Written communication in instant messaging, text messaging, chat, and other forms of electronic communication appears to have generated a "new language" of abbreviations, acronyms, word combinations, and punctuation. In this naturalistic study, adolescents collected their instant messaging conversations for a 1-week period and then completed a…

A descriptive study of vowel spelling errors made by children first diagnosed with dyslexia (n = 79) revealed that phonological errors, such as "bet" for "bat", outnumbered orthographic errors, such as "bate" for "bait". These errors were more frequent in nonwords than words, suggesting that lexical context helps with vowel spelling. In a second…

Thai has its own distinctive alphabetic script with syllabic characteristics as it has implicit vowels for some consonants. Consonants are written in a linear order, but vowels can be written non-linearly above, below or to either side of the consonant. Of particular interest to the current study are that vowels can precede the consonant in…

Discusses basic strokes, stroke sequence rules, and motor aspects of drawing in writing Chinese characters. Finds mastery of proper stroke sequence is low even for familiar characters. Discusses three main groups of errors children made. Explores educational implications for the teaching of stroke sequences in the teaching of handwriting based on…

An important element of learning to read and write at school is the ability to define word boundaries. Defining word boundaries in text writing is not a straightforward task even for children who have mastered graphophonemic correspondences. In children's writing, unconventional word segmentation has been observed across a range of languages and…

Investigates the written syntax of 81 college-able individuals demonstrating a specific learning disability. Supports a control impairment hypothesis, predicting that sentence production errors will be of the same kind as found in the language of writers demonstrating no handicapping conditions. Investigates the correlation of specific cognitive…

Examines whether dual-route models of spelling account for the misspellings of Spanish children of different educational levels. Finds that second graders relied heavily on phonological mediation, whereas eighth graders seemed to use a lexical strategy, and fourth-grade children showed an intermediate pattern. Finds support for dual-route spelling…

The Malay language has a transparent morphological system and, unlike English, it is written in a very shallow alphabetic-syllabic script. We predicted that beginner spellers (six-to eight-year-olds) of this Rumi script would encode words at the level of the syllable and morpheme, rather than the phoneme. Using the results of a 75-item spelling…

Children aged 11-12 years with a diagnosis of dyslexia (DR) were compared to chronological and reading-age matched poor readers (PR), and two normal reader groups, age-matched (CA) and spelling and reading-age matched (SA-RA), on their processing of inflectional morphology. In comparison to SA-RAs and PRs, the DRs made more spelling errors on…

Examines reading and spelling errors made by children learning Arabic within a developmental framework. Finds that errors in reading and spelling persisted throughout primary school, pointing to the difficulties involved in mastering the Arabic written language. Notes that misreadings involved mainly diacritics whereas misspellings were related to…

The current research is an examination of the nature of reading difficulties in dyslexic readers of Hindi. The reading performance of children with dyslexia was compared with that of reading-age (RA) and chronological-age (CA) matched controls on word and non word reading of items of different length. The results showed that the dyslexic children…

Morphology is one of the organizing principles of the mental lexicon. It is especially important in Hebrew, where word structure expresses a rich array of semantic notions. This study investigated the ability of Hebrew-speaking children to solve written morphological analogies by reading and completing two sets of real and invented root- and…

Aims at demonstrating the gradual automatization of subject-verb agreement operation in young writers by examining developmental changes in the occurrence of agreement errors. Finds that subjects' performance moved from systematic errors to attraction errors through an intermediate phase. Concludes that attraction errors are a byproduct of the…