Subsyllabic units in computerized reading instruction: onset-rime vs. postvowel segmentation

Previous studies suggest that adults and children divide spoken syllables into subsyllabic onset-rime units more readily than into any other kind of subsyllabic unit. We asked whether this same onset-rime segmentation might also be beneficial in teaching children to read. That is, can children learn more words segmented at the onset-rime boundary (e.g., CL-AP, D-ISH) than words segmented after the vowel (CLA-P, DI-SH)? In three experiments, first-grade students studied single words presented by a computer connected to a high-quality speech synthesizer. Experiment 1 used words of four letters but only three phonemes apiece (e.g., WHIP, DISH). In some of these words the onset-rime segmentation corresponded to the initial bigram (e.g., WH-IP); in some it did not (e.g., D-ISH). Experiments 2 and 3 used words of four letters and four phonemes (e.g., CLAP, CORN). In all three experiments, onset-rime segmentation proved more helpful than postvowel segmentation in short-term learning of the words.     

Are transposition effects specific to letters?

Recent research has consistently shown that pseudowords created by transposing two letters are perceptually similar to their corresponding base words (e.g., jugde–judge). In the framework of the overlap model (Gomez, Ratcliff, & Perea, 2008), this effect is due to a noisy process in the localization of the “objects” (e.g., letters, kana syllables). In the present study, we examine whether this effect is specific to letter strings or whether it also occurs with other “objects” (namely, digits, symbols, and pseudoletters). To that end, we conducted a series of five masked priming experiments using the same–different task. Results showed robust effects of transposition for all objects, except for pseudoletters. This is consistent with the view that locations of familiar objects (i.e., letters, numbers, and symbols) can be best understood as distributions along a dimension rather than as precise points.     

Reading, equivalence, and recombination of units: a replication with students with different learning histories

First graders, preschoolers, special education students, and adults received a reading program in which they learned to match printed to dictated words and to construct (copy) printed words. The students not only learned to match the training words but also learned to read them. In addition, most of the students learned to read new words that involved recombinations of the syllables of the training words. The results replicate and extend the generality of a prior analysis of a reading program based on stimulus equivalence and recombination of units.     

Effect of consonant/vowel letter organisation on the syllable counting task: evidence from English

Recent studies in alphabetic writing systems have investigated whether the status of letters as consonants or vowels influences the perception and processing of written words. Here, we examined to what extent the organisation of consonants and vowels within words affects performance in a syllable counting task in English. Participants were asked to judge the number of syllables in written words that were matched for the number of spoken syllables but comprised either 1 orthographic vowel cluster less than the number of syllables (hiatus words, e.g., triumph) or as many vowel clusters as syllables (e.g., pudding). In 3 experiments, we found that readers were slower and less accurate on hiatus than control words, even when phonological complexity (Experiment 1), number of reduced vowels (Experiment 2), and number of letters (Experiment 3) were taken into account. Interestingly, for words with or without the same number of vowel clusters and syllables, participants’ errors were more likely to underestimate the number of syllables than to overestimate it. Results are discussed in a cross-linguistic perspective.     

Syllables and spelling units affect feature integration in words

Three experiments showed that syllables and spelling patterns function as higher order units in word perception. Subjects were required to identify the color of a target letter in briefly presented words composed of different-colored letters. In Experiment 1, subjects incorrectly reported the color of a nontarget letter (conjunction error) more often in one-syllable words containing few spelling units than in two-syllable words containing many spelling units. Experiment 2 showed that subjects made more conjunction errors in one-syllable words than in two-syllable words when the number of spelling patterns was controlled. Experiment 3 showed that conjunction errors decreased as spelling units increased when the number of syllables was held constant. Experiments 1 and 3 also showed that more conjunction errors occurred within syllabic and spelling units than between these units. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on syllable and spelling pattern effects.     

Teaching reading and spelling: exclusion and stimulus equivalence

In Experiment 1, 7 nonreading children were exposed to a program designed to teach reading of 51 training words. The program featured an exclusion-based procedure in which the children (a) matched printed to dictated words and (b) constructed (copied) printed words with movable letters and named them. All children learned to read the training words. Five children also read generalization words and showed progress in spelling. Experiment 2 applied the program to 4 different children, omitting the word-construction task. They also learned to read the training words, but only 1 participant read generalization words. The data support a stimulus equivalence account of reading acquisition and suggest that reading generalization may be obtained, especially when the teaching program includes word construction.     

