Syllable onsets are perceptual reading units

Syllable onsets are defined as the initial consonant or consonant cluster in a syllable (e.g., BR in BREAD). In the present study, using a letter detection paradigm and French words, we tested whether syllable onsets are processed as units by the reading system. In Experiment 1, we replicated Gross, Treiman, and Inman's (2000) result of observing no difference between the detection latencies of letters embedded in a multi-letter syllable onset (e.g., c in ECLATER) relative to a single-letter syllable onset (e.g., C in ECARTER). In Experiment 2, participants took longer to detect the target letter when it was in the second position of a multi-letter onset (e.g., L in TABLIER) than when it was a single-letter onset (e.g., L in ECOLIER). In Experiment 3, this position effect was replicated for graphemes. In Experiment 4, we tested and ruled out an alternative explanation of the unitization effect, in terms of lateral masking. These results indicate that syllable onsets are processed as perceptual units by the reading system and that the unitization effect is position dependent.     

Graphemic complexity and multiple print-to-sound associations in visual word recognition

It has recently been reported that words containing a multiletter grapheme are processed slower than are words composed of single-letter graphemes (Rastle & Coltheart, 1998; Rey, Jacobs, Schmidt-Weigand, & Ziegler, 1998). In the present study, using a perceptual identification task, we found in Experiment 1 that this graphemic complexity effect can be observed while controlling for multiple print-to-sound associations, indexed by regularity or consistency. In Experiment 2, we obtained cumulative effects of graphemic complexity and regularity. These effects were replicated in Experiment 3 in a naming task. Overall, these results indicate that graphemic complexity and multiple print-to-sound associations effects are independent and should be accounted for in different ways by models of written word processing.     

A comparative quantitative analysis of Greek orthographic transparency

Orthographic transparency refers to the systematicity in the mapping between orthographic letter sequences and phonological phoneme sequences in both directions, for reading and spelling. Measures of transparency previously used in the analysis of orthographies of other languages include regularity, consistency, and entropy. However, previous reports have typically been hampered by severe restrictions, such as using only monosyllables or only word-initial phonemes. Greek is sufficiently transparent to allow complete sequential alignment between graphemes and phonemes, therefore permitting full analyses at both letter and grapheme levels, using every word in its entirety. Here, we report multiple alternative measures of transparency, using both type and token counts, and compare these with estimates for other languages. We discuss the problems stemming from restricted analysis sets and the implications for psycholinguistic experimentation and computational modeling of reading and spelling.     

A meta-analysis of executive functioning in dyslexia with consideration of the impact of comorbid ADHD

Grapheme coding was examined in French Grade 6 and Grade 8 children and adults who learned English as a second language (L2). In Experiments 1 and 2, three conditions were compared in a letter detection task in L2: (1) simple grapheme (i.e., detect “a” in black); (2) complex language-shared grapheme (i.e., “a” in brain) and (3) complex L2-specific grapheme (i.e., “a” in beach). The data indicated that graphemes in L2 words were functional sub-lexical orthographic units for these L2 learners. Moreover, L2-specific graphemes took longer to process than language-shared complex graphemes. Using the same task, Experiment 3 examined phonological influences by manipulating the cross-language congruency of grapheme-to-phoneme mappings (detect “a” in have [congruent] vs. take [incongruent]). The outcome of this study offers preliminary evidence of graphemic coding during L2 word recognition both at the orthographic and the orthography-to-phonology mapping levels.     

Dyslexic and typical-reading children use vowel digraphs as perceptual units in reading

Digraphs are graphemes that are composed of two letters like the “ou” in “soup”. We hypothesized that the serial-reading strategy of dyslexic readers might interfere with the processing of digraphs. We used a letter-detection task to compare the processing of vowel digraphs in dyslexic and typical-reading children. Both groups were found to be slower in detecting a letter within a vowel digraph than in detecting a letter of a single-letter grapheme. The slower response to target letters embedded in a digraph was position independent in both groups. We also found that dyslexic children did not differ from typical-reading children in the detection of letters in words. These results indicate that typical-reading and dyslexic children process vowel digraphs as perceptual units and that dyslexic children do not show impairments in this early visual process.     

