We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthograph...

For a social scientist of a particular kind, the first thought that springs to mind in association with ‘inconsistency’ is Arrow’s famous impossibility theorem. The association is a natural one because, in the original formulation, inconsistency plays a double role in Arrow’s theorem. At the first level, the requirement that any aggregate ‘community’ ranking of social states be transitive is ak...