Can we see syllables in monosyllabic words? A study with illusory conjunctions

Mathey, Zagar, Doignon, and Seigneuric (2006) reported an inhibitory effect of syllabic neighbourhood in monosyllabic French words suggesting that syllable units mediate the access to lexical representations of monosyllabic stimuli. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perception of syllable units in monosyllabic stimuli. The illusory conjunction paradigm was used to examine perceptual groupings of letters. Experiment 1 showed that potential syllables in monosyllabic French words (e.g., BI in BICHE) affected the pattern of illusory conjunctions. Experiment 2 indicated that the perceptual parsing in monosyllabic items was due to syllable information and orthographic redundancy. The implications of the data are discussed for visual word recognition processes in an interactive activation model incorporating syllable units and connected adjacent letters (IAS; Mathey et al., 2006).     

Recognition memory for foreign language lexical stress

This study investigated whether English speakers retained the lexical stress patterns of newly learned Spanish words. Participants studied spoken Spanish words (e.g., DUcha [shower], ciuDAD [city]; stressed syllables in capital letters) and subsequently performed a recognition task, in which studied words were presented with the same lexical stress pattern (DUcha) or the opposite lexical stress pattern (CIUdad). Participants were able to discriminate same- from opposite-stress words, indicating that lexical stress was encoded and used in the recognition process. Word-form similarity to English also influenced outcomes, with Spanish cognate words and words with trochaic stress (MANgo) being recognized more often and more quickly than Spanish cognate words with iambic stress (soLAR) and noncognates. The results suggest that while segmental and suprasegmental features of the native language influence foreign word recognition, foreign lexical stress patterns are encoded and not discarded in memory.     

The salience of silent letters in children’s memory for word spellings

To compare children’s memory for silent and pronounced letters in familiar spellings of words, 7- to 10-year-olds were given two tasks. First, they imagined word spellings and decided whether target letters were present. Then they recalled the words associated with the target letters. Five experiments yielded similar findings. Pronounced letters were recognized somewhat more accurately than silent letters. However, silent letters were detected more rapidly in words than pronounced letters were, and silent letters prompted superior recall of words. The influence of several factors, such as the particular words chosen, the position of letters, and the expectancies of subjects, was ruled out in one or another experiment. Two explanations for findings are proposed. The favorite is that effects reflect the way silent letters are stored in long-term memory when spellings are learned. The other is that events occurring in the experiment enhanced episodic memory for silent letters.     

What can megastudies tell us about the orthographic structure of English words?

Although the majority of research in visual word recognition has targeted single-syllable words, most words are polysyllabic. These words engender special challenges, one of which concerns their analysis into smaller units. According to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants (C) and vowels (V) constrains the orthographic structure of printed words. So far, evidence has been reported only in French with factorial studies of relatively small sets of items. In the present study, we performed regression analyses on corpora of megastudies (English and British Lexicon Project databases) to examine the influence of the CV pattern in English. We compared hiatus words, which present a mismatch between the number of syllables and the number of groups of adjacent vowel letters (e.g., client), to other words, controlling for standard lexical variables. In speeded pronunciation, hiatus words were processed more slowly than control words, and the effect was stronger in low-frequency words. In the lexical decision task, the interference effect of hiatus in low-frequency words was balanced by a facilitatory effect in high-frequency words. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that the configuration of consonant and vowel letters influences the processing of polysyllabic words in English.     

The use of rhythm in attending to speech

Three experiments examined attentional allocation during speech processing to determine whether listeners capitalize on the rhythmic nature of speech and attend more closely to stressed than to unstressed syllables. Ss performed a phoneme monitoring task in which the target phoneme occurred on a syllable that was either predicted to be stressed or unstressed by the context preceding the target word. Stimuli were digitally edited to eliminate the local acoustic correlates of stress. A sentential context and a context composed of word lists, in which all the words had the same stress pattern, were used. In both cases, the results suggest that attention may be preferentially allocated to stressed syllables during speech processing. However, a normal sentence context may not provide strong predictive cues to lexical stress, limiting the use of the attentional focus.     

The role of discourse context in developing word form representations: a paradoxical relation between reading and learning

To acquire representations of printed words, children must attend to the written form of a word and link this form with the word's pronunciation. When words are read in context, they may be read with less attention to these features, and this can lead to poorer word form retention. Two experiments with young children (ages 5-8 years) confirmed this hypothesis. In our experiments, children attempted to read words they could not previously read, during a self-teaching period, either in context or in isolation. Later they were tested on how well they learned the words as a function of self-teaching condition (isolation or context). Consistent with previous research, children read more words accurately in context than in isolation during self-teaching; however, children had better retention for words learned in isolation. Furthermore, this benefit from learning in isolation was larger for less skilled readers. This effect of poorer word retention when words are learned in context is paradoxical because context has been shown to facilitate word identification. We discuss factors that may influence this effect of context, especially the role of children's skill level and the demands of learning new word representations at the beginning of reading instruction.     