Dyslexic and typical-reading children use vowel digraphs as perceptual units in reading

Digraphs are graphemes that are composed of two letters like the "ou" in "soup". We hypothesized that the serial-reading strategy of dyslexic readers might interfere with the processing of digraphs. We used a letter-detection task to compare the processing of vowel digraphs in dyslexic and typical-reading children. Both groups were found to be slower in detecting a letter within a vowel digraph than in detecting a letter of a single-letter grapheme. The slower response to target letters embedded in a digraph was position independent in both groups. We also found that dyslexic children did not differ from typical-reading children in the detection of letters in words. These results indicate that typical-reading and dyslexic children process vowel digraphs as perceptual units and that dyslexic children do not show impairments in this early visual process.     

Automaticity in reading and the Stroop task: testing the limits of involuntary word processing

We investigated the parameters of involuntary word reading in the Stroop task in 7 experiments. Experiments 1-4 varied response modality and the presence of congruent word trials in a test of the claim that presenting a Stroop color word with only one letter in the target color eliminates the Stroop effect. Experiments 5 and 6 addressed the roles of spatial attention and orthographic processing as possible mechanisms behind the reduction of Stroop effects with the single-letter format. Experiment 7 investigated the limits of involuntary reading under optimal conditions for selective processing of rectangular color patch targets. We found that the single-letter format reduced but never eliminated Stroop effects, spatial attention but not orthographic processing plays a role in the effect of the single-letter format, and word reading is not completely prevented even with austere presentation conditions. We conclude with a defense of the involuntariness criterion for automaticity in the Stroop task, particularly when word reading is viewed in the context of a skilled performance.     

The role of nasals in reading: a normative study in French

Dual-route models of reading assume that reading can be done in two ways. A most common lexical route, on the one hand, allows regular and irregular words to be read while a second sublexical route allows nonwords and novel words to be read. A graphemic processing stage in sublexical reading is assumed to assemble the individual letters of a word or a nonword into multiletter graphemes prior to grapheme-phoneme conversion. The purpose of this study was to determine whether vowel/nasal clusters required as much time to be processed asvowel/vowel and consonant/consonant clusters in sublexical nonword reading in French. Results indicate that nonwords that contain vowel/nasal clusters are read significantly faster than nonwords comprising vowel/vowel and consonant/consonant clusters. Furthermore, nonwords that contain single-letter graphemes are read significantly faster than nonwords comprising vowel/nasal clusters and nonwords comprising vowel/vowel and consonant/consonant clusters. These results taken as a whole support the idea that nasals act as diacritic marks rather than being processed by means of a graphemic parsing procedure.     

Processing complex graphemes in handwriting production

Recent studies on handwriting production and neuropsychological data have suggested that orthographic representations are multilevel structures that encode information on letter identity and order, but also on intermediate-grained processing units such as syllables and morphemes. This study on handwriting production examined whether orthographic representations also include a graphemic-processing level. French adults wrote words containing an embedded one-, two-, or three-letter grapheme (e.g., a in clavier, ai in prairie, ain in plainte) on a digitizer. The results for letter duration revealed that the timing of movement processing depends on grapheme length (e.g., the duration of a for one-letter graphemes was shorter than that for two-letter graphemes, which, in turn, was shorter than that for three-letter graphemes). Two- and three-letter graphemes start to be processed before we start to write them. The results therefore revealed that orthographic representations also encode information on grapheme complexity.     

Visual detection of multi-letter patterns

This study addressed two basic questions about the detection of multi-letter patterns: (a) How is the detection of a multi-letter pattern related to the detection of its individual components? (b) How is the detection of a sequence of letters influenced by the observer's familiarity with that sequence? In three experiments observers searched for one-, two-, or three letter patterns embedded in a rapid series of multiple six-letter frames. In Experiment 1, unfamiliar two-letter patterns were detected more accurately than their one-letter components. This two-letter advantage reflects the fact that in an array of fixed size, larger target stimuli contain more information and are easier to discriminate from nontarget alternatives. Quantitative analyses indicated that observers combine information not decisions, about the component letters in a pattern. In Experiment 2, with statistical and physical properties equated, a familiar three-letter pattern (i.e., CAT) was detected more accurately than its unfamiliar anagram (i.e., TCA). This word advantage in word (not letter) detection persisted even after extensive practice and was uninfluenced by the lexical character of distractor items. In Experiment 3, words (e.g., FIB), pronounceable non words (e.g., FIF(, and familiar acronyms (e.g., FBI) were detected more readily than unfamiliar items (e.g., IBF). Thus both orthographic knowledge and familiarity with specific sequences can facilitate perceptual processing in "word" detection.     

