Children's and adults' reading of nonwords: effects of regularity and consistency.

The procedures used by novice readers to assemble pronunciations for nonwords were investigated. Children in Grades 1-3 read aloud consonant-vowel-consonant and longer monosyllabic nonwords. By the end of Grade 1, children displayed a good grasp of grapheme-phoneme (G-P) correspondences (e.g., ai, ow). Grade 2 and 3 readers increasingly used larger orthographic correspondences termed rimes (e.g., -ook, -ild). However, G-P correspondences determined most responses. Adults likewise used G-P rules when reading aloud nonwords and were more accurate at applying the rules. The strong reliance of Grade 1 and 2 readers on G-P rules was also demonstrated by their superior oral reading of regular words along with a tendency to regularize exception words (e.g., reading bull to rhyme with dull).     

List context effects on masked phonological priming in the lexical decision task

A lexical decision experiment tested the effects of briefly presented masked primes that were homophones or pseudohomophones of target words. Different types of nonword foil (pseudohomophones, orthographically regular nonwords, orthographically irregular nonwords) were mixed with the word targets. Pseudohomophone priming effects were independent of nonword foil variations, whereas homophone priming effects varied from being facilitatory in the presence of orthographically regular nonwords, inhibitory in the presence of pseudohomophones, and null in the presence of irregular nonwords. This dissociation in the way nonword foil variations influence masked pseudohomophone and homophone priming effects in the lexical decision task is discussed within the framework of a bimodal extension of the multiple readout model of visual word recognition (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996).     

Strategic effects in word naming: examining the route-emphasis versus time-criterion accounts

K. Rastle and M. Coltheart (1999) demonstrated that both nonwords and low-frequency regular words are named more slowly when mixed with first-phoneme irregular word fillers (e.g., CHEF) than when mixed with third-phoneme irregular word fillers (e.g., GLOW). Those authors suggested that their effects were due to a strategic de-emphasis of the nonlexical route when first-phoneme irregular fillers were used. An alternative explanation is that these results simply reflect a more lax position of a time criterion (S. J. Lupker, P. Brown, & L. Colombo, 1997) in the first-phoneme irregular filler condition. We contrasted these 2 accounts in 4 experiments. In all experiments, target naming latencies were longer when the fillers were harder to name, regardless of whether the fillers were nonwords or exception words. These results strongly favor a time-criterion account of K. Rastle and M. Coltheart's effects.     

The attentional control of lexical processing pathways: Reversing the word frequency effect

In two experiments, we investigated the influence of word frequency in speeded word naming and in a relatively novel regularization task in which participants were required to pronounce words on the basis of spelling-to-sound correspondences instead of giving their normal pronunciations (e.g., pronounce pint so that it rhymes with hint). Participants were presented high- and low-frequency regular words and exception words, along with a set of nonwords. The results indicated that there was a normal word frequency effect (i.e., high-frequency words faster than low-frequency words) in the standard speeded naming task, whereas, for the regularization task, the word frequency effect was reversed for regular words, even though the regular words were pronounced in an identical fashion in both the normal naming and the regularization tasks. This reversal of the word frequency effect was not obtained for the exception words. The discussion focuses on the implication of these results for attentional control models of lexical processing.     

Event-related brain potentials elicited during word recognition by adult good and poor phonological decoders

Cognitive processing of lexical and sub-lexical stimuli was compared for good and poor adult phonological decoders. Sixteen good decoders and 16 poor decoders, average age 19 years, silently read 150 randomly computer presented sentences ending in incongruous regular, irregular, or nonwords and 100 congruent filler sentences. Electro-encephalographic recordings were made from the final word of each incongruous sentence. Although no significant group differences were found, good decoders showed specialised hemispheric word recognition processing at P200 and P300. Nonwords elicited greater N200 and P300 amplitudes for both good and poor decoders. Larger amplitude P200s were elicited by poor decoders when processing nonwords. These findings provide evidence for separable lexical and sub-lexical procedures and support a psychophysiological basis for a core phonological deficit in poor phonological decoders.     

Attentional strategic control over nonlexical and lexical processing in written spelling to dictation in adults

We conducted four experiments to investigate whether adults can exert attentional strategic control over nonlexical and lexical processing in written spelling to dictation. In Experiment 1, regular and irregular words were produced either in a nonword context (regular and irregular nonwords) or in a word context (high-frequency regular and irregular words), whereas in Experiment 2, the same set of words was produced either in a regular nonword or in an irregular low-frequency word context. Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2 but with increased manipulation of the context. In Experiment 4, participants had to produce either under time pressure or in response to standard written spelling instructions. Regularity effects were found in all the experiments, but their size was not reliably affected by manipulations intended to increase or decrease reliance on nonlexical processing. More particularly, the results from Experiment 4 show that adults can speed up the initialization of their writing responses to a substantial degree without altering regularity effects on either latencies or spelling errors. Our findings suggest that, although adults are able to generate an internal deadline criterion of when to initialize the writing responses, nonlexical processing is a mandatory process that is not subject to attentional strategic control in written spelling to dictation.     

