Multisensory letter integration and implicit learning of reading with 5-year-old children

IntroductionSeveral studies have shown that adults can memorize an audio-visual association in response to an incidental presentation. Moreover, a motor experience of the letter-shape promotes letter knowledge and reading acquisition.ObjectiveIn order to develop optimal learning designs for children, we evaluate the effect of the implicit learning of grapho-phonemic correspondences on decoding abilities (study 1). The action performed on the letter-shape in this type of learning was then also investigated with regard to the emergence of multisensory knowledge (study 2).MethodsA paradigm inspired by studies conducted with adults was tested in 5-year-old children (study 1). A classical design pre-test/learning/post-test was used in the study 2. During the learning, the child was asked to explore the letter shape. An incidental presentation of the corresponding sound was simultaneously proposed to the child.ResultsResults indicated that (1) implicit learning was efficient on the discrimination of grapho-phonemic correspondences in young children and (2) the motor action amplified audio-visual integration within a single memory trace.ConclusionThese results are discussed in the light of knowledge emergence in long-term memory and the benefit of an implicit training at the beginning of reading acquisition.     

Attentional Processing of Letter Strings by Children

Reading a letter string requires attentional orienting toward the beginning of the string (left-dominant orientation), followed by orienting along the string. These attentional-orienting processes differ according to the lexicality of the letter string: Sequential processes apply when reading nonwords or pseudowords, while words can be processed more globally. The aim of this study was to evaluate the development of these attentional processes involved in reading. We conducted two experiments in 6- (first grade), 7- (second grade), and 9-year-old (fourth grade) children, using a procedure that required the detection of a letter (Experiment 1) or a nonletter (Experiment 2) target in a string of five characters. The target character could occur in the second (left) or fourth (right) position in the string. Results showed an advantage for left nonletter targets as early as age 6 and of left letter targets as early as age 7. In 6-year-olds, only good readers detected a left letter target faster than a right letter target; others detected a right letter target faster. Thus, dominant orienting toward the beginning of the letter string is not fully developed in children before the second year of reading. A possibility is that beginning readers have difficulties inhibiting an attention-orienting bias toward the right visual field in linguistic tasks. The results also showed that the lexicality effect on these attentional processes develops gradually until the fourth year of reading. We believe that the procedure used in this study will be very valuable for evaluating attentional difficulties during reading acquisition.     

The effect of neighborhood frequency in reading: evidence with transposed-letter neighbors

Transposed-letter effects (e.g., jugde activates judge) pose serious models for models of visual-word recognition that use position-specific coding schemes. However, even though the evidence of transposed-letter effects with nonword stimuli is strong, the evidence for word stimuli is scarce and inconclusive. The present experiment examined the effect of neighborhood frequency during normal silent reading using transposed-letter neighbors (e.g., silver, sliver). Two sets of low-frequency words were created (equated in the number of substitution neighbors, word frequency, and number of letters), which were embedded in sentences. In one set, the target word had a higher frequency transposed-letter neighbor, and in the other set, the target word had no transposed-letter neighbors. An inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency was observed in measures that reflect late processing in words (number of regressions back to the target word, and total time). We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual-word recognition and reading.     

Learning of letter names follows similar principles across languages: Evidence from Hebrew

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal reading instruction: a younger group (mean age 5 years 2 months) and an older group (mean age 6 years 2 months). Children's errors often involved letters with similar shapes or letters adjacent to one another in the alphabet. Most Hebrew letter names are not very similar to one another phonologically, and there were fewer phonologically based confusions than in English. We found both general frequency effects and frequency effects that reflected the letters in individual children's names. On average, girls knew more letter names than did boys. The results suggest that letter name learning follows similar principles across languages.     

Negative congruence effects in letter and pseudo-letter recognition: the role of similarity and response conflict

Letters and pseudo-letters were presented in three experiments using a sequential same-different task. While first items were always presented in isolation, the second item was either presented in isolation or surrounded by geometrical non-target shapes that could be congruent or incongruent to the target. In two experiments, a physical sameness criterion was used. In Experiment 1, in one condition, different pairs were always distinct in shape, in another they were similar in shape. Negative congruence effects were obtained for different pairs that are similar. In Experiment 2, this effect is replicated within participants. In this experiment, similar and dissimilar stimuli were mixed. The results were explained in terms of the difficulty of responding different to stimuli that are similar in shape: when the second item is surrounded by a congruent shape, the similarity is emphasized, making this response even more difficult. In Experiment 3, the same stimuli were presented using a categorical sameness criterion. This reduces the role of physical similarity and thus eliminates the response conflict. As a result, negative congruence effects were no longer observed. Taken together, the three experiments identify another source of negative congruence effects besides the ones recently reported in the literature.     

