Many studies have investigated the production and perception of second language learners. However, very few of them have discussed the effect of orthography. Although Mandarin and Cantonese share the same orthographic system, the phonological systems of the two languages are quite different. This preliminary study investigates the production and perception of Mandarin tones by Cantonese learner...

To investigate the effect of concurrent instruction in Dutch and English on reading acquisition in both languages, 23 pupils were selected from a school with bilingual education, and 23 from a school with education in Dutch only. The pupils had a Dutch majority language background and were comparable with regard to social-economic status (SES). Reading and vocabulary were measured twice within ...

In this article, we describe a novel approach to sequence tagging for languages that are rich in (e.g. orthographic) surface variation. We focus on lemmatization, a basic step in many processing pipelines in the Digital Humanities. While this task has long been considered solved for modern languages such as English, there exist many (e.g. historic) languages for which the problem is harder to s...

How does culture shape our concepts? Across many cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture specific: Later times are on the right in some cultures but on the left in others. Here we investigated whether experience reading can determine the direction and orientation of the mental timeline, independent of...

In Malayalam there are two prevailing orthographies traditional and reformed both are written as digital text using same Malayalam encoding. Today the difference between them is manifested by both spelling and typographic conventions (i.e., renderings). Traditional orthography rendering accommodates a lot more C2-conjoining ligatures, while reformed orthography would instead use nominal con...

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...

Adults of varying reading comprehension skill learned a set of previously unknown rare English words (e.g., gloaming) in three different learning conditions in which the type of word knowledge was manipulated. The words were presented in one of three conditions: (1) orthography-to-meaning (no phonology); (2) orthography-to-phonology (no meaning); and (3) phonology-to-meaning (no orthography). F...

Between phonological forms and their orthographic representations a close connection can be established. Previous psycholinguistic research has amply illustrated that word recognition can be influenced by orthography (Perre & Ziegler, 2008; Taft, 2001) and that orthography plays a role in phonemic awareness (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001; Tyler & Burnham, 2006). However, despite the lo...

We examined how whole-word lexical information and knowledge of distributional properties of orthography interact in children's spelling. High- versus low-frequency words, which included inconsistently spelled segments occurring more or less frequently in the orthography, were used in two experiments: (a) word spelling; (b) lexical priming of pseudoword spelling. Participants were 1st-, 2nd-, a...