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In recognition memory, retrieval is thought to occur by computing the global similarity of the probe to each of the studied items. However, to date, very few global similarity models have employed perceptual representations of words despite the fact that false recognition errors for perceptually similar words have consistently been observed. In this work, we integrate representations of letter strings from the reading literature with global similarity models. Specifically, we employed models of absolute letter position (slot codes and overlap models) and relative letter position (closed and open bigrams). Each of the representations was used to construct a global similarity model that made contact with responses and RTs at the individual word level using the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) model (Brown & Heathcote Cognitive Psychology, 57 , 153-178, 2008). Relative position models were favored in three of the four datasets and parameter estimates suggested additional influence of the initial letters in the words. When semantic representations from the word2vec model were incorporated into the models, results indicated that orthographic representations were almost equally consequential as semantic representations in determining inter-item similarity and false recognition errors, which undermines previous suggestions that long-term memory is primarily driven by semantic representations. The model was able to modestly capture individual word variability in the false alarm rates, but there were limitations in capturing variability in the hit rates that suggest that the underlying representations require extension.

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When acquiring novel spoken words, English-speaking children generate preliminary orthographic representations even before seeing the words' spellings (Wegener et al., 2018). Interestingly, these orthographic skeletons are generated even when novel words' spellings are uncertain, at least in transparent languages like Spanish (Jevtovic et al., 2022). Here we investigate whether this process depends on the orthographic rules of the language, and specifically, whether orthographic skeletons for words with uncertain spellings are generated even when the probability of generating an incorrect representation is high. Forty-six French adults first acquired novel words via aural instruction and were then presented with words' spellings in a self-paced reading task. Importantly, novel words were presented in their unique (consistent words) or one of their two possible spellings (preferred and unpreferred inconsistent words). A significant reading advantage observed for aurally acquired words indicates that participants indeed generated orthographic representations before encountering novel words' spellings. However, while no differences in reading times were found for aurally acquired words with unique and those presented in their preferred spellings, unpreferred spellings yielded significantly longer reading times. This shows that orthographic skeletons for words with multiple spellings were generated even in a language in which the risk of generating an incorrect representation is high. This finding raises a possibility that generating orthographic skeletons during spoken word learning may be beneficial. In line with this conclusion is the finding showing that - in interaction with good phonological short-term memory capacity - generating orthographic skeletons is linked to better word recall.

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Brain plasticity implies that readers of different orthographies can have different reading networks. Theoretical models suggest that reading acquisition in transparent orthographies relies on mapping smaller orthographic units to phonology, than reading opaque orthographies; but what are the neural mechanisms underlying this difference? Hebrew has a transparent (pointed) script used for beginners, and a non-transparent script used for skilled readers. The current study examined the developmental changes in brain regions associated with phonological and orthographic processes during reading pointed and un-pointed words. Our results highlight some changes that are universal in reading development, such as a developmental increase in frontal involvement (in bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) pars opercularis), and increase in left asymmetry (in IFG pars opercularis and superior temporal gyrus, STG) of the reading network. Our results also showed a developmental increase in activation in STG, which stands in contrast to previous studies in other orthographies. We further found an interaction of word length and diacritics in bilateral STG and the visual word form area (VWFA) across both groups. These findings suggest that children slightly adjust their reading depending on orthographic transparency, relying on smaller units when reading a transparent script and on larger units when reading an opaque script. Our results also showed that phonological abilities across groups correlated with activation in the VWFA, regardless of transparency, supporting the continued role of phonology at all levels of orthographic transparency. Our findings are consistent with multiple route reading models, in which both phonological and orthographic processing of multiple size units continue to play a role in children's reading of transparent and opaque scripts during reading development. The results further demonstrate the importance of taking into account differences between orthographies when constructing neural models of reading acquisition.

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English-speaking children and adults generate orthographic skeletons (i.e., preliminary orthographic representations) solely from aural exposure to novel words. The present study examined whether skilled readers generate orthographic skeletons for all novel words they learn or do so only when the words have a unique possible spelling. To that end, 48 Spanish adults first provided their preferred spellings for all novel words that were to appear in the experiment. Critically, consistent words had only one, while inconsistent words had two possible spellings. Two weeks later, they were trained on the pronunciations of the novel words through aural instruction. They then saw the spellings of these newly acquired words, along with a set of untrained words, in a self-paced sentence reading task. Participants read previously acquired consistent and inconsistent words presented in their preferred spellings faster than inconsistent words with unpreferred spellings. Importantly, no differences were observed in reading untrained consistent and inconsistent words (either preferred or unpreferred). This suggests that participants had generated orthographic skeletons for trained words with two possible spellings according to their individual spelling preferences. These findings provide further evidence for the orthographic skeleton account and show that initial orthographic representations are generated even when the spelling of a newly acquired word is uncertain.