Priming of abstract letter identities in the letter match task

Previous studies of letter recognition have not found priming for abstract letter identities. We used a task that required participants to decide whether a target is the same or different from a reference letter presented in opposite case, which avoids the shortcomings of tasks used in previous studies. We found robust priming effects in this task, which were the same size for letter pairs that have similar visual features across case (e.g., c/C, x/X) and dissimilar features (e.g., a/A, b/B). Also, the pattern of priming was the same whether the prime was in the same or different case as the reference. We take these findings as evidence that abstract letter identities support priming in this task. We suggest that the same–different match task is a useful tool for studying representations used to support masked priming in letter recognition and with other stimuli with limited set size.     

Reduced orthographic learning in dyslexic adult readers: Evidence from patterns of letter search

Visual letter search performance was investigated in a group of dyslexic adult readers using a task that required detection of a cued letter target embedded within a random five-letter string. Compared to a group of skilled readers, dyslexic readers were significantly slower at correctly identifying targets located in the first and second string position, illustrating significantly reduced leftward facilitation than is typically observed. Furthermore, compared to skilled readers, dyslexic readers showed reduced sensitivity to positional letter frequency. They failed to exhibit significantly faster response times to correctly detect target letters appearing in the most, compared to least, frequent letter position within five-letter words, and response times correlated with positional letter frequency only for the initial, and not the final, letter position. These results are compatible with the SERIOL (sequential encoding regulated by inputs to oscillations within letter units) model of orthographic processing proposed by Whitney and Cornelissen (2005). Furthermore, they suggest that dyslexic readers are less efficient than skilled readers at learning to extract statistical regularities from orthographic input.     

Raven's matrices and working memory: A dual-task approach

The cognitive system does not just act as a mirror from the sensory input; instead, it tends to normalize this information. Given that letter processing seems to be much more specialized than digit processing in the cortex, we examined whether the regularization process occurs differently from digits to letters than from letters to digits: We employed a masked priming same/different experiment (e.g., probe, VESZED; prime, V35Z3D ; and target, VESZED). When embedded in letter strings, digits that resemble letters (e.g., 3 and 5 in V35Z3D -VESZED) tend to be encoded in a letter-like manner, whereas when embedded in digit strings, letters that resemble digits (e.g., E and S in 9ES7E2–935732) tend not to be encoded in a digit-like manner.     

Gender differences on the semantic flanker task using transposed-letter target words

Previous research has demonstrated that men and women are differentially influenced by irrelevant distractors. Other lines of evidence have suggested that increasing the perceptual load of a task reduces distractor interference for participants generally. The present study examined these effects using a semantic version of the flanker task; participants made speeded responses to category target words that were flanked by irrelevant distractors. The response mapping between the target and flanker words was either congruent (mapped to the same motor response) or incongruent (target word mapped to a different motor response to that of the flankers). Target words were presented either normally (e.g., table: low perceptual load) or with the beginning letters transposed (e.g., atble: high perceptual load). The results revealed that women showed a larger congruency effect than men but this was not due to greater interference on incongruent trials. While men and women made faster responses to normal than to transposed target words, this was similar in magnitude. The magnitude of the flanker effect for normal and transposed target words was significantly correlated in men but not in women. These findings are consistent with the view that women may process target words to a deeper level than men and therefore may engage in more conflict monitoring then men.     

Eye movements when reading words with $YMβOL$ and NUM83R5: There is a cost

Recent evidence from masked priming experiments has revealed that readers regularize letter-like symbols and letter-like numbers into their corresponding base letters with minimal processing cost. However, one open question is whether the same pattern occurs when these items are presented during normal silent reading. In the present study, we respond to this question in an eye-movement experiment that included sentences with words that had symbols and numbers as letters, as in “YESTERDAY I SAW THE SECRE74RY WORKING VERY HARD”. Results revealed that there is a greater reading cost associated with letter-by-number replacements than with letter-by-symbol replacements, especially when the replaced letters occur at the beginning of the word. We examine the implications of these findings for models of visual word recognition and reading.