The Representation of Sublexical Orthographic-Phonologic Correspondences: Evidence from Phonological Dyslexia

Although there is considerable evidence that grapheme and body units are involved in assembling phonology from print, there is little evidence supporting the involvement of syllabic representations. We provide evidence on this point from a phonological dyslexic patient (ML) who, as a result of brain damage, is relatively unable to read nonwords. ML was found to be able to perform tasks assumed to reflect processes involved in assembled phonology (i.e. segmentation, orthographic-phonologic conversion, and blending) when the units involved were syllables, but demonstrated considerable difficulty when they were onset, body, or phoneme units. Additionally, both ML and matched controls were much better able to find words in an anagrams task (Treiman & Chafetz, 1987) when they resulted from the combination of segments corresponding to syllables than when they did not. It is suggested that the relationship between print and sound is represented at multiple levels (including the syllable) (Shallice, Warrington, & McCarthy, 1983) and that ML's nonword reading impairment is the result of disruption of representations below the level of the syllable.     

Lexical access of resyllabified words: Evidence from phoneme monitoring

Resyllabification is a phonological process in which consonants are attached to syllables other than those from which they originally came. In four experiments, we investigated whether resyllabified words, such as "my bike is" pronounced as "mai.bai.kis," are more difficult to recognize than nonresyllabified words. Using a phoneme-monitoring task, we found that phonemes in resyllabified words were detected more slowly than those in nonresyllabified words. This difference increased when recognition of the carrier word was made more difficult. Acoustic differences between the target words themselves could not account for the results, because cross-splicing the resyllabified and nonresyllabified carrier words did not change the pattern. However, when nonwords were used as carriers, the effect disappeared. It is concluded that resyllabification increases the lexical-processing demands, which then interfere with phoneme monitoring.     

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.     

Letter detection in very familiar texts

In the present study, we investigated whether patterns of letter detection for function and content words in texts are affected by the familiarity of the material being read. In Experiment 1, subjects searched for target letters in sentences that had been rehearsed prior to performing the letter detection on them as well as on unfamiliar sentences. In Experiment 2, subjects searched for target letters in highly familiar verses (e.g., nursery rhymes) and in unfamiliar sentences that were matched to the familiar verses. A disadvantage in letter detection for function as compared with content words consistently found with unfamiliar passages was reduced significantly with the familiar material in both experiments. Specifically, letter detection for content words grew worse in familiar text, but letter detection for function words showed a contrasting modest, though nonsignificant, improvement. The results are consistent with the proposition that in very familiar texts, parafoveal analysis permits the identification of generally less familiar content words. Simultaneously, the normal pattern of weighing the structure and content elements of text changes so that more fixations on function words occur than when one is reading unfamiliar texts.     

The impact of consonant clusters on preschool children''s phonemic awareness: A comparison between readers and nonreaders

Preschool children's ability to segment and blend real words and nonsense words, with and without consonant clusters was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment, preschool children's ability to segment real words into phonemes was examined. Readers performed better than nonreaders on a phoneme counting task and words containing consonant clusters were harder to segment compared to words without consonant clusters. In experiment two, the ability to segment and blend nonsense words was investigated. Nonreaders had significantly more difficulty with nonsense words compared to readers in both a phoneme synthesis and a phoneme analysis task. A two-way interaction between reading level and word type showed that nonsense words containing consonant clusters were particularly difficult for nonreaders. The results were discussed in relation to theories suggesting that syllables consist of an onset and a rime.     

To what extent do orthographic units in print mirror phonological units in speech?

Three experiments were performed to examine the degree to which the orthographic units in printed syllables reflect the phonological units in speech. Two of the experiments used a pronunciation decision task in which subjects had to determine whether a nonword sounded like a real word when pronounced. The third experiment used a lexical decision task. In all three experiments, evidence was obtained for orthographic units that correspond to onsets and rimes. The evidence was equivocal on whether the phonological category of the consonant that follows the vowel affects the internal structure of the orthographic rime as it does the structure of the phonological rime. The results are discussed in terms of the role of linguistic units in the processing of print.     

INCIDENTAL LANGUAGE LEARNING:

Abstract —Two experiments investigated the performance of first-grade children and adults on an incidental language-learning task. Learning entailed word segmentation from continuous speech, an initial and crucial component of language acquisition. Subjects were briefly exposed to an unsegmented artificial language, presented auditorily, in which the only cues to word boundaries were the transitional probabilities between syllables. Subjects were not told that they were listening to a language, or even to listen at all; rather, they were engaged in a cover task of creating computer illustrations. Both adults and children learned the words of the language. Moreover, the children performed as well as the adults. These data suggest that a statistical learning mechanism (transitional probability computation) is able to operate incidentally and, surprisingly, as well in children as in adults.