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The goal of this study was to examine the reading performance of French typically developing readers and dyslexic adolescents from grades 6 to 9 in English as a second language (L2) learned in a school context. Lexicality effects and the impact of two sub-lexical variables, that is cross-language orthographic markedness and congruency of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs), were investigated in three tasks: L2 reading aloud and lexical decision, and L2-to-L1 translation. English words and nonwords were divided into three conditions: (a) marked condition in which items have an L2-specific orthographic pattern (e.g., town), (b) unmarked congruent condition in which items have an L1/L2 shared orthography and similar GPCs across languages (e.g., fast) and (c) unmarked incongruent condition that contains incongruent GPCs across languages (e.g., dirt). The results yielded a significant deficit in dyslexic readers in all three tasks, suggesting poor decoding but also poor lexical orthographic representations in L2 and difficulties in connecting form to semantic representations. This deficit was mostly observed for the unmarked incongruent conditi-on, highlighting the need to carefully manipulate the sub-lexical features of items when examining L2 reading. The results are discussed in relation to the cross-language transfer hypothesis and to mono- and bilingual models of reading.

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The current study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the orthographic representations among poor readers compared to typical readers. For this aim, an orthographic visual closure task was used. One hundred and twenty native Arab readers, 60 typical and 60 poor, from third, fifth and seventh grades, were participated in the current study. A computerized tool was designed to test the orthographic closure ability, where the stimuli were orthographic patterns of words in Arabic. For each orthographic pattern of each word, eight levels of appearance display were created: Level 1 showed the most completed level of the image and Level 8 showed the most fragmented one. Throughout the experiment, participants were required to look at the screen and tell their answer loudly as soon as the pattern was identified. The level at which each correct identification has occurred was recorded. The results revealed significant differences between the two groups of readers and between the different ages regarding the level at which they were able to identify the presented words. The findings showed that the identification of written words, like pictures, can be activated even that the orthographic information is not fully presented while the effectiveness of such activations depends on the effectiveness of the orthographic representations.

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This paper investigated the role that types of knowledge beyond phonology have on spelling development, such as knowledge of morpheme-to-grapheme mappings, of orthographic patterns, and of word-specific orthographic patterns. It is based on the modern view that children do not learn spelling in discrete stages but, rather, they apply different types of strategies from early on. The goals of the paper were threefold: (1) to determine the relative difficulty of different types of non-phonological spelling strategies, (2) to examine the contribution of non-phonological strategies (specifically, morphological, morphophonological, orthographic, and lexical) to conventional spelling scores, and (3) to determine the role of children's educational level and population type (first- vs. second-language learners) on spelling strategy use. A large sample of 982 children (497 boys), speakers of Catalan (a Romance language similar to Spanish but with a less consistent orthography), participated in the study. They were administered a bespoke dictation task aimed to test their conventional and phonographic accuracy skill, as well as to determine their ability to use different types of non-phonological strategies for the spelling of ambiguous phonemes. Data were analyzed with a series of multigroup, multilevel SEMs. Results showed that (1) children across groups found morphological and lexical strategies harder to apply than orthographic and morphophonological strategies and (2) all types of non-phonological strategies contributed greatly to spelling accuracy scores, even after controlling for children's phonographic skills. Efficient strategy use increased as a function of schooling level, while second-language learners had a worse performance throughout, but no group showed a specific pattern of results. In conclusion, the paper offers substantial evidence that non-phonological strategies are paramount to learning to spell at least during the early and intermediate elementary school years. It is suggested that the teaching of writing should therefore be multidimensional in nature and target particularly the strategies with which children struggle the most: knowledge of morpho-graphemic mappings and word-specific lexical representations. Theoretical implications are also discussed.

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In this study, we investigated the source of the orthographic texture effect during familiar word spelling. Orthographic texture refers to the differential strength that individual letters in a word may be activated for output. Prior work indicates that strongly activated letters are more accurately produced than weakly activated ones (Jones, Folk, & Rapp, 2009, All Letters are not Equal: Sub-Graphemic Texture in Orthographic Working Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 1389-1402. DOI: 10.1037/a0017042). According to an orthographic lexical strength account, differences in activation of individual letters within words are the result of learning; more easily learned letters are more strongly represented and, thus, activated for output. However, an online-competition hypothesis indicates that the contribution of sublexical assembly processes during familiar word spelling may account for the effect. Current results support the orthographic lexical strength account; the lexical orthographic representations used for spelling are themselves textured.

