Effects of variations in orthographic information on Asian and American readers' English text reading

Orthographies vary in the support they provide for word identification based on grapheme-phoneme correspondences. If skills developed in acquisition of first-language (L1) reading transfer to reading English as a foreign language (EFL), the extent to which EFL readers' word identification shows reliance on information other than grapheme-phoneme correspondences could be expected to vary with whether their L1 orthography is a non-Roman alphabet such as Korean hangul or a nonalphabetic (morpho-syllabic) system such as Chinese characters. Another influence could be whether EFL readers have learned to read a morpho-syllabic L1 by means of an alphabetic transliteration. English text reading speeds and oral reading quality ratings of three groups of adult Asian EFL readers attending an American university were compared with those of two groups of American L1 readers: Graduate student peers and eighth-grade students. All EFL groups read more slowly than both groups of L1 readers, and their reading was more impaired when orthographic cues were disrupted by mixed case print or pseudohomophone spellings. Some of these effects were reduced in EFL readers from Hong Kong, who had earlier exposure to English. Contrary to previous findings, no effects could be attributed to type of first orthography or early exposure to alphabetic transliteration of Chinese characters, which differentiated the Taiwanese and Hong Kong groups. As a whole, the results suggest that, at least across the L1 groups studied, differences in EFL word reading are associated less with type of L1 orthography than with history of exposure to English.     

Acquiring reading and vocabulary in Dutch and English: the effect of concurrent instruction

To investigate the effect of concurrent instruction in Dutch and English on reading acquisition in both languages, 23 pupils were selected from a school with bilingual education, and 23 from a school with education in Dutch only. The pupils had a Dutch majority language background and were comparable with regard to social-economic status (SES). Reading and vocabulary were measured twice within an interval of 1 year in Grade 2 and 3. The bilingual group performed better on most English and some of the Dutch tests. Controlling for general variables and related skills, instruction in English contributed significantly to the prediction of L2 vocabulary and orthographic awareness at the second measurement. As expected, word reading fluency was easier to acquire in Dutch with its relatively transparent orthography in comparison to English with its deep orthography, but the skills intercorrelated highly. With regard to cross-linguistic transfer, orthographic knowledge and reading comprehension in Dutch were positively influenced by bilingual instruction, but there was no indication of generalization to orthographic awareness or knowledge of a language in which no instruction had been given (German). The results of the present study support the assumption that concurrent instruction in Dutch and English has positive effects on the acquisition of L2 English and L1 Dutch.     

The Effect of Urdu Vocabulary Size on the Acquisition of Single Word Reading in English

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Urdu, a phonologically transparent orthography with regular letter-sound correspondences on the development of reading in English. The results showed that children who had high levels of vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness in Urdu, were more likely to perform well on English reading and reading related tasks, but poorly on visual memory tasks. In contrast, children who had some Urdu word recognition skills, but low levels of Urdu vocabulary knowledge and Urdu phonological awareness tended to perform poorly on English reading and reading related tasks, but better on visual memory tasks. The findings provide further support to the direct impact of Urdu on single word reading in English.     

The effect of orthographic depth on reliance upon semantic context for oral reading in English and Hebrew

This paper examines the relationship between orthographic depth and reliance upon context for oral reading in English and Hebrew. Research on context effects in English has indicated that the decoding ability of adequate readers is only minimally affected by context. The effect of context may be greater in Hebrew because of its deeper orthography – context may help readers phonologically and semantically disambiguate words whose letters do not provide enough information for grapheme‐to‐phoneme conversion. It is hypothesised that bilingual English‐Hebrew participants would rely more upon context for oral reading of Hebrew than English and that in Hebrew, reading words which are more phonologically ambiguous (high degree of freedom words) would be more affected by context than reading of words which are less phonologically ambiguous (low degree of freedom words). Results support both hypotheses. The findings are consistent with the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis.     

The transition from fingerspelling to English print: facilitating English decoding

Fingerspelling is an integral part of American Sign Language (ASL) and it is also an important aspect of becoming bilingual in English and ASL. Even though fingerspelling is based on English orthography, the development of fingerspelling does not parallel the development of reading in hearing children. Research reveals that deaf children may initially treat fingerspelled words as lexical items rather than a series of letters that represent English orthography and only later begin to learn to link handshapes to English graphemes. The purpose of this study is to determine whether a training method that uses fingerspelling and phonological patterns that resemble those found in lexicalized fingerspelling to teach deaf students unknown English vocabulary would increase their ability to learn the fingerspelled and orthographic version of a word. There were 21 deaf students (aged 4-14 years) who participated. Results show that students were better able to recognize and write the printed English word as well as fingerspell the word, when training incorporated fingerspelling that is more lexicalized. The discussion focuses on the degree to which fingerspelling can serve as a visual phonological bridge as an aid to decode English print.     

