Phonological and semantic information in adults' orthographic learning

A training paradigm was used to assess the early stages of the acquisition of novel letter strings in adults. Provision of either phonological or semantic information during training improved spelling recognition (Experiment 1). Manipulation of the processing required during training (phonological, semantic, or both) produced no consistent effects on spelling when both phonology and meaning were provided (Experiment 2). An advantage of phonological over orthographic processing on spelling recognition and cued recall was found when meaning was provided during training but phonology was not (Experiment 3). The experiments support the role of phonological information in early learning of orthography, but additional research is required to clarify when and how semantic information supports the formation of new orthographic representations.     

Individual differences in mature readers in reading, spelling, and grapheme-phoneme conversion

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, verbal reasoning, frequency of print exposure, phonological skills, Gestalt processing and semantic processing were examined in 110 university undergraduates. Most reading and phonological tasks involved making sequences of lexical decisions through lists of common stimuli within set time limits. The test measures were percentages correct adjusting for chance. The main findings were as follows: First, there is a substantial “Matthew effect” in that good readers were also good at spelling, good at handling the meaning of words, and appeared to have had the most print exposure. Second, phonological skills appear to be independent of lexical skills. Furthermore, within these phonological skills there appear to be two components, one that is automatic, and one that is more of a conscious operation.     

Individual differences in mature readers in reading,spelling, and grapheme-phoneme conversion

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, verbal reasoning, frequency of print exposure, phonological skills, Gestalt processing and semantic processing were examined in 110 university undergraduates. Most reading and phonological tasks involved making sequences of lexical decisions through lists of common stimuli within set time limits. The test measures were percentages correct adjusting for chance. The main findings were as follows: First, there is a substantial “Matthew effect” in that good readers were also good at spelling, good at handling the meaning of words, and appeared to have had the most print exposure. Second, phonological skills appear to be independent of lexical skills. Furthermore, within these phonological skills there appear to be two components, one that is automatic, and one that is more of a conscious operation.     

Phonological error analysis, development and empirical evaluation.

A method of error analysis, designed to examine phonological and nonphonological reading and spelling processes, was developed from preliminary studies and theoretical background, including a linguistic model and the relationships between articulatory features of phonemes. The usefulness of this method as an assessment tool for phonological ability was tested on a group of normal subjects. The results from the error analysis helped clarify similarities and differences in phonological performance among the subjects and helped delineate differences between phonological performance in spelling (oral and written) and reading within the group of subjects. These results support the usefulness of this method of error analysis in assessing phonological ability. Also, these results support the position that phonological approximation of responses is an important diagnostic feature and merely cataloging errors as phonologically accurate or inaccurate is inadequate for assessing phonological ability.     

Lesion localization of phonological agraphia.

Phonological agraphia is a neurolinguistically specific profile of spelling impairment. It is characterized by an impairment in spelling pronounceable pseudowords ('sild') and by an impairment in spelling real words related to their familiarity, length, and often, part of speech (Shallice, 1981; Roeltgen, 1985; Bub & Chertkow, 1988). We report two cases of phonological agraphia, each with a different lesion profile. Analysis of the small number of published cases that include lesion data, plus our own cases, suggests that phonological agraphia can be produced by lesions in a wide range of perisylvian cortical regions that have in common some role in central phonological processes.     

The interaction between phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and naming speed in the reading and spelling performance of first-grade children

The performance of 267 first-grade children was examined on tasks assessing phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and naming speed. The children were also given several measures of word and pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and pseudoword and dictation spelling. A series of hierarchical analyses indicated that three variables (phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and naming speed) were still predictors of reading and spelling performance after variance in the others had been controlled for. The results, which confirm that syntactic awareness can account for variance in written language after phonological ability had been controlled for, support the hypothesis concerning the relationships between naming-speed processes and written language, and challenge the unitary phonological theory of reading difficulty.     

