Developmental dyslexia is a neurobiologically based disorder that affects approximately 5-17% of school children and is characterized by a severe impairment in reading skill acquisition. For readers of alphabetic (e.g., English) languages, recent neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that dyslexia is associated with weak reading-related activity in left temporoparietal and occipitotemporal reg...

PURPOSE To investigate phonological awareness and working memory skills as well as their influence on the literacy process in a group of intellectually normal children. METHODS Forty intellectually normal children (7.6-8.0 years) from the second and third grades of elementary school participated. Children were organized in two groups (20 children each): one with and another without literacy d...

Modern Japanese texts often include Western sourced words written in Roman alphabet. For example, a shopping directory in a web portal, which lists more than 8,000 shops, includes a total of 6,400 alphabetic words. As most of them are very new and idiosyncratic proper nouns, it is impractical to assume all those alphabetic words can be registered in the word dictionary of a text-to-speech synth...

We show that optimal alphabetic binary trees can be constructed in O(n) time if the elements of the initial sequence are drawn from a domain that can be sorted in linear time. We describe a hybrid algorithm that combines the bottom-up approach of the original Hu-Tucker algorithm with the top-down approach of Larmore and Przytycka’s Cartesian tree algorithms. The hybrid algorithm demonstrates th...

The Letter Spirit project explores the creative act of artistic letter-design. The aim is to mode] how the 26 lowercase letters of the roman alphabet can be rendered in many different but internally coherent styles. Viewed from a distance, the behavior of the program can be seen to result from the interaction of four emergent agents working together to form a coherent style sad to design s comp...

A classical result (often credited to Y. Medvedev) states that every language recognized by a finite automaton is the homomorphic image of a local language, over a much larger so-called local alphabet, namely the alphabet of the edges of the transition graph. Local languages are characterized by the value k = 2 of the sliding window width in the McNaughton and Papert’s infinite hierarchy of str...

We used the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method to quantitatively synthesize data from 19 published brain mapping studies of phonological processing in reading, six with Chinese and 13 with alphabetic languages. It demonstrated high concordance of cortical activity across multiple studies in each written language system as well as significant differences of activation likelihood betwe...

Word reading in alphabetic language involves a cortical system with multiple components whose division of labor depends on the transparency of the writing system. To gain insight about the neural division of labor between phonology and semantics subserving word reading in Chinese, a deep non-alphabetic writing system, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the effe...

In English and other alphabetic languages read from left to right, useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend much further to the right of each fixation than to the left. However, the asymmetry of the perceptual span for alphabetic languages read in the opposite direction (i.e., from right to left) has received very little attention in empirical res...

This monograph discusses research, theory, and practice relevant to how children learn to read English. After an initial overview of writing systems, the discussion summarizes research from developmental psychology on children's language competency when they enter school and on the nature of early reading development. Subsequent sections review theories of learning to read, the characteristics ...