The effects of bilingualism on learning to read English: evidence from the contrast between Urdu‐English bilingual and English monolingual children

Learning to read in a shallow alphabetic orthography such as Urdu may depend primarily on phonological processing skills, whilst learning to read in a deeper orthography, such as English, may place more reliance on visual processing skills. This study explores the effects of Urdu on the acquisition of English literacy skills by comparing the reading, memory and phonological processing skills of bilingual Urdu‐English and monolingual English children (7–8 years). The bilingual children had more difficulty in reading irregular English words, but were better at reading regular words and nonwords compared to the monolinguals. The poor performance of the bilingual children with irregular English words was linked to their poor visual memory skills, whilst their good performance with regular words and nonwords was related to the presence of enhanced phonological skills. The results demonstrate the transfer of first language skills to reading development in a second language. In English, first language skills can facilitate the development of either lexical or non‐lexical routes to reading.     

Reading comprehension and information processing strategies

The present study investigated the relationship between the reading comprehension and information processing strategies of relatively fluent oral readers of Oriya orthography. The study was necessary, because Oriya orthography has some significant differences from English orthography and these differences could bear implications for the reading strategies and processes. Hence, it was envisaged that findings in the field of reading research using English orthography may not hold good for the readers of Oriya orthography. One hundred students of grade V were taken as subjects in the present study. Reading comprehension tasks simultaneous and successive information processing tasks and a nonverbal measure of intelligence were administered to all the subjects. Results show that good comprehenders were relatively more intelligent than the poor comprehenders. So far as their performance on simultaneous and successive information processing strategies were concerned good cornprehenders were better off on both types of coding tasks and these differences were found to be statistically significant even after the effect of intelligence was partialled out. However, no differential proficiency on either of these coding strategies was observed neither for the good nor for the poor comprehender group.     

Development of letter position processing: effects of age and orthographic transparency

This study investigated the relative extent to which developing readers (6‐ and 9‐year‐olds) of English (deep) or Greek (transparent) orthography exhibit serial and exterior letter effects in letter position encoding. Participants were given a visual search task that required detection of a pre‐specified target letter within a random five‐letter string. Stimuli comprised letters either specific to English or Greek, or shared by both orthographies. For native letters, all readers showed significant initial‐letter facilitation. In contrast, final‐letter facilitation was shown only by English children. Furthermore, Greek 9‐year‐olds showed significantly more left‐to‐right facilitation than English 9‐year‐olds. These results suggest that letter position encoding is adaptive to the nature of the orthography acquired during reading development.     

The role of feedback from phonology to orthography in orthographic learning: an extension of item‐based accounts

Skilled readers were trained to recognise either the oral (n=44) or visual form (n=40) of a set of 32 novel words (oral and visual instantiation, respectively). Training involved learning the ‘meanings’ for the instantiated words and was followed by a visual lexical decision task in which the instantiated words were mixed with real English words and untrained pseudowords, and the instantiated words were to be considered as words. The phonology‐to‐orthography consistency (feedback consistency) of the instantiated words was manipulated to investigate the role of feedback from phonology in orthographic learning. Masked consonant and vowel‐preserving form primes were used in the lexical decision task as probes of orthographic learning. Feedback‐consistent instantiated words were recognised significantly faster in lexical decision than feedback‐inconsistent instantiated words, and facilitation was significantly greater from consonant‐preserving than vowel‐preserving primes for orally but not visually instantiated words. The results support the hypothesis that orthographic representations based on a consonant frame can be generated from the speech signal before encountering the printed forms, and that feedback from phonology is involved in the early stages of orthographic learning.     

Effects of memory load on word recognition: Are there dual-routers in Norway?

The release-from-competition (RFC) effect, inwhich a difficult concurrent memory task speedspronunciation of low-frequency irregular wordsbut slows pronunciation of other word types,has been interpreted as strong support for thedual-route approach to word recognition. However, attempts to replicate this effect havenot produced consistent results. Besides,attempts at replication have mostly beenlimited to skilled readers of English. Thepresent research attempted to replicate the RFCeffect with mature normal readers of Norwegianand thus tested the generalizability ofdual-route models to a considerably moreshallow orthography than English. There was noevidence that the RFC effect reliably occurredamong Norwegian readers in this study, not evenamong certain selected readers who were seen ascandidates for possessing a dual-routearchitecture and suffering within thatarchitecture the kind of competition in naminglow-frequency irregular words that RFC issupposed to eliminate. Thus, it was notpossible to extend the applicability of adual-route approach to word recognition to therelatively shallow Norwegian orthography, andthe question of the architectural organizationof Norwegian readers was essentially leftunanswered by our data.     

