilities compared with non-human primates. Here, we investigated the behavioural and neural correlates of laryngeal control, and their relationship to vocal expertise, using an imitation task that required adjustments of larynx musculature during speech. Highly trained human singers and non-singer control participants modulated voice pitch and vocal tract length (VTL) to mimic auditory speech targets, while undergoing real-time anatomical scans of the vocal tract and functional scans of brain activity. Multivariate analyses of speech acoustics, larynx movements and brain activation data were used to quantify vocal modulation behaviour and to search for neural representations of the two modulated vocal parameters during the preparation and execution of speech. We found that singers showed more accurate task-relevant modulations of speech pitch and VTL (i.e. larynx height, as measured with vocal tract MRI) during speech imitation; this was accompanied by stronger representation of VTL within a region of the right somatosensory cortex. Our findings suggest a common neural basis for enhanced vocal control in speech and song. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.