Xenia Schmalz

• BSc (Psyc) (Hons), PhD
• Principal Investigator at University of Cologne

Orthographic depth has been studied intensively as one of the sources of cross-linguistic differences in reading, and yet there has been little detailed analysis of what is meant by orthographic depth. Here we propose that orthographic depth is a conglomerate of two separate constructs: the complexity of print-to-speech correspondences and the unpr...

The type of sublexical correspondences employed during non-word reading has been a matter of considerable debate in the past decades of reading research. Non-words may be read either via small units (graphemes) or large units (orthographic bodies). In addition, grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences may involve context-sensitive correspondences, such...

Learning to read fluently involves moving from an effortful phonological decoding strategy to automatic recognition of familiar words. However, little is known about the timing of this transition, or the extent to which children continue to be influenced by phonological factors when recognizing words even as they progress in reading. We explored th...

This study investigated how task format, reading comprehension ability, and linguistic item features influence item difficulty in morphological awareness (MA) assessments among adult English speakers. In our pre-registered study, we analysed response accuracy from 102 participants (L1 and L2) who completed four pseudoword-based MA task types—short...

The wording of definitions for terms in open scholarship and research practices may be inconsistent, making it difficult for researchers to understand and apply them accurately. This hinders clear and effective communication in research. To address this, we developed “Re-SearchTerms”, a Shiny app that encourages researchers to revisit and criticall...

Multiverse analysis has emerged as a valuable tool for increasing transparency and assessing robustness in empirical research across many scientific disciplines. By systematically exploring multiple defensible analytical paths, researchers can uncover how different decisions in data processing, model specification, and estimation impact results. Ho...

The wording of definitions for terms in open scholarship and research practices may be inconsistent, making it difficult for researchers to understand and apply them accurately. This hinders clear and effective communication in research. To address this, we developed “Re-SearchTerms”, a Shiny app that encourages researchers to revisit and criticall...

The wording of definitions for terms in open scholarship and research practices may be inconsistent, making it difficult for researchers to understand and apply them accurately. This hinders clear and effective communication in research. To address this, we developed “Re-SearchTerms”, a Shiny app that encourages researchers to revisit and criticall...

Reading fluency and spelling accuracy depend on the presence of well-specified orthographic representations in the mental lexicon (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). The richness of a child’s orthographic lexicon is likely to depend on the efficiency of orthographic learning. This, in turn, may be influenced by their ability to form an a priori expectation of...

Cross-linguistic reading research often focuses on the effect of orthographic depth - the closeness of the relationship between print and speech. To understand its effect on reading, we need to be able to objectively quantify the level of orthographic depth of a given orthography. Previous work has suggested that different dimensions underlie ortho...

Word frequency plays an important role in diverse areas of psychology research, such as reading, memory, and word processing, with researchers traditionally relying on existing word-frequency corpora for their investigations. However, not all corpora are created equal, and factors such as data and language domain can significantly impact research o...

Academic texts often define a given concept using words. Across texts, definitions may represent the same or different meanings of the given concept, especially for concepts in interdisciplinary fields, such as cognitive science. Understanding the variability of definitions and the reasons for this variability may facilitate the replicability of sc...

As a prime step in the empirical research cycle, we rely on language to define the constituted concepts. In the plethora of scholarly output, we often find a wide range of discrepant definitions of a given concept manifested by varied linguistic expressions. Capturing the linguistic variability of de facto conceptual definitions helps researchers a...

Orthographies contain statistical regularities, such as a systematic relationship between written word forms and their pronunciations. Based on this observation, reading researchers have proposed a tight link between reading acquisition and statistical learning ability, and a statistical learning deficit as a possible cause of developmental dyslexi...

German skilled readers have been found to engage in morphological and syllable-based processing in visual word recognition. However, the relative reliance on syllables and morphemes in reading multi-syllabic complex words is still unresolved. The present study aimed to unveil which of these sub-lexical units are the preferred units of reading by em...

Infant faces are prioritized by the attentional system in parents, resulting in a greater cognitive engagement in terms of response time. However, many biological, contextual and environmental factors relating to this cognitive mechanism have been left unexplored. To fill this gap, this study aims to (i) confirm that infant faces engage more attent...