Context effects on orthographic learning of regular and irregular words

The self-teaching hypothesis proposes that orthographic learning takes place via phonological decoding in meaningful texts, that is, in context. Context is proposed to be important in learning to read, especially when decoding is only partial. However, little research has directly explored this hypothesis. The current study looked at the effect of context on orthographic learning and examined whether there were different effects for novel words given regular and irregular pronunciations. Two experiments were conducted using regular and irregular novel words, respectively. Second-grade children were asked to learn eight novel words either in stories or in a list of words. The results revealed no significant effect of context for the regular items. However, in an orthographic decision task, there was a facilitatory effect of context on irregular novel word learning. The findings support the view that contextual information is important to orthographic learning, but only when the words to be learned contain irregular spelling-sound correspondences.     

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.     

Acquisition and use of spelling-sound correspondences in reading

The acquisition and use of knowledge concerning the spelling-sound correspondences of English were evaluated by having children read words and nonwords that contained regular and homographic spelling patterns. Regular spelling patterns are associated with a single pronunciation (e.g., -UST as in MUST); homographic patterns have multiple pronunciations (e.g., -OSE as in HOSE, DOSE, LOSE). Analyses of errors, latencies, and pronunciations provided evidence for two complementary developmental processes: good beginning readers rapidly learn to recognize high-frequency words from visual input alone, while at the same time they are expanding and consolidating their knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences. Younger and poor readers rely more on phonological information in word decoding, as evidenced by their particular difficulty reading homographic spelling patterns. Poor readers do not appear to use a radically different strategy for reading words: their perfomance is similar to that of younger, good readers.     

The role of left perisylvian cortical regions in spelling

In order to examine the role of left perisylvian cortex in spelling, 13 individuals with lesions in this area were administered a comprehensive spelling battery. Their spelling of regular words, irregular words, and nonwords was compared with that of individuals with extrasylvian damage involving left inferior temporo-occipital cortex and normal controls. Perisylvian patients demonstrated a lexicality effect, with nonwords spelled worse than real words. This pattern contrasts with the deficit in irregular word spelling, or regularity effect, observed in extrasylvian patients. These findings confirm that damage to left perisylvian cortex results in impaired phonological processing required for sublexical spelling. Further, degraded phonological input to orthographic selection typically results in additional deficits in real word spelling.     

Word identification in isolation and in context by college dyslexic students

College dyslexic students (DYS) were compared to chronological age (CA)-matched and to reading age (RA)-matched control groups on tasks assessing naming of words and nonwords, regular and irregular words, and the use of context in word identification. The DYS group had the slowest naming latency for words in all tasks. In addition, they had extreme difficulty in naming nonwords, which in terms of the dual-route model for word recognition indicates impairment in the indirect route to the lexicon. However, they displayed a regularity effect in reading regular and irregular words and thus apparently utilized the indirect route in reading words. Correlational data supported the conclusion that the data are in conflict with the traditional dual-route model, and an alternative conceptualization is suggested. The use of context is discussed in terms of the interactive-compensatory model (Stanovich, 1980) and findings were generally supportive of the model. The DYS subjects of the present study appeared to be different from the RA controls and their performance did not support a developmental-lag model for explaining their reading problems.     

Subjective judgments of spelling-sound correspondences: Effects of word regularity and word frequency

Subjects asked to judge which of two pronunciations of a letter sequence is typical of how that sequence is pronounced in English showed a strong tendency to nominate the linguistically “regular” word in preference to the “irregular” or “exceptional” word. Experiment 1 showed that this tendency was uninfluenced by the frequencies of the words being compared. The effect of regularity was replicated in Experiment 2, which also demonstrated the importance of the method of cuing the common letter sequence; when it was printed beside the words being judged, a stronger regularity effect was obtained than when the words were presented alone. Both experiments also showed a variation in the subjective strength of spelling-sound correspondences, and it was concluded that all-or-nothing conceptualizations of “rules” and "regularity" are oversimplifications. The implications of the findings for the concept of analogies in pronunciation were also considered.     

