Prior research with adult participants reported a rightward bias in the reading version of the flankers task. Here, we investigated how this bias evolves as a function of reading expertise. We tested two groups of French primary school children from Cycle 2 (grades 1 and 2) and Cycle 3 (grades 4 and 5) and one group of adult participants. In the related flanker conditions, the central target word was flanked by the same word either on the left (park park ####), the right (#### park park), or on both sides (park park park). In the unrelated conditions, the repeated flanker words were replaced by a different unrelated word. In the analysis of standardized reaction times (RTs), there was a three-way interaction between the three groups of participants and the impact of flanker relatedness as a function of the position of the related flankers. This three-way interaction reflected the significantly greater increase in effects of flanker relatedness between Cycle 2 and Cycle 3 for the bilateral flanker and the right flanker conditions compared with the left flanker condition. This suggests that the rightward bias is driven by attentional asymmetries that develop during the process of learning to read.

Increasing numbers of international students enter university education via English language bridging programs. Much research has overlooked the nature of second language reading development during a bridging program, focusing instead on the development of literacy skills of international students who already meet the language requirement for undergraduate admission. We report a longitudinal eye-movement study assessing English passage reading efficiency and comprehension in 405 Chinese-speaking bridging program students. Incoming IELTS reading scores were used as an index of baseline reading ability. Linear mixed-effects regression models fitted to global eye-movement measures and reading comprehension indicated that despite initial between-subjects differences, within-subject change at each ability level progressed at the same rate, following parallel growth trajectories. Therefore, there was significant overall reading progress during the bridging program, but no evidence that the gap between low and high ability readers either closed or widened over time.

We know a great deal about children’s first steps into reading. Here, we explore how they become more sophisticated readers, learning to read complex words. Theoretical accounts predict that one key factor is morphological awareness, or awareness of the minimal units of meaning in language. And yet empirical studies have yet to clarify whether morphological awareness has a stronger relation to the development of reading skill for words with multiple morphemes in particular (i.e., morphological decoding) or to the reading of a whole range of words. We examined this question in this study by contrasting the role of morphological awareness in the development of morphological decoding and of broader word reading skill. Participants were 197 English-speaking children who were followed from Grade 3 to 4. We conducted longitudinal analyses that included stringent autoregressive controls to capture the determinants of gains over time, as well as controls for vocabulary and phonological awareness. Structural equation modeling (SEM) path analysis with this set of controls revealed that morphological awareness predicted significant unique gains in morphological decoding from Grade 3 to 4 with no such unique contributions to broader word reading skill. These findings clarify the role of morphological awareness in supporting children in developing the ability to read morphologically complex words, supporting a more targeted role for morphology in theories of word reading development.

This study investigated the development of character transposition effects during Chinese compound word recognition via computer mouse movements instead of the conventional key presses. Empirical evidence to reveal the impacts of vocabulary knowledge, grade level, and whole word frequency on Chinese transposed-character effect is lacking. In the present study, we measured the transposed-character effect in two groups of Taiwanese children (second and fourth graders) in a mouse-tracking lexical-decision task including nonwords derived from real words by transposing two characters (e.g., “習學” from “學習” [learning]) and control nonwords in which two characters are replaced (e.g., “以修”). Our results indicate that participants showed longer mouse movement times and larger spatial attraction in recognizing transposed-character nonwords than in replaced-character nonwords, suggesting that the dominant role of whole-word representation in processing Chinese compound words. Our results also further demonstrate that how the degree of character transposition was affected by vocabulary knowledge, grade level, and word frequency.

Arabic-speaking students learn to read a transparent maʃku:l script, which provides full vowel information using letters to represent long vowels and phonemic diacritics for short vowels. Gradually, they progress to an opaque ɣayr-maʃku:l script, without diacritics. In this script, internal short vowels can be retrieved using morphological information about word patterns. The current study compared the contribution of phonological information to that of morphological information in the reading acquisition process in Arabic. Four Arabic-speaking groups (2nd, 4th, 6th grades, and adults) read three lists of pseudowords aloud. Two lists included the same morphologically based pseudowords (MPW), one maʃku:l and the second ɣayr-maʃku:l. The third list comprised matched maʃku:l nonwords (NW) with no internal morphological structure. All groups read the ɣayr-maʃku:l MPW list faster than the two other maʃku:l lists, and maʃku:l NWs were read the slowest. There was an age by list type accuracy interaction: while ɣayr-maʃku:l MPWs were read more accurately with increasing age, there were no differences between the student groups with respect to either of the other two lists. However, maʃku:l MPWs were read more accurately than maʃku:l NWs. The findings suggest that from very early on, morphology exceeds phonology, playing a crucial role in supplementing missing vowel information.

Finnish is a language with simple syllable structure but rich morphology. It was investigated whether syllables or morphemes are preferred processing units in early reading. To this end, Finnish first- and second-grade children read sentences with embedded inflected target words while their eye-movements were registered. The target words were either in essive or inessive/adessive (i.e., locative) case. The target words were either non-hyphenated, or had syllable-congruent or syllable-incongruent hyphenation. For the locatives, the syllable-incongruent hyphenation coincided with the morpheme boundary, but this was not the case for the essives. It was shown that the second-graders were slowed down by hyphenation to a larger extent than first-graders. However, there was no slowdown in gaze duration for either age group when the syllable-incongruent hyphen was morpheme-congruent. These findings suggest that Finnish readers already utilize morpheme-level information during the first grade.

Previous evidence with English beginning readers suggests that some orthographic effects, such as the orthographic neighborhood density effects, could be stronger for children than for adults. Particularly, children respond more accurately to words with many orthographic neighbors than to words with few neighbors. The magnitude of the effects for children is much higher than for adults, and some researchers have proposed that these effects could be progressively modulated according to reading expertise. The present paper explores in depth how children from 1st to 6th grade perform a lexical decision with words that are from dense or sparse orthographic neighborhoods, attending not only to accuracy measures, but also to response latencies, through a computer-controlled task. Our results reveal that children (like adults) show clear neighborhood density effects, and that these effects do not seem to depend on reading expertise. Contrarily to previous claims, the present work shows that orthographic neighborhood effects are not progressively modulated by reading skill. Further, these data strongly support the idea of a general language-independent preference for using the lexical route instead of grapheme-to-phoneme conversions, even in beginning readers. The implications of these results for developmental models in reading and for models in visual word recognition and orthographic encoding are discussed.