Response to "The Myth of Normal Reading" by Huettig and Ferreira

Anecdotal evidence suggests that biliterates who had limited exposure to one of their scripts during childhood often struggle to develop reading fluency. Reading fluency is a prerequisite for fluent reading and comprehension. Here, we investigate reading dysfluency and its causes in 70 biliterate adults reading while processing Cyrillic and Latin s...

Orthographies vary in complexity (the number of multi-letter grapheme-phoneme rules describing print-to-speech regularities) and unpredictability (the number of words which cannot be read correctly, even with at-ceiling knowledge of the rules). To assess how these constructs affect reading acquisition, we used an artificial orthography learning par...

Orthographies vary in complexity (the number of multi-letter grapheme-phoneme rules describing print-to-speech regularities) and unpredictability (the number of words which cannot be read correctly, even with at-ceiling knowledge of the rules). To assess how these constructs affect reading acquisition, we used an artificial orthography learning par...

The use of Bayes factors is becoming increasingly common in psychological sciences. Thus, it is important that researchers understand the logic behind the Bayes factor in order to correctly interpret it, and the strengths of weaknesses of the Bayesian approach. As education for psychological scientists focuses on frequentist statistics, resources a...

Many theories have been put forward that propose that developmental dyslexia is caused by low-level neural, cognitive, or perceptual deficits. For example, statistical learning is a cognitive mechanism that allows the learner to detect a probabilistic pattern in a stream of stimuli and to generalise the knowledge of this pattern to similar stimuli....

Many theories have been put forward that propose that developmental dyslexia is caused by low-level neural, cognitive or perceptual deficits. For example, statistical learning is a cognitive mechanism which allows the learner to detect a probabilistic pattern in a stream of stimuli, and to generalise the knowledge of this pattern to similar stimuli...

We introduce an innovative method for the investigation of human gait, which is based on the visualisation of the vertical component of the movement of the centre of mass during walking or running, in the space of the coordinates position, velocity, and acceleration of the centre of mass. Collected data has been numerically approximated by the best...

In this work we propose the use of Entropy to measure variability in pronunciations in pseudowords reading aloud: pseudowords where participants give many different pronunciations receive higher Entropy values. Monolingual adults, monolingual children, and bilingual children proficient in different European languages varying in orthographic depth w...

Artificial Orthography Learning (AOL) may act as a possible candidate to model the learning of print-to-speech correspondences. In order to serve as an adequate task, however, we need to establish whether AOL can be reliably measured. In the current study, we report the correlations between the learning of two different artificial orthographies by...

The use of Bayes Factors is becoming increasingly common in psychological sciences. Thus, it is important that researchers understand the logic behind the Bayes Factor in order to correctly interpret it, and the strengths of weaknesses of the Bayesian approach. As education for psychological scientists focuses on Frequentist statistics, resources a...

In this work we propose the use of Entropy as a new way to measure variability in pronunciations in pseudowords reading aloud: pseudowords where participants give many different pronunciations receive higher Entropy values. Monolingual adults, monolingual children, and bilingual children proficient in different European languages varying in orthogr...

Single-word reading studies form the backbone of reading research. In such studies, participants respond to single words and computational models simulate the obtained patterns of results. A more ecologically valid paradigm involves tracking participants' eye movements as they silently read sentences. In the current study, we examine whether the st...

This systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the efficacy of spelling interventions for the remediation of dyslexia and spelling deficits. Theoretically important moderators, such as the treatment approach as well as orthographic and sample characteristics, were also considered. Thirty-four controlled trials that evaluated spelling interve...

Learning to read in most alphabetic orthographies requires not only the acquisition of simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) but also the acquisition of context-sensitive GPCs, where surrounding letters change a grapheme’s pronunciation. We aimed to explore the use and development of simple GPCs (e.g. a ➔ /æ/) and context-sensitive GPCs (e...

In an open letter more than five years ago, a group of scientists called for adopting Registered Reports in all journals of the life sciences. This letter and subsequent efforts have yielded some notable success. At time of writing, 207 journals support the Registered Reports format, with many more currently considering its implementation. However,...

This systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the efficacy of spelling interventions for the remediation of dyslexia and spelling deficits. Theoretically important moderators, such as the treatment approach as well as orthographic and sample characteristics, were also considered. Thirty-four controlled trials that evaluated spelling interve...

