Impaired ability in visual-spatial attention in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia

Many studies demonstrated that alphabetic language speaking children with developmental dyslexia had a deficit in visual-spatial attention, especially in rapid orienting of the attentional spotlight. Chinese, as a logographic language, is characterized as highly visual-spatial complexity. To date, few studies explored the visual-spatial attention of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia. The present study examined the visual-spatial attention of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia using the visual search task. The results showed that Chinese children with developmental dyslexia had poor performances in conjunction search, indicating that they had a deficit in the rapid orienting of visual-spatial attention. Meanwhile, only the conjunction search was a significant predictor of Chinese characters reading when other variables were controlled. These results indicated that Chinese dyslexic children had a deficit in visual-spatial attention, and visual-spatial attention played a special role in Chinese reading development.

LexiCAL: A calculator for lexical variables

While a number of tools have been developed for researchers to compute the lexical characteristics of words, extant resources are limited in their useability and functionality. Specifically, some tools require users to have some prior knowledge of some aspects of the applications, and not all tools allow users to specify their own corpora. Additionally, current tools are also limited in terms of the range of metrics that they can compute. To address these methodological gaps, this article introduces LexiCAL, a fast, simple, and intuitive calculator for lexical variables. Specifically, LexiCAL is a standalone executable that provides options for users to calculate a range of theoretically influential surface, orthographic, phonological, and phonographic metrics for any alphabetic language, using any user-specified input, corpus file, and phonetic system. LexiCAL also comes with a set of well-documented Python scripts for each metric, that can be reproduced and/or modified for other research purposes.

Analysis on types of spelling errors in true Tibetan characters

Spelling error checking is a challenging research topic with a wide range of applications such as text editing, word processing, spell checking, teaching, etc. As an alphabetic language, spelling errors in Tibetan could be categorized into three types, namely, non-true type, true type, and punctuation misuse. In order to study true Tibetan syllable spelling error in much more depth, the article analyses the types of Tr u e Tibetan syllable spelling errors based on Tibetan word formation rules, grammar and semantic features laying a foundation for Tibetan spelling error checking research.

A cross-linguistic comparison of category and letter fluency: Mandarin and English

Verbal fluency tasks are widely applied in a variety of languages, but whether the quality and quantity of responses are comparable across structurally different writing systems is debatable. For example, since there are no letters in a logographic, non-alphabetic language such as Chinese, the mechanisms speakers use to generate a list of words in a letter fluency task might be structurally different than those used by speakers of alphabetic languages. In this study, we investigated lexical retrieval strategies and approaches in letter and category fluency tasks among monolingual Mandarin speakers compared to monolingual English speakers. We found that the responses of Mandarin speakers are both qualitatively and quantitatively different in letter fluency, and qualitatively different in category fluency. These results suggest that differences in task completion among non-English-speaking populations are important to consider when using this extensively utilised cognitive and linguistic measure in research and clinic.

So, Morphological Awareness Contributes to Reading in Brazilian Portuguese?

The present study aims to answer a recently raised controversy regarding the role that morphological awareness has to reading skills acquisition in Brazilian Portuguese. The aim was to investigate whether morphological awareness contributes to reading after controlling for non-verbal intelligence and phonological awareness in Brazilian Portuguese variables. The study included 52 elementary school students enrolled in a public school in the municipality of São Gonçalo, state of Rio de Janeiro. The hierarchical regression analyses showed that derivational morphological awareness contributes to reading independently of phonological processing and non-verbal ability. The results of this study indicate that morphological awareness contributes to reading words but not to reading comprehension. The results of this study corroborate with the hypothesis that even in an alphabetic language, such as Portuguese, morphological awareness is important to reading acquisition.

Adapting Phonological Awareness Interventions for Children With Down Syndrome Based on the Behavioral Phenotype: A Promising Approach?

Many children with Down syndrome demonstrate deficits in phonological awareness, a prerequisite to learning to read in an alphabetic language. The purpose of this study was to determine whether adapting a commercially available phonological awareness program to better align with characteristics associated with the behavioral phenotype of Down syndrome would increase children's learning of phonological awareness, letter sounds, and words. Five children with Down syndrome, ages 6 to 8 years, participated in a multiple baseline across participants single case design experiment in which response to an adapted phonological awareness intervention was compared with response to the nonadapted program. Results indicate a functional relation between the adapted program and phonological awareness. Suggestions for future research and implications for practice are provided.

Bilingual experience modulates hemispheric lateralization in visual word processing

Previous studies showed reduced hemispheric asymmetry in face perception in bilinguals compared with monolinguals, suggesting that hemispheric asymmetry in visual stimulus processing may be modulated by language reading experience. Here we examined whether this phenomenon can also be observed in bilinguals with different language backgrounds. We compared English monolinguals, European–English bilinguals (who know two alphabetic languages), and Chinese–English bilinguals (who have mastered a logographic and an alphabetic language) in an English word sequential matching task. We showed that European–English bilinguals had a stronger right visual field/left hemispheric advantage than the other two groups, suggesting that different language experiences can influence how visual words are processed in the brain. In addition, by using a computational model that implements a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception, we showed that this lateralization difference could be accounted for by the difference in participants’ vocabulary size and the difference in word-to-sound mapping between alphabetic and logographic languages.