Study title

The data collection consists of behavioural measures of performance in laboratory studies in which adults learn to read in novel languages printed in artificial scripts. These studies vary the nature of instruction and the nature of the artificial writing systems. The behavioural measures include learning performance throughout a multiday training period on a variety of training tasks, performance at the end of training on a variety of test tasks, and baseline measures of language and literacy ability. Performance is expressed in both accuracy and reaction time. Text files include full documentation of the archive and methodology. Reading is one of the most remarkable of our cognitive abilities. In a short space of time, most children go from painstakingly sounding out the individual symbols that make up words, to the rapid and seemingly automatic access to meaning from these symbols that skilled readers experience. Literacy has a profound impact on individuals, society, and the economy: amongst other things, it decreases dependency on state benefits and improves participation in the democratic process. Yet, unlike many other of our fundamental capacities (e.g. walking, talking), explicit instruction and practice are necessary in learning to read. To comprehend text, young children learning alphabetic languages start by translating printed words into their spoken forms, and then they use their knowledge of spoken language to recover meaning. This print-to-sound-to-meaning mapping is often referred to as a sub-word process because words are broken down into letters that systematically correspond to sounds before meaning is accessed. Recent advances in the teaching of reading have shown that phonics instruction helps children to develop these sub-word reading skills. Most children then progress to using a more efficient whole-word process whereby meaning is accessed directly from print. However, we know that around 20% of 15-year-old children in the European...