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A growing body of cross-linguistic research has suggested that morphological awareness plays a key role in both L1 and L2 word reading among bilingual readers. However, little is known about the interaction and development of L1 and L2 morphological awareness in relation to word reading. We addressed this issue by evaluating the unique contributions of L1 Chinese and L2 English morphological awareness to word reading in both Chinese and English across Grades 2 (N = 150), 5 (N = 158), and 8 (N = 159) Hong Kong Chinese–English bilingual children. Children completed five tasks of Chinese morphological awareness which tapped for compounding awareness, homophone awareness, homographic awareness, semantic radical awareness, and affix awareness, and six English morphological judgment and analogy tasks that assessed morphological awareness at three levels: inflection, derivation, and compounding. English phonological awareness, Chinese and English vocabulary, and nonverbal ability were measured as controls. Word reading was assessed in both languages. Within-language analyses revealed that Chinese morphological awareness accounted for 27, 22, and 12% of unique variances in Chinese word reading above the control measures in Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively. In contrast, English morphological awareness explained small but significant unique variances in English word reading, i.e., 4, 8, and 2%, across Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively. Critically, there were cross-language influences: Chinese morphological awareness explained 4% of unique variance in English word reading in Grade 2 after controlling for IQ, English vocabulary, English phonological awareness, and English morphological awareness; English morphological awareness explained significant variances in Chinese word reading, i.e., 4, 3, and 4% in Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively, after the relevant controls. These findings suggest a bi-directional cross-language transfer of morphological awareness to word reading in L1 Chinese and L2 English. However, the direction of its transfer may be constrained by some language-specific morphological features.

We examined ambiguity resolution in reading in Arabic. Arabic is an abjad orthography and is morphologically similar to Hebrew. However, Arabic literacy occurs in a diglossic context, and its orthography is more visually complex than Hebrew. We therefore tested to see whether hemispheric differences will be similar or different from previous findings in Hebrew. We also tested whether phonological recoding is a mandatory stage in reading Arabic. We used a divided visual field paradigm, where 32 participants performed semantic decisions on pairs of words in which the first word (presented centrally) was either a homophone (bank), heterophone (tear), or unambiguous. The second word was presented in the left, right, or central visual field. The results revealed larger effects of ambiguity for heterophones than for homophones in all conditions, and thus support the contention that phonological recoding is mandatory in reading Arabic. Hemispheric patterns were different from those found with Hebrew, and were similar in the peripheral visual fields, which can be interpreted as indicating a single processor, with the pattern indicating that this processor is the LH. The alternative hypothesis is that interhemispheric integration occurs in all conditions. The implications of these results for reading in Arabic are discussed.

Most sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters) are phonograms (phonetic compounds). A phonogram is composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, with the former usually implying the meaning of the phonogram, and the latter providing cues to its pronunciation. This study focused on the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals which are themselves free standing sinograms. Two primed naming experiments were carried out to examine whether the meanings and pronunciations of the semantic radicals embedded in phonograms were activated or not during sinogram recognition. In Experiment 1, semantically opaque phonograms were used as primes. We observed facilitatory priming effects for targets which were semantically related to the semantic radicals embedded in primes, but not to the primes themselves. These effects were present for low-frequency primes, but not for high-frequency primes. Experiment 2 used only low-frequency phonograms as primes. We observed facilitatory priming effects for targets which were homophones of the semantic radicals embedded in primes, but not of the primes themselves. These results suggest that sub-lexical semantic and phonological information of semantic radicals are activated, and that the activation processes are modulated by the lexical frequency of the host phonograms. Our study shows that sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals is similar to that of phonetic radicals, indicating no fundamental difference between sub-lexical processing of semantic and phonetic radicals, supporting the view that a radical has a unique representation irrespective of its function in the orthographic system of Taft’s model.

Insufficient knowledge of the subtle relations between words’ spellings and their phonology is widely held to be the primary limitation in developmental dyslexia. In the present study the influence of phonology on a semantic-based reading task was compared for groups of readers with and without dyslexia. As many studies have shown, skilled readers make phonology-based false-positive errors to homophones and pseudohomophones in the semantic categorization task. The basic finding was extended to children, teens, and adults with dyslexia from familial and clinically-referred samples. Dyslexics showed the same overall pattern of phonology errors and the results were consistent across dyslexia samples, across age groups, and across experimental conditions using word and nonword homophone foils. The dyslexic groups differed from chronological-age matched controls by having elevated false-positive homophone error rates overall, and weaker effects of baseword frequency. Children with dyslexia also made more false-positive errors to spelling control foils. These findings suggest that individuals with dyslexia make use of phonology when making semantic decisions both to word homophone and non-word pseudohomophone foils and that dyslexics lack adequate knowledge of actual word spellings, compared to chronological-age and reading-level matched control participants.