Morphological awareness in Spanish-speaking English language learners: within and cross-language effects on word reading

This study investigated within and cross-language effects of morphological awareness on word reading among Spanish-speaking children who were English Language Learners. Participants were 97 Spanish-speaking children in grade 4 and grade 7. Morphological awareness in Spanish and in English was evaluated with two measures of derivational morphology. The results showed that Spanish morphological awareness contributed unique variance to Spanish word reading after controlling for other reading related variables. English morphological awareness also explained unique variance in English word reading. Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness was observed from Spanish to English, but not from English to Spanish. These results suggest that morphological awareness is important for word reading in Spanish, a shallow orthography with a complex morphological system. They also suggest that morphological awareness developed in children’s L1 is associated with word reading in English, their L2.     

汉语儿童英语单词命名策略研究

运用定量研究的方法调查了汉语儿童英语单词命名中的策略使用情况。128名小学六年级的学生参加了此次实验。被试给混杂在规则和不规则单音节和双音节英语词汇表中的高频和低频词命名。不规则词语使读者倾向于使用词汇路径,而纯规则词语构成的词汇表却使目标词中的非词汇信息得到了更有效的运用。当词汇表主要由规则或不规则双音节填塞词构成时,词频效应就达到了。相对于单音节规则词语,当填塞词是单音节不规则词语时,频率效应显著增大。此研究结果拓展了之前的浅正字法研究,这表明作为第二语言学习者的汉语儿童在较深的正字法,即英语的单词命名中也能对音位和词汇信息灵活地加以运用。     

Rapid naming in relation to reading and writing in Korean (Hangul), Chinese (Hanja) and English among Korean children: a 1‐year longitudinal study

The relation of rapid automatised naming (RAN) to word recognition may depend on the phonological regularity of the orthography. This study examined differential contributions of RAN to reading and writing in Korean alphabetic Hangul, logographic Hanja (Chinese) and English as a second language among 73 fifth graders in Korea across 1 year. RAN was differentially associated between reading and writing in Hangul and English. After statistically controlling for age, gender, morphological awareness, vocabulary and phonological awareness, RAN was uniquely predictive of Hangul word writing but not Hangul word recognition, and it uniquely accounted for English word recognition but not English word writing. Meanwhile, RAN explained both reading and writing in Hanja. Findings were discussed in terms of their orthography characteristics and different levels of proficiency.     

Word identification and reading disorders in the Spanish language

In this study, a reading-level-match design was used to test the hypothesis that children with reading disability (RD) are characterized by poor phonological skills, and that a developmental lag, as opposed to a specific deficit, will be found in transparent orthographies. Spanish has a transparent orthography and thus children with RD should not show severe difficulties in the use of the phonological route, as in the English language. A sample of 118 participants was selected and organized into three different groups: 40 with RD, 38 normal readers matched in age with the former, and 40 younger normal readers at the same reading level as those with RD. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of lexicality, word frequency, word length, and positional frequency of syllables on lexical decision making and word-naming performance. While the participants were performing the naming task, we recorded what they read to subsequently analyze the form as well as the frequency of naming errors. The present study provides evidence for a deficit in phonological processing in a transparent orthography, particularly in nonword reading, because there were differences between the reading-level-matched groups.     

Word learning: An ERP investigation of word experience effects on recognition and word processing

Adults of varying reading comprehension skill learned a set of previously unknown rare English words (e.g., gloaming) in three different learning conditions in which the type of word knowledge was manipulated. The words were presented in one of three conditions: (1) orthography-to-meaning (no phonology); (2) orthography-to-phonology (no meaning); and (3) phonology-to-meaning (no orthography). Following learning, participants made meaning judgments on the learned words, familiar known words, and unpresented (unlearned) rare words while their ERPs were recorded. The behavioral results showed no significant effects of comprehension skill on meaning judgment performance. Contrastingly, the ERP results indicated comprehension skill differences in P600 amplitude; high-skilled readers showed stronger familiarity effects for learned words, whereas less-skilled readers did not distinguish between learned words, familiar words, and unlearned words. Evidence from the P600 and N400 illustrated superior learning of meaning when meaning information was coupled with orthography rather than phonology. These results suggest that the availability of word knowledge (orthography, phonology, and meaning) at learning affects subsequent word identification processes when the words are encountered in a new context.     