The development of visual information processing skills related to reading

Literate adults can use their familiarity with specific words and their knowledge of English orthography to facilitate word recognition processes. The development of word superiority effects in visual perception was investigated in the present study using a search task with kindergarten (5.7 years old), second (8.0 years old), and fourth grade children (10.0 years old), and college students. The search task consisted of the visual presentation of a target letter followed by a three-, four-, or five-letter display. The target letter was included in the display on half the trials, and the displays were common words, orthographically regular pseudowords, and irregular nonwords. Although response times decreased with age, the three oldest groups showed similar effects for the size and structure of the displays. That is, response times increased linearly with the number of display letters, and responses were faster for word and pseudoword displays than for nonwords. The data for the kindergarten children showed evidence for the use of a different search strategy, and they did not respond differentially to the three types of displays. The results are discussed in terms of the implications for developmental models of visual search and word superiority effects in visual perception.     

Word regularity affects orthographic learning

Share's self-teaching hypothesis proposes that orthographic representations are acquired via phonological decoding. A key, yet untested, prediction of this theory is that there should be an effect of word regularity on the number and quality of word-specific orthographic representations that children acquire. Thirty-four Grade 2 children were exposed to the sound and meaning of eight novel words and were then presented with those words in written form in short stories. Half the words were assigned regular pronunciations and half irregular pronunciations. Lexical decision and spelling tasks conducted 10 days later revealed that the children's orthographic representations of the regular words appeared to be stronger and more extensive than those of the irregular words.     

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.     

Typing letter strings varying in orthographic structure

Subjects typed six-letter strings varying in orthographic structure. Lexical status, word frequency, position-sensitive log bigram frequency, and regularity of letter sequencing were systematically varied. Cumulative reaction times (RTs) of the keystrokes were adequately described by a linear function of letter position in the test string. Overall, words were typed faster than nonwords, and regular strings faster than irregular strings. Although the effect of log bigram frequency was not significant, this variable interacted with regularity and word frequency. Post hoc analyses of performance on each of the 200 letter strings revealed significant effects of the number of irregularities, log bigram frequency, and log word frequency. Transition times between successive keystrokes were significantly longer for illegal than for legal letter transitions. These results are similar to previous findings on the role of orthographic structure in the perceptual recognition of letter strings and provide a more complete analysis of context effects in typing.     

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.     

11-month-olds' knowledge of how familiar words sound

During the first year of life, infants' perception of speech becomes tuned to the phonology of the native language, as revealed in laboratory discrimination and categorization tasks using syllable stimuli. However, the implications of these results for the development of the early vocabulary remain controversial, with some results suggesting that infants retain only vague, sketchy phonological representations of words. Five experiments using a preferential listening procedure tested Dutch 11-month-olds' responses to word, nonword and mispronounced-word stimuli. Infants listened longer to words than nonwords, but did not exhibit this response when words were mispronounced at onset or at offset. In addition, infants preferred correct pronunciations to onset mispronunciations. The results suggest that infants' encoding of familiar words includes substantial phonological detail.     

This and THAP -- constraints on the pronunciation of new, written words

The pronunciation of nonwords that start with TH is investigated in lists and sentences. The initial phoneme is usually unvoiced (as in THOUGHT) when the nonword is embedded in lists of words and nonwords. In contrast, the initial phoneme is usually voiced (as in THIS) when such nonwords are read aloud in a function word position in a sentence. These findings are inconsistent with the current dual process theory of the routes from print to sound which implies that the phonology of a new word or nonword can be derived only from a form of letter-sound correspondence which is independent of lexical/syntactic pressures.     

The first steps in word learning are easier when the shoes fit: comparing monolingual and bilingual infants

English, French, and bilingual English-French 17-month-old infants were compared for their performance on a word learning task using the Switch task. Object names presented a /b/ vs. /g/ contrast that is phonemic in both English and French, and auditory strings comprised English and French pronunciations by an adult bilingual. Infants were habituated to two novel objects labeled 'bowce' or 'gowce' and were then presented with a switch trial where a familiar word and familiar object were paired in a novel combination, and a same trial with a familiar word–object pairing. Bilingual infants looked significantly longer to switch vs. same trials, but English and French monolinguals did not, suggesting that bilingual infants can learn word–object associations when the phonetic conditions favor their input. Monolingual infants likely failed because the bilingual mode of presentation increased phonetic variability and did not match their real-world input. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by presenting monolingual infants with nonce word tokens restricted to native language pronunciations. Monolinguals succeeded in this case. Experiment 3 revealed that the presence of unfamiliar pronunciations in Experiment 2, rather than a reduction in overall phonetic variability was the key factor to success, as French infants failed when tested with English pronunciations of the nonce words. Thus phonetic variability impacts how infants perform in the switch task in ways that contribute to differences in monolingual and bilingual performance. Moreover, both monolinguals and bilinguals are developing adaptive speech processing skills that are specific to the language(s) they are learning.