阅读障碍儿童的形音捆绑缺陷及其脑神经机制

形音捆绑缺陷研究是国内外阅读障碍研究领域的一个新方向。本文阐述了形音捆绑加工的理论与定义,综述了国内外研究者经常采用的三种形音捆绑的研究范式:配对联想学习、变化检测范式和线索回忆任务,介绍并分析了各研究范式的优缺点、适用范围及主要研究发现。同时,综述与评价了国内外有关阅读障碍形音捆绑缺陷的脑机制研究的主要结论及不足。最后,本文讨论了现有研究在实验设计和理论上的贡献与不足,提出了今后的研究方向和改进建议。     

Tracking the transition from sublexical to lexical processing: On the creation of orthographic and phonological lexical representations

Participants read aloud nonword letter strings, one at a time, which varied in the number of letters. The standard result is observed in two experiments; the time to begin reading aloud increases as letter length increases. This result is standardly understood as reflecting the operation of a serial, left-to-right translation of graphemes into phonemes. The novel result is that the effect of letter length is statistically eliminated by a small number of repetitions. This elimination suggests that these nonwords are no longer always being read aloud via a serial left-to-right sublexical process. Instead, the data are taken as evidence that new orthographic and phonological lexical entries have been created for these nonwords and are now read at least sometimes by recourse to the lexical route. Experiment 2 replicates the interaction between nonword letter length and repetition observed in Experiment 1 and also demonstrates that this interaction is not seen when participants merely classify the string as appearing in upper or lower case. Implications for existing dual-route models of reading aloud and Share's self-teaching hypothesis are discussed.     

Surface dyslexia: A case report and some theoretical implications to reading models

This paper reports on the psycholinguistic investigation of a surface dyslexic aphasic patient's abilities to handle written material. The analysis of paralexic errors produced in reading aloud single words and nonwords classically suggested that the patient was using an analytical strategy parsing the letter string stimulus, from left to right, into graphemes, and assigning phonemic values to graphemes. The patient's results were found to be sensitive to irregularities in correspondence between graphemes and phonemes not only in reading aloud but in lexical decisions, writing on dictation, rhyming, and written-word comprehension. Moreover, the patient's linguistic behavior brought out the reverse pattern observed in deep-dyslexic performances within word/nonword and content/function word dimensions. It was found that some semantic information about written words could be retrieved from both phonological and nonphonological processes presumably operating concurrently and both providing converging or conflicting pieces of meaning to the understanding of written words. Some considerations derived from the observation of this pathological reading behavior are discussed, contributing to a psycholinguistic model of normal reading.     

Effects of targets embedded within words in a visual search task

Visual search performance can be negatively affected when both targets and distracters share a dimension relevant to the task. This study examined if visual search performance would be influenced by distracters that affect a dimension irrelevant from the task. In Experiment 1 within the letter string of a letter search task, target letters were embedded within a word. Experiment 2 compared targets embedded in words to targets embedded in nonwords. Experiment 3 compared targets embedded in words to a condition in which a word was present in a letter string, but the target letter, although in the letter string, was not embedded within the word. The results showed that visual search performance was negatively affected when a target appeared within a high frequency word. These results suggest that the interaction and effectiveness of distracters is not merely dependent upon common features of the target and distracters, but can be affected by word frequency (a dimension not related to the task demands).     

The interfering effect of word perception on letter identification

Subjects identified a single lowercase letter in a visual display by pressing one of two buttons. Two letters were assigned to each response. Groups received one of three context conditions: word, nonword, or single-letter displays. In words and nonwords, the flanking letters adjacent to the target varied as to whether they were response compatible or incompatible with the target. Single letters produced faster response latencies than either multi-letter condition, and words yielded slower latencies than did nonwords. Items Containing an incompatible-response flanking letter produced longer latencies than items containing a compatible flanking letter. Subgroups of subjects with different characteristic processing patterns were identified with a separate test. These subgroups were differentially affected by the context conditions in the letter-identification task. A greater subgroup difference was found in nonwords than in words.     

