Children use vowels to help them spell consonants

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between ch and tch is determined by the preceding vowel (coach, roach vs. catch, hatch). We investigated children's sensitivity to vowel context when spelling consonants in monosyllabic nonwords. Second graders (7-year-olds) tended to use vowel context correctly when spelling word-final consonants (codas). This use of context was progressively stronger for third and fifth graders as well as for college students. The increase is not due to differences in vocabulary because the contextual patterns are similar in reading materials targeted at all four age groups. Vowel letters (graphotactics) had a stronger influence than did vowel pronunciation. Children also used vowel context when spelling word-initial consonants (onsets); this effect was as strong for second graders as for adults. Thus, novice spellers take advantage of graphotactic information.     

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.     

Pronouncing novel graphemes: The role of consonantal context

In three experiments, we examined how readers learn and generalize new pronunciations for vowel graphemes. Children ages 6 1/2 to 9 (n = 97) and college students (n = 21) were taught a nonword that included a novel vowel pronunciation in the middle position (e.g., zuop is pronounced /zup/). They were then asked to pronounce other nonwords that contained the same vowel grapheme. Participants were more likely to use the taught pronunciation when the target item and the training item shared a consonant as well as a vowel than when they shared only the vowel. The new pronunciation was not significantly more likely to appear when the target shared the vowel and final consonant (rime) of the training stimulus than when it shared the initial consonant and vowel. We discuss implications for views of reading and its development.     

Influence of consonantal context on the pronunciation of vowels: a comparison of human readers and computational models

In two experiments, we found that college students' pronunciations of vowels in nonwords are influenced both by preceding and following consonants. The predominance of rimes in previous studies of reading does not appear to arise because readers are unable to pick up associations that cross the onset-rime boundary, but rather because English has relatively few such associations. Comparisons between people's vowel pronunciations and those produced by various computational models of reading showed that no model provided a good account of human performance on nonwords for which the vowel shows contextual conditioning. Possible directions for improved models are suggested.     

Word learning and phonetic processing in preschool-age children

Consonants and vowels have been shown to play different relative roles in different processes, including retrieving known words from pseudowords during adulthood or simultaneously learning two phonetically similar pseudowords during infancy or toddlerhood. The current study explores the extent to which French-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds exhibit a so-called “consonant bias” in a task simulating word acquisition, that is, when learning new words for unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, the to-be-learned words differed both by a consonant and a vowel (e.g., /byf/-/duf/), and children needed to choose which of the two objects to associate with a third one whose name differed from both objects by either a consonant or a vowel (e.g., /dyf/). In such a conflict condition, children needed to favor (or neglect) either consonant information or vowel information. The results show that only 3-year-olds preferentially chose the consonant identity, thereby neglecting the vowel change. The older children (and adults) did not exhibit any response bias. In Experiment 2, children needed to pick up one of two objects whose names differed on either consonant information or vowel information. Whereas 3-year-olds performed better with pairs of pseudowords contrasting on consonants, the pattern of asymmetry was reversed in 4-year-olds, and 5-year-olds did not exhibit any significant response bias. Interestingly, girls showed overall better performance and exhibited earlier changes in performance than boys. The changes in consonant/vowel asymmetry in preschoolers are discussed in relation with developments in linguistic (lexical and morphosyntactic) and cognitive processing.     

The influence of phoneme position overlap on the phonemic similarity effect in nonword recall

The current research examined the predictions that short-term memory models generate for the phonological similarity effect, when similarity was defined in different ways. Three serial recall experiments with consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) nonwords are reported, where the position of the phonemes that list items shared was manipulated (i.e., shared vowel and final consonant [_VC; Experiment 1], initial consonant and vowel [CV_; Experiment 2], or the two consonants [C_C; Experiment 3]. The results show that the position of common phonemes in nonwords has differential effects on order and item information. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research into the effect of phonemic similarity on nonword recall, and modifications to current short-term memory models are proposed.     

Effects of phoneme repertoire

In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from five vowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with different consonants). In Experiment 1, the listeners’ native language was Dutch, in which vowel and consonant repertoires are similar in size. The difference between predictable and unpredictable contexts was comparable for vowel and consonant targets. In Experiments 2 and 3, the listeners’ native language was Spanish, which has four times as many consonants as vowels; here effects of an unpredictable consonant context on vowel detection were significantly greater than effects of an unpredictable vowel context on consonant detection. This finding suggests that listeners’ processing of phonemes takes into account the constitution of their language’s phonemic repertoire and the implications that this has for contextual variability.     