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In transparent orthographic systems, the main characteristic of developmental dyslexia is poor reading fluency. Several studies have reported that children with dyslexia have difficulties forming orthographic representations of words, which hampers good reading fluency. This study aimed at evaluating whether the semantic-phonological training prior to word reading could facilitate the formation of orthographic representations and leading an improvement in reading fluency. Twenty-four native Spanish-speaking children with developmental dyslexia carried out two different reading tasks. In one of them, participants previously received semantic and phonological information about stimuli whereas in the other task no previous information was provided. Eight different unfamiliar words (four short and four long) were used in each reading task and the reduction of the length effect across reading blocks was taken as a formation index of new orthographic representations. Results showed low accuracy, slow speed reading, and difficulties in developing orthographic representations despite of repeated reading, probably due to the instability in decoding processes. However, the previous phonological and semantic training had a facilitator effect in the formation of orthographic representations, as indicated by the decrease in the length effect.

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Several studies have found that, after repeated exposure to new words, children form orthographic representations that allow them to read those words faster and more fluently. However, these studies did not take into account variables related to the words. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of sublexical variables on the formation of orthographic representations of words by Spanish children. The first experiment used pseudo-words of varying syllabic structure and syllabic frequency. The stimuli for the second experiment were formed with or without context-dependent graphemes. We found that formation of orthographic representations was influenced by syllabic structure (easier for words with simple syllabic structure) and the context-dependency of graphemes (easier in the absence of context-dependent graphemes), but not syllabic frequency. These results indicate that the easier it is to read a word, the easier it is to form an orthographic representation of it.

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Recent studies have suggested that Spanish children with dyslexia have difficulty storing orthographic representations of new words. But given that the syllable plays an important role in word recognition in Spanish, it is possible that the formation of orthographic representations is influenced by the characteristics of the syllables that make up the words. The objective of this study was to determine whether syllabic frequency and syllabic complexity influence orthographic learning in children with dyslexia. We compared the performance of a group of dyslexic children with that of a group of typical readers on a task that involved reading short and long pseudowords six times; we manipulated the frequency and complexity of the syllables from which the pseudowords were constructed. The results showed that dyslexic children do not benefit from syllabic simplicity or frequency when it comes to storing orthographic representations as the length effect in the dyslexic group remained was unchanged after repeated readings, regardless of stimulus characteristics. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Resumen En este estudio se analizó el desarrollo de conocimiento ortográfico de niños en el marco de un programa de intervención de aulas educativas en el que participaron 74 niños argentinos que cursaban 3er grado de la escuela primaria y que fueron ubicados en dos grupos: 36 niños en un grupo de intervención y 38 en un grupo control. Con el grupo de intervención, se realizó una secuencia didáctica para promover la formación de representaciones ortográficas léxicas y sub-léxicas y el aprendizaje de reglas contextuales. La comparación postest entre grupos mostró un desempeño superior del grupo de intervención en la escritura de las palabras entrenadas. También se evaluaron ambos grupos en la escritura de palabras de transferencia, palabras no específicamente trabajadas en la intervención pero que compartían reglas ortográficas, sílabas o morfemas con las palabras entrenadas. Los resultados postest mostraron que el grupo de intervención escribió significativamente mejor que el grupo control las palabras de transferencia con las mismas reglas ortográficas contextuales pero no con las que incluían cadenas subléxicas idénticas a las de las palabras de entrenamiento. Se concluye que la intervención realizada benefició la transferencia de reglas contextuales pero no de representaciones ortográficas subléxicas para la escritura de palabras desconocidas.

Abstract This paper analyzed the acquisition of orthographic knowledge in 3rd grade, Spanish-speaking children. Participants were 74 Argentine children; 36 were included in an experimental group while 38 were part of a control group. The experimental group was engaged in classroom activities designed to promote the acquisition of context-sensitive correspondence rules and the establishment of orthographic representations of words, syllables and morphemes. Post-test comparisons carried out between the experimental and the control groups showed that the experimental group was significantly better in the spelling of all words trained in the program. Children were also evaluated in the spelling of transfer words, that is, words not specifically presented in the intervention program but which included the same rules, syllables or morphemes as the trained words. The experimental group outperformed the control group in the spelling of transfer words including the context-sensitive correspondence rules presented in the program. However, no differences were obtained between groups in transfer words comprising the trained syllables or morphemes. These results suggest that the intervention program was effective in promoting the transfer of newly acquired rules to non trained words but that the acquisition and transfer of syllables and morphemes may require additional processes.

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Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to visual characteristics such as font and case. In the present functional MRI study, we tested this assumption by presenting written words and varying the case format of the initial letter of German nouns (which are always capitalized) as well as German adjectives and adverbs (both usually in lowercase). As evident from a Word Type × Case Format interaction, activation in the VWFA was greater to words presented in unfamiliar case formats relative to familiar case formats. Our results suggest that neural representations of written words in the VWFA are not fully abstract and still contain information about the visual format in which words are most frequently perceived.