Biases and regularities of grapheme–colour associations in Japanese nonsynaesthetic population

Associations between graphemes and colours in a nonsynaesthetic Japanese population were investigated. Participants chose the most suitable colour from 11 basic colour terms for each of 40 graphemes from the four categories of graphemes used in the Japanese language (kana characters, English alphabet letters, and Arabic and kanji numerals). This test was repeated after a three-week interval. In their responses, which were not as temporally consistent as those of grapheme–colour synaesthetes, participants showed biases and regularities that were comparable to those of synaesthetes reported in past studies. Although it has been believed that only synaesthetes, and not nonsynaesthetes, tended to associate graphemes with colours based on grapheme frequency, Berlin and Kay's colour typology, and colour word frequency, participants in this study tended in part to associate graphemes with colours based on the above factors. Moreover, participants that were nonsynaesthetes tended to associate different graphemes that shared sounds and/or meanings (e.g., Arabic and kanji numerals representing the same number) with the same colours, which was analogous to the findings in Japanese synaesthetes. These results support the view that grapheme–colour synaesthesia might have its origins in cross-modal association processes that are shared with the general population.     

Perceptual Recovery from Consonant-Cluster Simplification in Korean Using Language-Specific Phonological Knowledge

Two experiments examined whether perceptual recovery from Korean consonant-cluster simplification is based on language-specific phonological knowledge. In tri-consonantal C1C2C3 sequences such as /lkt/ and /lpt/ in Seoul Korean, either C1 or C2 can be completely deleted. Seoul Koreans monitored for C2 targets (/p/ or / k/, deleted or preserved) in the second word of a two-word phrase with an underlying /l/-C2-/t/ sequence. In Experiment 1 the target-bearing words had contextual lexical-semantic support. Listeners recovered deleted targets as fast and as accurately as preserved targets with both Word and Intonational Phrase (IP) boundaries between the two words. In Experiment 2, contexts were low-pass filtered. Listeners were still able to recover deleted targets as well as preserved targets in IP-boundary contexts, but better with physically-present targets than with deleted targets in Word-boundary contexts. This suggests that the benefit of having target acoustic-phonetic information emerges only when higher-order (contextual and phrase-boundary) information is not available. The strikingly efficient recovery of deleted phonemes with neither acoustic-phonetic cues nor contextual support demonstrates that language-specific phonological knowledge, rather than language-universal perceptual processes which rely on fine-grained phonetic details, is employed when the listener perceives the results of a continuous-speech process in which reduction is phonetically complete.     

Effect of direction of sequential presentation and redundancy on short-term recognition memory

Short-term recognition memory was tested by presenting six letters, one after the other, followed by a target letter and having S indicate whether or not the target matched one of the six letters. Recognition memory for a letter was better when it was embedded in a six-letter word, rather than a nonword, and when it was included in a sequence presented left-to-right, rather than right-to-left (Experiment 1). Reducing the presentation rate from 4/sec to 2.5/sec largely eliminated the left-to-right effect (Experiment 2). The effect of direction of presentation was greater for redundant (Experiment 1) than for nonredundant sequences (Experiment 3) and was greater for Ss who more frequently formed a word out of the sequence (Experiments 1 and 2), but was no greater for words than nonwords (Experiments 1 and 2) and no greater for letter than for line-figure sequences (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that the left-to-right effect depends as much, or more, on “peripheral” processes (e.g., eye movements) as on “central” processes (e.g., reading).     

Interference between phonemes during phoneme monitoring: evidence for an interactive activation model of speech perception

We explore the recent finding (Newman & Dell, 1978) that the time needed to detect a target phoneme in a phoneme monitoring task is increased when the preceding word contains a phoneme similar to the target. Normal adult native speakers of English monitored auditorily presented sentences and responded as quickly as possible whenever they detected a specified phoneme. We found that preceding word-initial phonemes, despite being processed more quickly, increased the response latency to the following target phoneme more than did preceding word-medial phonemes. There was also an increase in response latency even when the subject could be highly certain that the similar preceding phoneme was not an instance of the target phoneme. We argue that the interference effects are due to fundamental characteristics of perceptual processing and that more time is needed to categorize the target phoneme. We present a computer simulation using an interactive activation model of speech perception to demonstrate the plausibility of our explanation.