Do length and transposed-letter effects reflect developmental changes on reading acquisition in a transparent orthography? Can computational models of visual word recognition accommodate these changes? To answer these questions, we carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment with Spanish beginning, intermediate, and adult readers (N=36, 44, and 39; average age: 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively). Target words were either short or long (6.5 vs. 8.5 letters), and transposed-letter primes were formed by the transposition of two letters (e.g. aminal-ANIMAL) or by the substitution of two letters (orthographic control: arisal-ANIMAL). Children showed a robust length effect (i.e. long words were read slower than short words) that vanished in adults. In addition, both children and young adults showed a transposed-letter priming effect relative to the control condition. A robust transposed-letter priming effect was also observed in non-word reading, which strongly suggests that this effect occurs at an early prelexical level. Taken together, the results reveal that children evolve from a letter-by-letter reading to a direct lexical access and that the lexical decision task successfully captures the changing strategies used by beginning, intermediate, and adult readers. We examine the implications of these findings for the recent models of visual word recognition.

The influence of addition and deletion neighbors on visual word identification was investigated in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 used Spanish stimuli. In Experiment 1, lexical decision latencies were slower and less accurate for words and nonwords with higher-frequency deletion neighbors (e.g., jugar in juzgar), relative to control stimuli. Experiment 2 showed a similar interference effect for words and nonwords with higher-frequency addition neighbors (e.g., conejo, which has the addition neighbor consejo), relative to control stimuli. Experiment 3 replicated this addition neighbor interference effect in a lexical decision experiment with English stimuli. Across all three experiments, interference effects were always evident for addition/deletion neighbors with word-outer overlap, usually present for those with word-initial overlap, but never present for those with word-final overlap. Experiment 4 replicated the addition/deletion neighbor inhibitory effects in a Spanish sentence reading task in which the participants' eye movements were monitored. These findings suggest that conventional orthographic neighborhood metrics should be redefined. In addition to its methodological implications, this conclusion has significant theoretical implications for input coding schemes and the mechanisms underlying word recognition. Keywords: visual word recognition, lexical inhibition, neighborhood effects, orthographic input coding, SOLAR modelIn the past decade, cracking the orthographic code has become a key question for researchers in visual word recognition and reading (see Grainger, 2008, for a recent review). The origins of this quest can be traced 3 decades ago, when Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, and Besner (1977) reported an experiment that has come to be considered a classic study in the field of visual word identification. To investigate lexical access procedures, Coltheart and colleagues manipulated an orthographic similarity metric that they labeled "N". The N metric had previously been suggested by Landauer and Streeter (1973) as a measure of the number of close "neighbors" of a stimulus, and was computed by counting the number of words that can be created by changing a single letter of the stimulus. For example, N ϭ 10 for the word river (which has an orthographic neighborhood that includes the words diver, liver, rover, rider, and rivet), whereas N ϭ 1 for the word drive, as only a single word (drove) can be formed by substituting a single letter. In a lexical decision task, Coltheart et al. (1977) found that N had no effect on the latency of "Yes" responses, but that "No" responses were significantly slower to large-N nonwords than to small-N nonwords. This was interpreted as evidence against a serial search model and in favor of a parallel access model like Morton's (1970) logogen model. It was argued that fixating a written word leads to the automatic activation of its neighbors, and that this lexical activation made it harder to reject large-N nonwords than small-N nonwords.In the years since Colth...

Reading a text without spaces in an alphabetic language causes disruption at the levels of word identification and eye movement control. In the present experiment, we examined how word discriminability affects the pattern of eye movements when reading unspaced text in an alphabetic language. More specifically, we designed an experiment in which participants read three types of sentences: normally written sentences, regular unspaced sentences, and alternatingbold unspaced sentences. Although there was a reading cost in the unspaced sentences relative to the normally written sentences, this cost was much smaller in alternatingbold unspaced sentences than in regular unspaced sentences.

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This study investigates whether orthographic consistency and transparency of languages have an impact on the development of reading strategies and reading sub-skills (i.e. phonemic awareness and visual attention span) in bilingual children. We evaluated 21 French (opaque)-Basque (transparent) bilingual children and 21 Spanish (transparent)-Basque (transparent) bilingual children at Grade 2, and 16 additional children of each group at Grade 5. All of them were assessed in their common language (i.e. Basque) on tasks measuring word and pseudoword reading, phonemic awareness and visual attention span skills. The Spanish speaking groups showed better Basque pseudoword reading and better phonemic awareness abilities than their French speaking peers, but only in the most difficult conditions of the tasks. However, on the visual attention span task, the French-Basque bilinguals showed the most efficient visual processing strategies to perform the task. Therefore, learning to read in an additional language affected differently Basque literacy skills, depending on whether this additional orthography was opaque (e.g. French) or transparent (e.g. Spanish). Moreover, we showed that the most noteworthy effects of Spanish and French orthographic transparency on Basque performance were related to the size of the phonological and visual grain used to perform the tasks.