Modern Hebrew exhibits a non-concatenative morphology of consonantal “roots” and melodic “templates” that is typical of Semitic languages. Even though this kind of non-concatenative morphology is well known, it is only partly understood. In particular, theories differ in what counts as a morpheme: the root, the template, both, or neither. Accordingly, theories differ as to what representations learners must posit and what processes generate the eventual surface forms. In this paper I present a theory of morphology and allomorphy that combines lexical roots with syntactic functional heads, improving on previous analyses of root-and-pattern morphology. Verbal templates are here argued to emerge from the combination of syntactic elements, constrained by the general phonology of the language, rather than from some inherent difference between Semitic morphology and that of other languages. This way of generating morphological structure fleshes out a theory of morphophonological alternations that are non-adjacent on the surface but are local underlyingly; with these tools it is possible to identify where lexical exceptionality shows its effects and how it is reined in by the grammar. The Semitic root is thus analogous to lexical roots in other languages, storing idiosyncratic phonological and semantic information but respecting the syntactic structure in which it is embedded.

The importance of phonological syllables in recognition and pronunciation of visual words has been demonstrated in languages with a high degree of spelling-sound correspondence. In Spanish, multisyllabic words with frequent first syllables are named more quickly than those with less frequent first syllables, but receive slower lexical decisions. The latter effect is attributed to lexical competition from other words beginning with the same syllable. We examined syllable frequency effects on naming and lexical decision for 3029 visually presented words in English, a language with a high degree of irregularity in spelling/sound relationships, and in which phonological syllables are less clearly marked in printed words. The results showed facilitative effects of syllable frequency in both tasks, and these were stronger when syllables were defined orthographically than phonologically. The results suggest that activation of lexical candidates based on a syllabic code does not occur rapidly enough to interfere with lexical decision in English.

An increasing body of dyslexia researchdemonstrates, in addition to phonologicaldeficits, a second core deficit in theprocesses underlying naming speed. Thehypothesized independence of phonologicalawareness and naming-speed variables inpredicting variance in three aspects of readingperformance was studied in a group of 144severely-impaired readers in Grades 2 and 3. Stepwise regression analyses were conducted onthese variables, controlling for the effects ofSES, age, and IQ. Results indicated thatphonological measures contribute more of thevariance to those aspects of reading skill thatinvolve decoding or word attack skills;naming-speed measures contribute more to skillsinvolved in word identification. Subtypeclassification findings were equally supportiveof the independence of the two deficits: 19%of the sample had single phonological deficits;15% had single naming-speed deficits; 60% had double-deficits; and 6% could not be classified. The implications of these findingsfor diagnosis and intervention are discussed.

The current study examined the nature of deaf readers’ phonological processing during online word recognition, and how this compares to similar effects in hearing individuals. Unlike many previous studies on phonological activation, we examined whether deaf readers activated phonological representations for words as opposed to pseudohomophones. Both hearing and deaf adults performed lexical decisions on homophones and control words in the context of either pseudoword foils (e.g., CLANE) or pseudohomophone foils (e.g., BRANE). As expected, hearing readers responded more slowly to homophones than to control words in both non-word contexts, reflecting phonological activation during reading. In contrast, deaf readers responded more slowly to homophones than to control words in the pseudohomophone foil context, but not in the pseudoword foil context. This finding suggests that deaf readers are able to activate phonological representations; however the nature of these representations appears to be more coarse-grained in deaf readers.

The paper reports studies of segmentation performance by a Nursery group of children, who had not yet started to learn to read, and by Primary 1 and 2 groups, who were in the early stages of learning by a standard method of whole word acquisition combined with letter-sound learning. Rhyme and alliteration production tasks were applied, together with segmentation tasks requiring division of monosyllabic words or non-words of simple or complex structure into two parts, three parts, or as many parts as possible. Performance was related to the hierarchical model of the syllable which distinguishes a two-dimensional (2D) level (onset/rime), a three-dimensional (3D) level (initial consonants, vowel, terminal consonants) and many-dimensional (nD) level (phonemes). The hypothesis that ‘phonological awareness’ (PA) normally develops down the hierarchy, from larger to smaller units, predicts that segmentation ability should emerge in the sequence 2D → 3D → nD. In practice, the reverse of this order was found. The results are discussed in relation to theories of the relationship between literacy development and the different levels of PA.

