Previous studies have shown that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal memory span are reliable correlates of learning to read in English. However, the extent to which these different predictors have the same relative importance in different languages remains uncertain. In this article, we present the results from a 10-month longitudinal study that began just before or soon after the start of formal literacy instruction in four languages (English, Spanish, Slovak, and Czech). Longitudinal path analyses showed that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN (but not verbal memory span) measured at the onset of literacy instruction were reliable predictors, with similar relative importance, of later reading and spelling skills across the four languages. These data support the suggestion that in all alphabetic orthographies, phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN may tap cognitive processes that are important for learning to read.

Background. Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have proved useful in investigating the role of auditory processing in cognitive disorders such as developmental dyslexia, specific language impairment (SLI), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, and autism. However, laboratory recordings of auditory ERPs can be lengthy, uncomfortable, or threatening for some participants – particularly children. Recently, a commercial gaming electroencephalography (EEG) system has been developed that is portable, inexpensive, and easy to set up. In this study we tested if auditory ERPs measured using a gaming EEG system (Emotiv EPOC®, ) were equivalent to those measured by a widely-used, laboratory-based, research EEG system (Neuroscan).Methods. We simultaneously recorded EEGs with the research and gaming EEG systems, whilst presenting 21 adults with 566 standard (1000 Hz) and 100 deviant (1200 Hz) tones under passive (non-attended) and active (attended) conditions. The onset of each tone was marked in the EEGs using a parallel port pulse (Neuroscan) or a stimulus-generated electrical pulse injected into the O1 and O2 channels (Emotiv EPOC®). These markers were used to calculate research and gaming EEG system late auditory ERPs (P1, N1, P2, N2, and P3 peaks) and the mismatch negativity (MMN) in active and passive listening conditions for each participant.Results. Analyses were restricted to frontal sites as these are most commonly reported in auditory ERP research. Intra-class correlations (ICCs) indicated that the morphology of the research and gaming EEG system late auditory ERP waveforms were similar across all participants, but that the research and gaming EEG system MMN waveforms were only similar for participants with non-noisy MMN waveforms (N = 11 out of 21). Peak amplitude and latency measures revealed no significant differences between the size or the timing of the auditory P1, N1, P2, N2, P3, and MMN peaks.Conclusions. Our findings suggest that the gaming EEG system may prove a valid alternative to laboratory ERP systems for recording reliable late auditory ERPs (P1, N1, P2, N2, and the P3) over the frontal cortices. In the future, the gaming EEG system may also prove useful for measuring less reliable ERPs, such as the MMN, if the reliability of such ERPs can be boosted to the same level as late auditory ERPs.

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Indicators of letter visual similarity have been used for controlling the design of empirical and neuropsychological studies and for rigorously determining the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition. Additionally, these letter similarity/confusability matrices have been useful for studies examining more general aspects of human cognition, such as perception. Despite many letter visual-similarity matrices being available, they all have two serious limitations if they are to be used by researchers in the reading domain: (1) They have been constructed using atypical reading data obtained from speeded reading-aloud tasks and/or under degraded presentation conditions; (2) they only include letters from the English alphabet. Although some letter visual-similarity matrices have been constructed using data gathered from normal reading conditions, these either are based on old fonts, which may not resemble the letters found in modern print, or were never published. For the first time, this article presents a comprehensive letter visual-similarity/confusability matrix that has been constructed based on untimed responses to clearly presented upper-and lowercase letters that are present in many languages that use Latin-based alphabets, including Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Such a matrix will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning reading and literacy acquisition.Keywords Letter visual-similarity/confusability matrix . Latin alphabets . Reading . Literacy acquisitionIn an extensive review of the literature spanning over 120 years, Mueller and Weidemann (2012) identified more than 70 published articles that had in one way or another sought to measure letter similarity (or confusability). From this review, the authors identified three main motivations for studying letter similarity: (1) practical attempts to make written text more comprehensible, and thereby allow learners to acquire reading skill more easily; (2) empirical investigations with the goal of understanding how the visual system functions; and (3) theoretical research attempting to explain how letters are represented by the visual system or, in abstract form, by the cognitive system. Regardless of the motivations for studying letter similarity, in the majority of these studies the same basic paradigm has been used-that of presenting single letters to participants, with the task being to name the presented item. A confusion matrix is then constructed by noting how often each letter was (incorrectly) given as a response to the presented letter. The number of responses given for each stimulus-response letter pair has been assumed to be an indication of the level of similarity (or confusability) between the two letters, with more errors on a pair indicating higher similarity/confusability. One problem with this paradigm is that if the letters are presented in a visually clear manner and no time limit to make a response is imposed on the participants, fe...

The masked onset priming effect (MOPE) refers to the empirical finding that target naming is faster when the target (SIB) is preceded by a briefly presented masked prime that starts with the same letter/phoneme (suf) than when it does not (mof; Kinoshita, 2000, Experiment 1). The dual-route cascaded (DRC) computational model of reading (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) has offered an explanation for how the MOPE might occur in humans. However, there has been some empirical discrepancy regarding whether for nonword items the effect is limited to the first-letter/phoneme overlap between primes and targets or whether orthographic/phonological priming effects occur beyond the first letter/phoneme. Experiment 1 tested these two possibilities. The human results, which were successfully simulated by the DRC model, showed priming beyond the first letter/phoneme. Nevertheless, two recent versions of the DRC model made different predictions regarding the nature of these priming effects. Experiment 2 examined whether it is facilitatory, inhibitory, or both, in order to adjudicate between the two versions of the model. The human results showed that primes exert both facilitatory and inhibitory effects.

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Research on morphological processing has been mainly conducted in the single-word reading domain using the lexical-decision task. Similar research in the sentence reading domain has been conducted using eye-tracking techniques, yet the experimental paradigms used in each domain are not directly comparable. In the present study, we investigated morphological processing in single-word reading using the masked priming paradigm (Experiments 1a, 1b, 3), and in sentence reading using the fast priming paradigm in eye tracking (Experiment 2). The study was conducted in German using the same prefixed and suffixed items in both tasks. All experiments yielded an identical pattern of results, indicating early processing of the embedded stems, independently of whether these stems were combined with a prefix, a suffix, or a nonmorphological letter sequence. We interpret our findings in relation to previous results in the literature and discuss their implications for reading research both in the single-word and sentence-reading domains. (PsycINFO Database Record

The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing in the visual and auditory modality. French and German adults performed a visual and auditory lexical decision task that involved the same translation-equivalent items. The focus of the study was on nonwords, which were constructed in a way that the independent role of stems and suffixes in visual and auditory processing could be investigated. Results revealed a stem-by-modality and a suffix-by-modality interaction, indicating a more prominent role for morphology in the visual than in the auditory domain. Moreover, a significant language-by-stem interaction indicated more robust morphological processing in German than in French. The latter result supports the idea that morphological processing is influenced by the morphological productivity of a language.