LEARNING TO READ IN ARABIC: READING,SYNTACTIC, ORTHOGRAPHIC AND WORKING MEMORY SKILLS IN NORMALLY ACHIEVING AND POOR ARABIC READERS

ABSTRACT

While many studies point to a positive relationship between phonological skills and reading in English, little is known about these relationships for children learning to read in Arabic. Arabic orthography is considered deep if it is not vowelized but shallow if it is vowelized. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among reading ability, phonological, semantic, orthographic and syntactic skills in Arabic. The participants were 143 Arab children, aged 8‐11, in Arab villages of central Israel. They were administered working memory, visual, oral close, phonological, word recognition, spelling, orthographic, and word attack tests. The results showed that word recognition test was highly correlated with phonological skills, semantic processing, syntactic knowledge and short‐term memory. Poor readers showed a significant lag in the development of these skills, the problems being most significant at phonological and semantic levels and less so at the visual levels. The similarities and differences between the acquisition of reading skills in Arabic and English are discussed.     

Modelling relations between sensory processing, speech perception, orthographic and phonological ability, and literacy achievement

The general magnocellular theory postulates that dyslexia is the consequence of a multimodal deficit in the processing of transient and dynamic stimuli. In the auditory modality, this deficit has been hypothesized to interfere with accurate speech perception, and subsequently disrupt the development of phonological and later reading and spelling skills. In the visual modality, an analogous problem might interfere with literacy development by affecting orthographic skills. In this prospective longitudinal study, we tested dynamic auditory and visual processing, speech-in-noise perception, phonological ability and orthographic ability in 62 five-year-old preschool children. Predictive relations towards first grade reading and spelling measures were explored and the validity of the global magnocellular model was evaluated using causal path analysis. In particular, we demonstrated that dynamic auditory processing was related to speech perception, which itself was related to phonological awareness. Similarly, dynamic visual processing was related to orthographic ability. Subsequently, phonological awareness, orthographic ability and verbal short-term memory were unique predictors of reading and spelling development.     

Linguistic semantic agraphia: A dissociation of the lexical spelling system from semantics

Two spelling systems have been described. The phonological system transcodes speech sounds to letters and is thought to be useful for spelling regular words and pronounceable nonwords. Although the second system, the lexical-semantic system, is thought to use visual word images and meaning to spell irregular words, it is not known if this system is dependent on semantic knowledge. We used a homophone spelling test to examine the lexical-semantic system in five patients. The patients were asked to spell individual homophones (doe or dough) using the context of a sentence. Semantically incorrect and correct homophones were spelled equally well, whether they were regular or irregular. These results demonstrate that an irregular word may be spelled without knowledge of the word's meaning. Therefore, the lexical system can be dissociated from semantic influence.     

First and second language in the brain: Neuronal correlates of language processing and spelling strategies

This study explores oscillatory brain activity by means of event-related synchronization and desynchronization (%ERS/ERD) of EEG activity during the use of phonological and orthographic-morphological spelling strategies in L2 (English) and L1 (German) in native German speaking children. EEG was recorded while 33 children worked on a task requiring either phonological or orthographic-morphological spelling strategies. L2 processing elicited more theta %ERS than L1 processing (particularly at bilateral frontal and right posterior parietal sites) which might suggest a stronger involvement of semantic encoding and retrieval of the less familiar L2. The highest level of theta %ERS was revealed for the orthographic-morphological strategy in L2 which might indicate a more intense way of lexical retrieval compared to the phonological strategy in L2 and the orthographic-morphological strategy in L1. Analyses moreover revealed that phonological processing (both in L1 and L2) was associated with comparatively strong left-hemispheric %ERD in the upper alpha frequency band.     