Previous studies found a relationship between performance on statistical learning (SL) tasks and reading ability and developmental dyslexia. Thus, it has been suggested that the ability to implicitly learn patterns may be important for reading acquisition. Causal mechanisms behind this relationship are unclear: Although orthographic sensitivity to...

The type of sublexical correspondences employed during non-word reading has been a matter of considerable debate in the past decades of reading research. Non-words may be read either via small units (graphemes) or large units (orthographic bodies). In addition, grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences may involve context-sensitive correspondences, such...

Learning to read fluently involves moving from an effortful phonological decoding strategy to automatic recognition of familiar words. However, little is known about the timing of this transition, or the extent to which children continue to be influenced by phonological factors when recognizing words even as they progress in reading. We explored th...

The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis [Katz, L., & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process is different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In R. Frost & L. Katz (Eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology, and meaning (pp. 67–84). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science] proposes cross-linguistic differences in the involvement of lexical...

The existing literature on developmental dyslexia (hereafter: dyslexia) often focuses on isolating cognitive skills which differ across dyslexic and control participants. Among potential correlates, previous research has studied group differences between dyslexic and control participants in performance on statistical learning tasks. A statistical l...

Handelte es sich bei dem Beitrag des Präsidenten der Freien Universität Berlin Günther M. Ziegler “Die Bedeutung der Verlage wandelt sich” wieder nur um ein “Loblied auf “Open Access" als Zukunft des wissenschaftlichen Publizierens”? Diesen Vorwurf jedenfalls machte Wolfgang Sander dem Präsidenten in seinem kurzen Kommentar vom 12. Juni 2019. Doch...

In single-word reading aloud studies, the researcher normally analyses the Reaction Time (RT): the time between target presentation and the onset of the participant's response. RT measures are inherently noisy. For noisy measures, a large number of observations are sometimes required to obtain reliable estimates. Reducing the noisiness of a measure...

Previous studies found a relationship between performance on statistical learning (SL) tasks and reading ability and developmental dyslexia. Thus, it has been suggested that the ability to implicitly learn patterns may be important for reading acquisition. Causal mechanisms behind this relationship are unclear: Although orthographic sensitivity to...

Psycholinguistic researchers identify linguistic variables and assess if they affect cognitive processes. One such variable is letter bigram frequency, or the frequency with which a given letter pair co-occurs in an orthography. While early studies reported that bigram frequency affects visual lexical decision, subsequent, well-controlled studies n...

Psycholinguistic researchers identify linguistic variables and assess if and how these affect cognitive processes. One such variable is letter bigram frequency, or the frequency with which a given pair of letters co-occurs in an orthography. While early studies have shown that bigram frequency affects visual word recognition, subsequent, well-contr...

Previous studies have found that words and nonwords with many body neighbours (i.e., words with the same orthographic body, e.g., cat, brat, at) are read faster than items with fewer body neighbours. This body-N effect has been explored in the context of cross-linguistic differences in reading where it has been reported that the size of the effect...

Word reading partly depends on the activation of sublexical letter clusters. Previous research has studied which types of letters clusters have psychological saliency, but less is known about cognitive mechanisms of letter string parsing. Here, we take advantage of the high degree of context-dependency of the Russian orthography to examine whether...

The existing literature on developmental dyslexia (hereafter: dyslexia) often focuses on isolating cognitive skills which differ across dyslexic and control participants. Among potential correlates, previous research has studied group differences between dyslexic and control participants in performance on statistical learning tasks. A statistical l...

The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis [Katz, L., & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process is different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In R. Frost & L. Katz (Eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology, and meaning (pp. 67–84). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science] proposes cross-linguistic differences in the involvement of lexical...

In this thesis, we explore methodological and theoretical issues associated with the concept of orthographic depth. In the first section (Papers 1 - 5), we conducted a series of word and nonword reading experiments. We compare the sublexical correspondences underlying reading in English, which is considered to be a deep orthography, and German, whi...

Lexical selection—both during reading aloud and speech production—involves selecting an intended word, while ignoring irrelevant lexical activation. This process has been studied by the use of interference tasks. Examples are the Stroop task, where participants ignore the written color word and name the color of the ink, picture–word interference t...