Traditional Phonics: What It Is and What It Is Not

Recent research into the phonological aspects of children’s early reading development holds that English beginners are more aware of word-sounds at the onset and rime level than at the individual phoneme level. A link is suspected with the comparative irregularity of English orthography. As it is widely assumed that children need to be aware of phonemes before they can benefit from a traditional phonics approach, a ‘new’ phonics or ‘rhyming analogy’ approach has been recommended as an easier route than traditional phonics for English beginning readers. This paper argues, however, that English beginners are just as capable of a phonemic approach as beginners in other languages, that phonemic awareness is not a precondition, that beliefs to the contrary are based on misunderstanding, and that systematically applying grapheme-phoneme correspondences throughout each word is an excellent basis for word-identification even in English. These claims are supported by test results.     

Spanish-speaking children’s spelling errors with English vowel sounds that are represented by different graphemes in English and Spanish words

Vowels in Spanish have direct one-to-one letter-sound correspondences, whereas vowels in English usually have multiple spellings. For native Spanish-speaking children learning to spell in English, this transition from a shallow to a deep orthography could potentially cause difficulties. We examined whether the spelling of English vowel sounds was particularly difficult for native Spanish-speaking children, and whether the errors are consistent with Spanish orthographic rules. Twenty-six native Spanish-speaking and 53 native English-speaking children in grades 2 and 3 were given real-word and pseudoword spelling tasks in English that included words containing four vowels that have different spellings between Spanish and English. Results supported our hypothesis—native Spanish-speaking children committed significantly more vowel spelling errors that were consistent with Spanish orthography. The number of vowel spelling errors not consistent with Spanish orthography did not differ between the two language groups. These findings suggest that orthographic properties of the children’s native language influence their learning to spell in a second language. Educational implications address how knowledge of this cross language influence can aide teachers in improving spelling instruction.     

Cross‐language correlates in phonological awareness and naming speed: evidence from deep and shallow orthographies

Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatised naming (RAN) skills in relation to reading acquisition were examined using two languages, one with a deep orthography (English) and the other with a shallow orthography (Korean). Participants were 50 Korean American children who spoke English as a dominant language (DL) and were learning to read Korean as a sequential language (SL). Parallel measures in English and Korean assessed PA, RAN and reading skills. The results showed the similarities and differences between the DL and SL acquisition patterns for PA and RAN. While PA skills of the DL were a dominant predictor in SL reading achievement, RAN became important for the children with the higher level of SL reading performance. This cross‐sectional study indicates that proficiencies of PA and RAN in the DL are the pathway to reading success in an SL. This suggests that a universal thread exists in learning dual languages, despite dissimilar orthography, phonology and writing systems.     

The importance of morphological awareness in Korean–English biliteracy acquisition

This study examined the importance of morphological awareness in Korean–English biliteracy acquisition. English is an opaque orthographic system, in which letters and sounds have indirect correspondences. Korean Hangul, on the other hand, is a transparent orthographic system where there are direct letter-sound correspondences. Sixty-five children from Grades 2 to 4 were tested on a set of comparable Korean and English tasks tapping into oral vocabulary, phonemic awareness, morphological awareness, real word reading, and passage reading comprehension. Results showed that morphological awareness explained a significant amount of variance in word reading and reading comprehension within both Korean Hangul and English, suggesting that morphological awareness is important not only in an opaque orthography but also in a transparent orthography. Furthermore, morphological awareness in one language uniquely predicted a significant amount of variance in reading real words in the other language, suggesting that morphological awareness facilitates word reading across different orthographies.     

Learning a transparent orthography at five years old: reading development of children during their first year of formal reading instruction in Wales

This study compared the early reading development of five‐year‐old children who were learning to read either English (an opaque orthography) or Welsh (a shallow orthography). The children were being educated in Welsh and English‐speaking primary schools in Wales during their first year of formal reading instruction. Teaching methods in both schools emphasised phonics. The reading, letter recognition and phonological awareness skills of the children were tested at three points in the year (November 1998, March 1999 and June 1999). By March, the children who were learning to read in Welsh were performing better than the English‐speaking group at word recognition. The English‐speaking children showed some improvement in their ability to read regular words across the three test phases, but no significant improvement in their ability to read irregular words. The children learning to read in Welsh also performed better on a phoneme counting task in March and June than the English‐speaking children. Both groups performed similarly on tests of letter recognition throughout the year. The results suggest that a transparent orthography facilitates reading acquisition and phoneme awareness skills from the earliest stages of reading development onward.