文盲文字加工的行为和脑机制

文盲作为一个特殊的被试群体,对其的研究一直备受关注。文盲研究最初集中在文盲的口语加工和语音意识等方面。其后比较关注文盲字词的语音和语义加工。随着脑成像技术的发展,对文盲的文字加工脑认知机制进行了研究,探讨脑功能组织是如何受到早期学习的调制,左侧梭状回在字词识别中的作用及其文盲脑功能偏侧化问题。以后此类研究应关注文盲字词识别学习过程中的脑功能变化和文化认知对认知老化的影响等科学问题。     

Is surface dysgraphia tied to semantic impairment? Evidence from a case of semantic dementia

Recent models of lexical processing suggest that written spelling partly depends upon the semantic system. According to these models, a deterioration in word meanings would necessarily lead to a spelling impairment, especially for low-frequency and orthographically irregular words. We report a case study of a patient (MK) with semantic dementia who presents impairments in knowledge of word meanings and surface dysgraphia. By specifically identifying concepts that are still known or that are partially or completely deteriorated, we show that the patient's spelling deficit is highly correlated with word comprehension. These data confirm that surface dysgraphia is directly linked to the breakdown in semantic memory.     

Lexical access for low- and high-frequency words in Hebrew

The hypothesis that phonological mediation is involved to a greater extent in the recognition of low- than in the recognition of high-frequency words was examined using Hebrew. Hebrew has two forms of spelling, pointed and unpointed, which differ greatly in the extent of phonological ambiguity, with the unpointed spelling lacking almost all vowel information. A lexical decision task was employed using target words that had only one pronunciation whether pointed or unpointed. Targets were either pointed or unpointed and were preceded by a prime, which for word targets, was either semantically related or unrelated. The results indicated the following: First, the advantage of pointed over unpointed spelling was larger for low-frequency than for high-frequency words, suggesting a stronger phonological mediation for low-frequency words. Second, the size of the pointing effect was independent of word length, suggesting that phonology is obtained on the basis of the printed word as a whole, by looking it up in a phonological lexicon. Third, response latency to nonwords was not affected by the presence or absence of pointing, suggesting that failure to locate the entry corresponding to a letter string in a phonological lexicon results in a NO decision. Fourth, presence of a related prime was not found to compensate for absence of pointing, suggesting that the activation of a word’s representation in the semantic lexicon does not aid access to its corresponding entry in the phonological lexicon.     

A longitudinal study of children's text messaging and literacy development

Recent studies have shown evidence of positive concurrent relationships between children's use of text message abbreviations ('textisms') and performance on standardized assessments of reading and spelling. This study aimed to determine the direction of this association. One hundred and nineteen children aged between 8 and 12 years were assessed on measures of general ability, reading, spelling, rapid phonological retrieval, and phonological awareness at the beginning and end of an academic year. The children were also asked to provide a sample of the text messages that they sent over a 2-day period. These messages were analyzed to determine the extent to which textisms were used. It was found that textism use at the beginning of the academic year was able to predict unique variance in spelling performance at the end of the academic year after controlling for age, verbal IQ, phonological awareness, and spelling ability at the beginning of the year. When the analysis was reversed, reading and spelling ability were unable to predict unique variance in textism usage. These data suggest that there is some evidence of a causal contribution of textism usage to spelling performance in children aged 8-12 years. However, when the measure of rapid phonological retrieval (rapid picture naming) was controlled in the analysis, the relationship between textism use and spelling ability just failed to reach statistical significance, suggesting that phonological access skills may mediate some of the relationship between textism use and spelling performance.     

Orthography and phonology in reading Japanese kanji words: Evidence from the semantic decision task with homophones

Correspondences between spelling and sound for Japanese kanji are complex and deep. The meaning of kanji words has generally been assumed to be accessed directly from orthography without phonological mediation. Experiment 1, however, replicated the findings of Van Orden (1987) that subjects made more false-positive errors on homophone foils than they did on nonhomophone controls in a semantic decision task, although they did so only when the foils were orthographically similar to the correct exemplars, which indicates both orthographic and phonological activations of meaning. Experiment 2 showed the same results when subjects were not required to pronounce the target words after semantic decisions, which indicates automatic phonological activation of kanji words. In Experiment 3, under pattern-masking conditions, this homophony effect was reduced but remained on errors, and the orthographic-similarity effect remained strong on both homophone and nonhomophone foils. These results suggest that both orthography and phonology play an important role in the comprehension of kanji words.     