Onsets and rimes as units of spoken syllables: evidence from children

The effects of syllable structure on the development of phonemic analysis and reading skills were examined in four experiments. The experiments were motivated by theories that syllables consist of an onset (initial consonant or cluster) and a rime (vowel and any following consonants). Experiment 1 provided behavioral support for the syllable structure model by showing that 8-year-olds more easily learned word games that treated onsets and rimes as units than games that did not. Further support for the cohesiveness of the onset came from Experiments 2 and 3, which found that 4- and 5-year-olds less easily recognized a spoken or printed consonant target when it was the first phoneme of a cluster than when it was a singleton. Experiment 4 extended these results to printed words by showing that consonant-consonant-vowel nonsense syllables were more difficult for beginning readers to decode than consonant-vowel-consonant syllables.     

The influence of phoneme position overlap on the phonemic similarity effect in nonword recall

The current research examined the predictions that short-term memory models generate for the phonological similarity effect, when similarity was defined in different ways. Three serial recall experiments with consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonwords are reported, where the position of the phonemes that list items shared was manipulated (i.e., shared vowel and final consonant [_VC; Experiment 1], initial consonant and vowel [CV_; Experiment 2], or the two consonants [C_C; Experiment 3]. The results show that the position of common phonemes in nonwords has differential effects on order and item information. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research into the effect of phonemic similarity on nonword recall, and modifications to current short-term memory models are proposed.     

Vowel mutability and lexical selection in English: Evidence from a word reconstruction task

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Paris, France This study introduces a new paradigm for investigating lexical processing. First, an analysis of data from a series of word-spotting experiments is presented suggesting that listeners treat vowels as more mutable than consonants in auditory word recognition in English. In order to assess this hypothesis, a word reconstruction task was devised in which listeners were required to turn word-like nonwords into words by adapting the identity of either one vowel or one consonant. Listeners modified vowel identity more readily than consonant identity. Furthermore, incorrect responses more often involved a vowel change than a consonant change. These findings are compatible with the proposal that English listeners are equipped to deal with vowel variability by assuming that vowel identity is comparatively underdefined. The results are discussed in the light of theoretical accounts of speech processing.     

Speech perception and the discrimination of brief auditory cues in reading disabled children

The processing of speech and nonspeech sounds by 23 reading disabled children and their age- and sex-matched controls was examined in a task requiring them to identify and report the order of pairs of stimuli. Reading disabled children were impaired in making judgments with very brief tones and with stop consonant syllables at short interstimulus intervals (ISI's). They had no unusual difficulty with vowel stimuli, vowel stimuli in a white noise background, or very brief visual figures. Poor performance on the tones and stop consonants appears to be due to specific difficulty in processing very brief auditory cues. The reading disabled children also showed deficits in the perception of naturally produced words, less sharply defined category boundaries, and a greater reliance on context in making phoneme identifications. The results suggest a perceptual deficit in some reading disabled children, which interferes with the processing of phonological information.     

The phonological similarity effect in serial recognition

An experiment is reported examining the effect of consistent phonemic similarity among list items on memory retention in a task that is independent of overt speech production, the serial recognition task. Lists of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and nonwords were constructed such that although phoneme overlap was manipulated (i.e., shared vowel and final consonant [_VC], initial consonant and vowel [CV_], or the two consonants [C_C]), similarity remained constant. The results show that the influence of sub-syllabic mechanisms on STM performance is independent of speech production processes, and similarity in the pattern of results suggests that the same mechanisms subserve the recall of words and nonwords in STM. It is argued that the results are more consistent with psycholinguistic models than nonlinguistic models of STM, and implications for current STM models are discussed.     

The phonological similarity effect in serial recognition

An experiment is reported examining the effect of consistent phonemic similarity among list items on memory retention in a task that is independent of overt speech production, the serial recognition task. Lists of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and nonwords were constructed such that although phoneme overlap was manipulated (i.e., shared vowel and final consonant [_VC], initial consonant and vowel [CV_], or the two consonants [C_C]), similarity remained constant. The results show that the influence of sub-syllabic mechanisms on STM performance is independent of speech production processes, and similarity in the pattern of results suggests that the same mechanisms subserve the recall of words and nonwords in STM. It is argued that the results are more consistent with psycholinguistic models than nonlinguistic models of STM, and implications for current STM models are discussed.     

Learning a novel grapheme: effects of positional and phonemic context on children's spelling

Two experiments explored how children who encounter a new spelling for a phoneme generalize it to novel items. Children ages 5 1/2 to 9 (N = 123) were taught a CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) nonword containing a new vowel spelling in the middle position (e.g., /gaik/ is spelled as giik). They were then asked to spell other nonwords containing the vowel or to judge spellings that had supposedly been produced by younger children. Children were sensitive to position in the spelling production task, being more likely to use the novel grapheme when the vowel appeared in the middle of a CVC target than when it appeared in word-initial or word-final position. Children were not significantly more likely to use the novel grapheme when the target shared the vowel and final consonant (rime) of the training stimulus than when it shared the initial consonant and vowel. Implications for views of spelling development are discussed.     

