EXPRESS: Consonant and vowel transpositions effects during reading development: a study on Italian children and adults

Recently, Colombo, Spinelli, and Lupker (2020), using a masked transposed letter (TL) priming paradigm, investigated whether consonant/vowel (CV) status is important early in orthographic processing. In four experiments with Italian and English adults, they found equivalent TL priming effects for CC, CV, and VC transpositions. Here, we investigated that question with younger readers (age 7 to 10) and adults, as well as whether masked TL priming effects might have a phonological basis. That is, because young children are likely to use phonological recoding in reading, the question was whether they would show TL priming that is affected by CV status. In Experiment 1, target words were preceded by primes in which two letters (either CV, VC, or CC) were transposed versus substituted (SL). We found significant TL priming effects, with an increasing developmental trend, but, again, no letter type by priming interaction. In Experiment 2 the transpositions/substitutions involved only pairs of vowels with those vowels having either diphthong or hiatus status. The difference between these vowel clusters is only phonological, thus the question was would TL priming interact with this factor. TL priming was again found with an increasing trend with age, but there was no vowel cluster by priming interaction. There was, however, an overall vowel cluster effect (slower responding to words with hiatuses) which decreased with age. The results suggest that TL priming only taps the orthographic level, and that CV status only becomes important at a later phonological level.

Reading Skills in Down Syndrome: An Examination of Orthographic Knowledge

The primary goal of this study was to examine the word identification domain of the Simple View of Reading in participants with Down syndrome (DS) by comparing them to participants with typical development (TD) matched on word identification ability. Two subskills, phonological recoding and orthographic knowledge, were measured. Results revealed that individuals with DS performed similarly to controls on 2 measures of orthographic knowledge, but more poorly on phonological recoding and a third measure of orthographic knowledge. The first two orthographic tasks included real words as stimuli; the third task used letter patterns, not real words. These results suggest that individuals with DS may have a relative strength in word-specific orthographic knowledge but not in general orthographic knowledge.