Disruption of semantic influence on writing following a left prefrontal lesion

We report a patient with impaired spontaneous writing, written naming, and homophone spelling, consistent with a disruption of semantic influence on writing. However, writing to dictation by both the phonological and lexical spelling systems was intact. In addition, general semantic abilities were spared, as indicated by preserved auditory and reading comprehension. We propose that our patient could not incorporate meaning into writing because of a disruption of both direct and indirect connections between semantics and the orthographic output lexicon. The writing dysfunction was accompanied by a similar impairment of speech output, suggesting that it was part of a more general disturbance of semantic influence on language production following left prefrontal damage.     

Type-specific proactive interference in patients with semantic and phonological STM deficits

Prior neuropsychological evidence suggests that semantic and phonological components of short-term memory (STM) are functionally and neurologically distinct. The current paper examines proactive interference (PI) from semantic and phonological information in two STM-impaired patients, DS (semantic STM deficit) and AK (phonological STM deficit). In Experiment 1 probe recognition tasks with open and closed sets of stimuli were used. Phonological PI was assessed using nonword items, and semantic and phonological PI was assessed using words. In Experiment 2 phonological and semantic PI was elicited by an item recognition probe test with stimuli that bore phonological and semantic relations to the probes. The data suggested heightened phonological PI for the semantic STM patient, and exaggerated effects of semantic PI in the phonological STM case. The findings are consistent with an account of extremely rapid decay of activated type-specific representations in cases of severely impaired phonological and semantic STM.     

Orthographic learning in learning to spell: The roles of semantics and type of practice

This study investigated the relevance of type of practice and presence of semantic representation for orthographic learning in learning to spell. A total of 36 students in Grade 2 (mean age = 7 years 10 months) were exposed to 10 novel nonwords, 5 of which were paired with semantic information. Half of the participants practiced reading these new items, whereas the others spelled them. The students were then tested 1 and 7 days later on a dictation task. Results revealed a significant main effect of practice type favoring spelling practice and a main effect of the teaching condition, where taught items paired with semantic information were spelled correctly more often than words presented without semantic support. There was no effect of testing time, with learned words being retained well over the 1-week delay, nor were there any significant interactions. The findings support the contention that spelling offers an excellent milieu for orthographic learning to occur. Furthermore, semantics are proposed as a relevant factor in learning to spell, supporting the view that orthographic learning involves the integration of phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations.     

Predictive influence of phonological processing, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling performance

This paper focuses on the predictive influence of phonological awareness, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling. The retrospective study correlated spelling performance in a group of 199 French-speaking children at the end of grade 2 with earlier capacities for phonemic manipulation, morphological/syntactic correction, and naming speed, assessed at the end of grade 1. The results are consistent with an integrative model that challenges the unitary phonological disorder hypothesis and confirmed that in French, as in other languages, naming speed is an independent predictor of reading performance.     

Alphabetic and nonalphabetic L1 effects in English word identification: a comparison of Korean and Chinese English L2 learners

Different writing systems in the world select different units of spoken language for mapping. Do these writing system differences influence how first language (L1) literacy experiences affect cognitive processes in learning to read a second language (L2)? Two groups of college students who were learning to read English as a second language (ESL) were examined for their relative reliance on phonological and orthographic processing in English word identification: Korean students with an alphabetic L1 literacy background, and Chinese students with a nonalphabetic L1 literacy background. In a semantic category judgment task, Korean ESL learners made more false positive errors in judging stimuli that were homophones to category exemplars than they did in judging spelling controls. However, there were no significant differences in responses to stimuli in these two conditions for Chinese ESL learners. Chinese ESL learners, on the other hand, made more accurate responses to stimuli that were less similar in spelling to category exemplars than those that were more similar. Chinese ESL learners may rely less on phonological information and more on orthographic information in identifying English words than their Korean counterparts. Further evidence supporting this argument came from a phoneme deletion task in which Chinese subjects performed more poorly overall than their Korean counterparts and made more errors that were phonologically incorrect but orthographically acceptable. We suggest that cross-writing system differences in L1s and L1 reading skills transfer could be responsible for these ESL performance differences.