Does alphabetic-phonetic writing start with the proper name and how does the name affect reading and writing skills? Sixty 4- to 5(1/2)-year-old children from middle SES families with Dutch as their first language wrote their proper name and named letters. For each child we created unique sets of words with and without the child's first letter of the name to test spelling skills and phonemic se...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether making the sender's knighthood explicit in a series of letters would have any detectable effect on the response. DESIGN A random sequence was generated by flipping a coin to determine whether a letter would have 'Sir Iain Chalmers' or 'Iain Chalmers' typed under the signature. This sequence was prepared independently of the preparation of an alphabetic list of the ...

BACKGROUND Most people show a remarkable deficit in reporting the second of two targets (T2) when presented 200-500 ms after the first (T1), reflecting an 'attentional blink' (AB). However, there are large individual differences in the magnitude of the effect, with some people, referred to as 'non-blinkers', showing no such attentional restrictions. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Here we repl...

We introduce an extension of the derivatives of rational expressions to expressions denoting formal power series over partially commuting variables. The expressions are purely noncommutative, however they denote partially commuting power series. The derivations (which are so-called φ-derivations) are shown to satisfy the commutation relations. Our main result states that for every so-called rig...

Gaining facility with spelling is an important part of becoming a good writer. Here we review recent work on how children learn to spell in alphabetic writing systems. Statistical learning plays an important role in this process. Thus, young children learn about some of the salient graphic characteristics of written texts and attempt to reproduce these characteristics in their own productions e...

In an experiment measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs), single-letter targets were preceded by briefly presented masked letter primes. Name and case consistency were manipulated across primes and targets so that the prime was either the same letter as the target (or not), and was presented in the same case as the target (or not). Separate analyses were performed for letters whose uppe...

Recent models in word recognition have assumed that a word activation device which is based upon phonemes is universal. The present study has attempted to investigate this proposal with Japanese school children without knowledge of Roman alphabet. The main question addressed in this study is to test whether Japanese school children without Roman alphabet could activate word candidates on the ba...

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the various company managers who participated in the surveys of Yorkshire & Humberside and Northern Ireland. Abstract Multinational enterprises occupy a prominent position in most UK regional economies. The contribution of these firms to employment and growth in the host region will be enhanced if they purchase material inputs from local firms ('local sour...

The developmental dyslexia studies in alphabetic languages usually from the perspectives of cognition, neurobiology and genetics. Since the Chinese language is characterized as a logographic writing system with deep orthography, which is different from alphabetic languages, whether the findings in alphabetic languages are coincident in Chinese remains a question. By comparing theories in the ca...

Routing plays an important role in determining the total circuit area and circuit performance and hence must be addressed as early as possible during the design process In this paper an e ective routing driven approach for technology dependent logic synthesis which relies on alphabetic tree construction is presented Alphabetic trees are trees which are generated under the restriction that the i...