Most sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters) are phonograms (phonetic compounds). A phonogram is composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, with the former usually implying the meaning of the phonogram, and the latter providing cues to its pronunciation. This study focused on the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals which are themselves free standing sinograms. Two primed naming experiments were carried out to examine whether the meanings and pronunciations of the semantic radicals embedded in phonograms were activated or not during sinogram recognition. In Experiment 1, semantically opaque phonograms were used as primes. We observed facilitatory priming effects for targets which were semantically related to the semantic radicals embedded in primes, but not to the primes themselves. These effects were present for low-frequency primes, but not for high-frequency primes. Experiment 2 used only low-frequency phonograms as primes. We observed facilitatory priming effects for targets which were homophones of the semantic radicals embedded in primes, but not of the primes themselves. These results suggest that sub-lexical semantic and phonological information of semantic radicals are activated, and that the activation processes are modulated by the lexical frequency of the host phonograms. Our study shows that sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals is similar to that of phonetic radicals, indicating no fundamental difference between sub-lexical processing of semantic and phonetic radicals, supporting the view that a radical has a unique representation irrespective of its function in the orthographic system of Taft’s model.

Although it is well established that a relationship exists between specific reading disability and spoken language difficulties, the nature of that relationship remains controversial. In the study reported here, the performance of poor readers was firstly compared with that of matched good readers on a series of spoken and written language tasks on three assessment trials 12 months apart, and secondly to that of younger average readers. Five experimental tasks were used to measure the readers' phonological processing skills, and three subtests from the CELF-R were selected to measure the students' syntactic and semantic skills. Reading accuracy and comprehension ability were assessed by the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability-Revised. The results showed that 8–10-year-old poor readers performed poorly in all three linguistic areas concurrently, and that these difficulties persisted. However, the important finding from this study was that while the good readers demonstrated no significant difference between their phonological processing skills and their semantic/syntactic skills, the poor readers' ability did differ according to skill area. The poor readers' phonological processing skills appeared to be particularly impaired, a finding which was further enhanced by results from the reading-match comparison. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of reading disability.

This study presents a formal generative model that integrates perception and reading, and uses English intervocalic consonants borrowed into Italian as either singletons or geminates to illustrate how the model works. Consisting of words borrowed in the 20th century, our data show that the quantity of the intervocalic consonant in an Italian loanword depends on its written representation in English, the source language. Thus only English intervocalic consonants that are written with two identical letters (for example, as in splatter) are borrowed as geminates. We provide a formalization of these orthographic adaptations with grapheme-to-phoneme mappings in the shape of Optimality-theoretic constraints that model the native reading process, and show how the output of these mappings is restricted by native phonotactic constraints. Furthermore, we illustrate that the native reading grammar proposed here complements the perceptual adaptation model by Boersma and Hamann (2009). This combined model is shown to be able to account for simultaneous orthographic and perceptual borrowings in Italian, as well as to hold for reading and perception outside the realm of loanword adaptation.

This study reports the effects of a highly structuredindividually administered remedial teaching programmefor children with reading difficulties. Thephonological awareness, reading accuracy and spellingattainments of 28 children diagnosed as having low IQ(Mean IQ = 66, SD = 5.3) were compared with those of29 children diagnosed as having discrepancy defineddyslexia (Mean IQ = 95, SD = 8.4). The responsivenessto intervention of each group was also compared withteacher-referred reading-delayed children matched forinitial literacy skills. For reading accuracy andphonological awareness the dyslexic group respondedmore successfully than the low IQ group. The twogroups did not differ significantly on spelling. It isargued that the reading accuracy and phonologicalawareness results are in keeping with thephonological-core variable-difference (Stanovich &Siegel 1994) model of reading disability and that thegains of all groups on all measures were such thatthere is no obvious benefit in using IQ to selectchildren for a programme of individual teaching whichcombines reading with phonological awarenesstraining.

Dyslexia is assumed to be frequent amonginmates in prisons and in juvenileinstitutions. However, it remains unclearwhether the literacy difficulties observed arereally dyslexic in nature. Seventy inmates injuvenile institutions were studied. In additionto literacy skills, the assessment includedphonological skills, school attendance,cultural background, and self-esteem. Dyslexiain the sense of decoding problems related tophonological deficiencies was observed in 11%of the cases. Most of the inmates withliteracy difficulties had a background, frominfancy and onwards, characterized by severesocial and emotional problems, interfering withpositive experience of literacy and theliterate culture. However, these sub-optimalexperiences of the literate culture do notimply dyslexia. From this perspective, it isunlikely that dyslexia is a determining factorof delinquent behavior.