Previous studies implicate suprasegmental phonology in reading acquisition. However, little is known about how suprasegmental sensitivity develops or how it contributes to reading. Here, 130 Spanish primary-school children participated in this 2-year longitudinal study. Nonlinguistic rhythm, lexical-stress sensitivity and metrical-stress…

In polysyllabic languages the assignment of stress is crucial for understanding the reading process. Here we review empirical evidence, drawn mainly from studies on Italian, and discuss critical issues in understanding reading. We first discuss the lexical and sublexical mechanisms responsible for stress assignment and propose that the former is…

Dyslexic difficulties in lexical stress were compared to difficulties in segmental phonology. Twenty-nine adolescents with dyslexia and 29 typically developing adolescents, matched on age and nonverbal ability, were assessed on reading, spelling, phonological and stress awareness, rapid naming, and short-term memory. Group differences in stress…

In Kannada, visual features are arranged in blocks called "akshara," making this a visually more complex writing system than typical alphabetic orthographies. Akshara knowledge was assessed concurrently and 8 months later in 113 children in the first years of reading instruction (aged 4-7 years). Mixed effects logistic regression models…

Limited evidence supports the external validity of the distinction between developmental phonological and surface dyslexia. We previously identified children ages 8 to 13 meeting criteria for these subtypes (Peterson, Pennington, & Olson, 2013) and now report on their reading and related skills approximately 5 years later. Longitudinal…

We report two experiments that investigated whether phonological and/or orthographic shifts in a base word interfere with morphological processing by French 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders and adults (as a control group) along the time course of visual word recognition. In both experiments, prime-target pairs shared four possible relationships:…

The study investigated cognitive deficits associated with dyslexia and familial risk of dyslexia (endophenotypes) by comparing children from families with and without a history of dyslexia. Eighty-eight school-aged children were assessed on measures of phonology, language and rapid automatized naming. A series of regression analyses with family…

In a cross-sectional study, we examined the relationship between the quality of lexical representations and text comprehension skill in German primary school children (Grades 1-4). We measured the efficiency and accuracy of orthographical, phonological, and meaning representations by means of computerized tests. Text comprehension skill was…

The present study investigated the relationships between lexical access, reading fluency, and comprehension. Two components of speed of lexical access were studied: phonological and semantic. Previous studies have mainly investigated these components of lexical access separately. The present study examined both components in naming tasks--with…

Does the intensification of what can be called "language-specific speech perception" around reading onset occur as a function of maturation or experience? Preschool 5-year-olds with no school experience, 5-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, 6-year-olds with 6 months' schooling, and 6-year-olds with 18 months' schooling were tested on native and…

Deaf people often achieve low levels of reading skills. The hypothesis that the use of phonological codes is associated with good reading skills in deaf readers is not yet fully supported in the literature. We investigated skilled and less skilled adult deaf readers' use of orthographic and phonological codes in reading. Experiment 1 used a masked…

This article examines the relationship between individual differences in speech perception and sublexical/phonological processing in reading. We used an auditory phoneme identification task in which a /ba/-/pa/ syllable continuum measured sensitivity to classify participants into three performance groups: poor, medium, and good categorizers. A…

This article queries whether consonant sonority (sonorant vs. obstruent) and status (coda vs. onset) within intervocalic clusters influence syllable-based segmentation strategies. We used a modified version of the illusory conjunction paradigm to test whether French beginning, intermediate, and advanced readers were sensitive to an optimal…

The effect of phonology and semantics on word learning in 5- and 6-year-old children was explored. In Experiment 1, children learned to read words varying in spelling-sound consistency and imageability. Consistency affected performance on early trials, whereas imageability affected performance on later trials. Individual differences among children…

The spellings of 39 profoundly deaf users of cochlear implants, aged 6 to 12 years, were compared with those of 39 hearing peers. When controlled for age and reading ability, the error rates of the 2 groups were not significantly different. Both groups evinced phonological spelling strategies, performing better on words with more typical…