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The present fMRI study used a spelling task to investigate the hypothesis that the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) hosts neuronal representations of whole written words. Such an orthographic word lexicon is posited by cognitive dual-route theories of reading and spelling. In the scanner, participants performed a spelling task in which they had to indicate if a visually presented letter is present in the written form of an auditorily presented word. The main experimental manipulation distinguished between an orthographic word spelling condition in which correct spelling decisions had to be based on orthographic whole-word representations, a word spelling condition in which reliance on orthographic whole-word representations was optional and a phonological pseudoword spelling condition in which no reliance on such representations was possible. To evaluate spelling-specific activations the spelling conditions were contrasted with control conditions that also presented auditory words and pseudowords, but participants had to indicate if a visually presented letter corresponded to the gender of the speaker. We identified a left vOT cluster activated for the critical orthographic word spelling condition relative to both the control condition and the phonological pseudoword spelling condition. Our results suggest that activation of left vOT during spelling can be attributed to the retrieval of orthographic whole-word representations and, thus, support the position that the left vOT potentially represents the neuronal equivalent of the cognitive orthographic word lexicon.

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Spanish-speaking developmental dyslexics are mainly characterized by poor reading fluency. One reason for this lack of fluency could be a difficulty in creating and accessing lexical representations, because, as the self-teaching theory suggest, it is necessary to develop orthographic representations to use direct reading (Share, 1995). It is possible that this difficulty to acquire orthographic representations can be specifically related to words that contain context-sensitive graphemes, since it has been demonstrated that reading is affected by this kind of graphemes (Barca et al., 2007). In order to test this possibility we compared a group of dyslexic children with a group of normal readers (9-13 years), in a task of repeated reading. Pseudo-words (half short and half long) with simple and contextual dependent rules were used. The length effect reduction on the reading speed, after repeated exposure, was considered an indicator of orthographic representation development, as the length effect is strong when reading unknown words, but absent when reading familiar words. The results show that dyslexic children have difficulties in developing orthographic representations, not only with context-sensitive graphemes, but also with simple graphemes. In contrast to the control children, in the dyslexic group differences between reading times for short and long stimuli remained without significant changes after six presentations. Besides, this happened with sensitive context rules and also with simple grapheme-phoneme conversion rules. On the other hand, response and articulation times were greatly affected by length in dyslexic children, indicating the use of serial reading. Results suggest that the problems related to storing orthographic representations could be caused by a learning deficit, independently of whether the word contained context-sensitive rules or not.

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Cognitive theories on causes of developmental dyslexia can be divided into language-specific and general accounts. While the former assume that words are special in that associated processing problems are rooted in language-related cognition (e.g., phonology) deficits, the latter propose that dyslexia is rather rooted in a general impairment of cognitive (e.g., visual and/or auditory) processing streams. In the present study, we examined to what extent dyslexia (typically characterized by poor orthographic representations) may be associated with a general deficit in visual long-term memory (LTM) for details. We compared object- and detail-related visual LTM performance (and phonological skills) between dyslexic primary school children and IQ-, age-, and gender-matched controls. The results revealed that while the overall amount of LTM errors was comparable between groups, dyslexic children exhibited a greater portion of detail-related errors. The results suggest that not only phonological, but also general visual resolution deficits in LTM may play an important role in developmental dyslexia.

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The present fMRI study investigated the effects of word-likeness of visual and auditory stimuli on activity along the ventral visual stream. In the context of a one-back task, we presented visual and auditory words, pseudowords, and artificial stimuli (i.e., false-fonts and reversed-speech, respectively). Main findings were regionally specific effects of word-likeness on activation in a left ventral occipitotemporal region corresponding to the classic localization of the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA). Specifically, we found an inverse word-likeness effect for the visual stimuli in the form of decreased activation for words compared to pseudowords which, in turn, elicited decreased activation compared to the artificial stimuli. For the auditory stimuli, we found positive word-likeness effects as both words and pseudowords elicited more activation than the artificial stimuli. This resulted from a marked deactivation in response to the artificial stimuli and no such deactivation for words and pseudowords. We suggest that the opposite effects of visual and auditory word-likeness on VWFA activation can be explained by assuming the involvement of visual orthographic memory representations. For the visual stimuli, these representations reduce the coding effort as a function of word-likeness. This results in highest activation to the artificial stimuli and least activation to words for which corresponding representations exist. The positive auditory word-likeness effects may result from activation of orthographic information associated with the auditory words and pseudowords. The view that the VWFA has a primarily visual function is supported by our findings of high activation to the visual artificial stimuli (which have no phonological or semantic associations) and deactivation to the auditory artificial stimuli. According to the phenomenon of cross-modal sensory suppression such deactivations during demanding auditory processing are expected in visual regions.