We investigated whether children who were learning to read simultaneously in English and French activate phonological representations from only the language in which they are reading or from both of their languages. Children in French Immersion programs in Grade 3 were asked to name aloud cognates, interlingual homographs, interlingual homophones, and matched control words. Half of the participants performed the task in English, their first oral language, and half performed the task in French. Control monolingual children in each language were also tested. In the French reading task, fewer errors were observed for cognates and interlingual homophones than for matched control words, whereas more errors were produced for interlingual homographs than matched controls. Only the inhibitory interlingual homograph effect was observed in the English reading task. These data provide evidence that phonological activation in bilinguals is not language selective. The locus of each of these effects in the bilingual word recognition system is discussed.

The current study examined the nature of deaf readers’ phonological processing during online word recognition, and how this compares to similar effects in hearing individuals. Unlike many previous studies on phonological activation, we examined whether deaf readers activated phonological representations for words as opposed to pseudohomophones. Both hearing and deaf adults performed lexical decisions on homophones and control words in the context of either pseudoword foils (e.g., CLANE) or pseudohomophone foils (e.g., BRANE). As expected, hearing readers responded more slowly to homophones than to control words in both non-word contexts, reflecting phonological activation during reading. In contrast, deaf readers responded more slowly to homophones than to control words in the pseudohomophone foil context, but not in the pseudoword foil context. This finding suggests that deaf readers are able to activate phonological representations; however the nature of these representations appears to be more coarse-grained in deaf readers.

Previous cross-language research has focused on L1 phonological processing and its relation to L2 reading. Less extensive is the research on the effect that L1 orthographic processing skill has on L2 reading and spelling. This study was designed to investigate how reading and spelling acquisition in English (L2) is influenced by phonological and orthographic processing skills in Spanish (L1) in 89 Spanish-English bilingual children in grades 2 and 3. Comparable measures in English and Spanish tapping phonological and orthographic processing were administered to the bilingual children. We found that cross-language phonological and orthographic transfer occurs from Spanish to English. Specifically, the Spanish phoneme deletion task contributed a significant amount of unique variance to English word reading and spelling, for both real words and pseudowords. The Spanish homophone choice task predicted English reading, but not spelling. Taken together, these results suggest that there are shared phonological and orthographic processes in bilingual reading; however, orthographic patterns may be language specific, thereby not likely to transfer to spelling performance.

The purpose of this study was to assess the role that phonological, orthographic, and contextual sources of information play in a group of adults who were learning to read compared to adult skilled readers. Participants read short paragraphs that contained a correct homophone, an incorrect homophone, or a spelling control. Target words were orthographically similar or dissimilar, and they appeared in context that predicted the target or was neutral with respect to the target. The pattern of data obtained for skilled readers was consistent with past work (Rayner et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 24(2), 476–497, 1998). Skilled readers showed no reading time differences between the correct homophone and the incorrect homophone, as long as the two were orthographically similar, but reading times on these words were faster than the spelling control condition. The pattern of data for the adults who were learning to read was different. These readers were actually better at noticing that an incorrect version of the homophone was present. Importantly, we did find consistent significant differences between the incorrect homophone condition and the spelling control condition. This suggests the adults who were learning to read use phonological codes during word recognition, but they do so less efficiently than skilled readers.

Investigations of reading have focussed largely on two component processes, phonological processing and orthographic processing. However, a number of unresolved issues have hampered progress in the investigation of these abilities. Three such issues that formed the focus of the present study were (1) the extent to which tasks used to operationalise orthographic processing measure the same construct, (2) the extent to which tasks from a range of phonological processing domains measure the same construct, and (3) the degree to which orthographic processing tasks reflect orthographic processes independent of extraneous phonological operations, and conversely, phonological processing tasks measure phonological processes independent of orthographic processes. To address these questions, a variety of tasks used to evaluate orthographic processing (orthographic verification, homophone verification, nonlexical choice, irregular word reading, irregular word spelling), phonological processing (phoneme deletion, phonological choice, nonword reading, nonword spelling) and related domains (e.g., word identification, IQ) were administered to 177 children from Grades 3, 4 and 5. Factor analysis conducted using accuracy data revealed that orthographic processing tasks congregate along a single factor, while phonological processing tasks congregate along another, separate factor, viewed as evidence for the construct validity of orthographic processing and phonological processing, respectively. When response-time data were analysed, these same tasks did not differentiate on the basis of their orthographic and phonological demands, but rather in terms of their more general task demands. Additionally, results reveal that some phonological processing and orthographic processing tasks measure their respective construct with a greater degree of purity than do others. It is recommended that these tasks be used in future research.