What the reader’s eye tells the mind’s ear: Silent reading activates inner speech

Although copious research has investigated the role of phonology in reading, little research has investigated the precise nature of the entailed speech representations. The present study examined the similarity of “inner speech” in reading to overt speech. Two lexical decision experiments (in which participants gave speeded word/nonword classifications to letter strings) assessed the effects of implicit variations in vowel and word-initial consonant length. Responses were generally slower for phonetically long stimuli than for phonetically short stimuli, despite equal orthographic lengths. Moreover, the phonetic length effects displayed principled interactions with common factors known to affect lexical decisions, such as word frequency and the similarity of words to nonwords. Both phonetic length effects were stronger among slower readers. The data suggest that acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.     

THE ACQUISITION OF GRAPHEME‐PHONEME CORRESPONDENCES IN A WORD LEARNING TASK

Abstract

The relationship between reading ability with receptive vocabulary level and the ability to induce grapheme‐phoneme relationships was investigated using grade one students. The ability to induce relationships was assessed by a word learning task in which the stimuli were six consonant‐vowel‐consonant trigrams composed of seven letter‐like forms with a 1:1 grapheme‐phoneme correspondence. The word learning task was followed by a test of each student's acquisition of the grapheme‐phoneme correspondences that appeared in the word stimuli. The ability to induce the relationships was found to be much more strongly related to reading ability than receptive vocabulary. The results suggest that good and poor readers applied different word learning strategies, with good readers appearing to apply more readily a principled solution and poor readers an associative solution. The results are consistent with the theory of reading acquisition advanced by Gibson and Levin.     

Call me Alix,not Elix: vowels are more important than consonants in own‐name recognition at 5 months

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical acquisition was assessed in French‐learning 5‐month‐olds by testing sensitivity to minimal phonetic changes in their own name. Infants’ reactions to mispronunciations revealed sensitivity to vowel but not consonant changes. Vowels were also more salient (on duration and intensity) but less distinct (on spectrally based measures) than consonants. Lastly, vowel (but not consonant) mispronunciation detection was modulated by acoustic factors, in particular spectrally based distance. These results establish that consonant changes do not affect lexical recognition at 5 months, while vowel changes do; the consonant bias observed later in development does not emerge until after 5 months through additional language exposure.     

Is a "Phoenician" reading style superior to a "Chinese" reading style? Evidence from fourth graders

This study compared normally achieving fourth-grade "Phoenician" readers, who identify nonwords significantly more accurately than they do exception words, with "Chinese" readers, who show the reverse pattern. Phoenician readers scored lower than Chinese readers on word identification, exception word reading, orthographic choice, spelling, reading comprehension, and verbal ability. When compared with normally achieving children who read nonwords and exception words equally well, Chinese readers scored as well as these children on word identification, regular word reading, orthographic choice, spelling, reading comprehension, phonological sensitivity, and verbal ability and scored better on exception word reading. Chinese readers also used rhyme-based analogies to read nonwords derived from high-frequency exception words just as often as did these children. As predicted, Phoenician and Chinese readers adopted somewhat different strategies in reading ambiguous nonwords constructed by analogy to high-frequency exception words. Phoenician readers were more likely than Chinese readers to read ambiguous monosyllabic nonwords via context-free grapheme-phoneme correspondences and were less likely to read disyllabic nonwords by analogy to high-frequency analogues. Although the Chinese reading style was more common than the Phoenician style in normally achieving fourth graders, there were similar numbers of poor readers with phonological dyslexia (identifying nonwords significantly more accurately than exception words) and surface dyslexia (showing the reverse pattern), although surface dyslexia was more common in the severely disabled readers. However, few of the poor readers showed pure patterns of phonological or surface dyslexia.     

ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION AND PHONEMIC SEGMENTATION IN SKILLED READERS:

Abstract— The long-lasting effect of reading experience in Hebrew and English on phonemic segmentation was examined in skilled readers Hebrew and English orthographies differ in the way they represent phonological information Whereas each phoneme in English is represented by a discrete letter, in un-pointed Hebrew most of the vowel information is not conveyed by the print, and, therefore, a letter often corresponds to a CV utterance (i. e., a consonant plus a vowel) Adult native speakers of Hebrew or English, presented with words consisting of a consonant, a vowel, and then another consonant, were require to delete the first "sound" of each word and to pronounce the remaining utterance as fast as possible Hebrew speakers deleted the initial CV segment instead of the initial consonant more often than English speakers, for both Hebrew and English words Moreover, Hebrew speakers were significantly slower than English speakers in correctly deleting the initial phoneme, and faster in deleting the whole syllable. These results suggest that the manner in which orthography represents phonology not only affects phonological awareness during reading acquisition, but also has a long-lasting effect on skilled readers' intuitions concerning the phonological structure of their spoken language.