Two experiments investigated the effect of kanji morphemic homophony on lexical decision and naming. Effects were examined from both the left-hand and right-hand positions of Japanese two-kanji compound words. The number of homophones affected the processing of compound words in the same way for both tasks. For left-hand kanji, fewer morphemic homophones led to faster lexical decision and whole-word naming. For right-hand kanji, the number of morphemic homophones did not affect either lexical decision or naming. This effect of homophonic density suggested that, when a kanji-compound word is to be processed, phonological information of its kanji constituents is automatically activated and reverberates back to generate a series of orthographic representations of kanji morphemic homophones, but not in a completely parallel fashion.

At what level of orthographic representation is phonology linked in the lexicon? Is it at the whole word level, the syllable level, letter level, etc.? This question can be addressed by comparing the two scripts used in Korean, logographic hanja and alphabetic/syllabic hangul, on a task where judgments must be made about the phonology of a visually presented word. Three experiments are reported that used a "homophone decision task" and manipulated the sublexical relationship between orthography and phonology in hanja and hangul ,a s well as the lexical status of the stimuli. For both hanja and hangul word targets, subjects showed a high error rate in correctly judging that there was another word identically pronounced with it when sublexical information was non-supportive of whole-word homophony. It is concluded that the process of making a homophone decision reflects the relationship between ortho- graphy and phonology as mediated through sublexical units activated from orthography to phonology and vice versa (called "Orthography-Phonology-Orthography Rebound" or "OPO Rebound"). The results are explained and discussed within a multilevel interactive activation model with orthographic units linked to phonological units at each level.

Verstaen, Humphreys, Olson and D'Ydewalle ((1995) Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 335-356) reported null phonemic masking effects with homophone targets under conditions discouraging reliance on phonology. They attributed these null effects to the absence of reliance on phonology, concluding that reliance on phonology may be strategic- ally controlled. Two studies using Verstaen et al.'s method occasionally replicate these null phonemic masking effects, but challenge their interpretation. The emergence of null phon- emic masking effects was unrelated to the strategy manipulation. Conversely, evidence for phonology emerged in homophone errors regardless of the strategy manipulation and despite null phonemic masking effects. Our findings reflect an inherent instability in the perception of homophones. We demonstrate that this instability is directly due to reliance on phonology, rather than to its control.

Six different measures of orthographic processing (three different letter string choice tasks, two orthographic choice tasks, and a homophone choice task) were administered to thirty-nine children who had also been administered the word recognition subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test and a comprehensive battery of tasks assessing phonological processing skill (four measures of phonological sensitivity, nonword repetition, and pseudoword reading). The six orthographic tasks displayed moderate convergence – forming one reasonably coherent factor. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that a composite measure of orthographic processing skill predicted variance in word recognition after variance accounted for by the phonological processing measures had been partialed out. A measure of print exposure predictedvariance in orthographic processing after the variance in phonologicalprocessing had been partialed out.

Genetic influences on reading are investigated in a sample of 285, 13 year old twins. Using a multiple regression procedure, the heritability of disability (hp2 fg) for Reading Recognition was found to be non-significant. However the hp2 fg for spelling disability was found to be 0.58 (P < 0.05), after controlling for individual differences in IQ. The twins in this study were an unselected sample from the general population. Therefore it was possible to estimate hp2 fg for differing degrees of severity of disability. These analyses showed that for spelling but not for Reading Recognition or Reading Composite, there were substantial genetic contributions to all levels of disability. For indices of Orthographic Coding there were no significant values of hp2 fg. In contrast measures of Phonological Coding and Homophone Recognition have consistently high values of hp2 fg. More detailed analyses suggested that there were possibly two independent aspects of phonological ability, each influenced by genetic factors.