Phonological and Semantic Knowledge Are Causal Influences on Learning to Read Words in Chinese

We report a training study that assesses whether teaching the pronunciation and meaning of spoken words improves Chinese children’s subsequent attempts to learn to read the words. Teaching the pronunciations of words helps children to learn to read those same words, and teaching the pronunciations and meanings improves learning still further. These results provide evidence that both phonological and semantic knowledge are causal influences on learning to read words aloud in Chinese. It appears that learning to read words in Chinese may entail a greater reliance on mappings from orthography to semantics than learning to read words in alphabetic orthographies.     

The Role of Pictures in Learning to Read

The one constant aspect of children's books is that they include pictures. It is known that pictures can hinder some aspects of the development of reading skills in young children. Yet, in other ways they may serve a supportive function. The situation is not a simple one since what is seen as unsupportive in one approach to teaching reading may be supportive in another. When and where pictures might provide support is considered.     

Young Children's Ability to Read and Spell Their Own and Classmates' Names: The Role of Letter Knowledge

Children's ability to read and spell their own and classmates' personal names in and out of context in Hebrew was studied. Preliterate children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 60) showed high knowledge of their own names but varied greatly in knowledge of others' names and emergent literacy skills. Reading and spelling of names was primarily related to letter knowledge rather than to phonemic awareness. Superior performance with initial over medial/final letters occurred despite no capitalization in Hebrew names. Names of two letters were read better than longer names, which were read equally well, indicating use of partial cues. These results bear on Ehri's (2005) phase theory. We speculate that informal learning of names is founded on letter knowledge plus exposure to names and is fueled by children's interest in names.     

Learning to Read Words in Albanian: A Skill Easily Acquired

According to many views of literacy development, prereaders use a logographic approach when they attempt to link print and speech. If so, these children should find pairs in which the spelling–pronunciation links are consistent with their writing system no easier to learn than arbitrary pairs. We tested this idea by comparing the ability of U.S. prereaders (M age = 4 years 9 months) to learn phonetically motivated pairs like AP–ape and MA–may and arbitrary pairs like OM–ape and PO–may. In both spelling and reading tasks, children learned the pairs with vowel letter name cues more easily than the arbitrary pairs. Phonetically motivated pairs were especially advantaged when the vowel letter names were at the beginning (e.g., AP–ape) rather than the end (MA–may). Prereaders who have some knowledge about letters, as U.S. preschoolers typically do, are not limited to a logographic approach in learning about print.     

Introduction to This Special Issue: The Role of Morphology in Learning to Read

Reading involves the decoding of written forms into language forms that represent phonological, morphological, and word level units. Thus, orthographies convey not only phonological but also morphological information-the word roots, syntactic inflections, and derivational relations that constitute the minimal semantic and grammatical units of a language. There are many psycholinguistic issues brought to light by the facts about morphology. However, the central one has focused on decomposition-whether and how language users, including readers, decompose morphologically complex words into their constituent morphemes.     

The Role of Speaker Knowledge in Children's Pragmatic Inferences

During communication, conversational partners should offer as much information as is required and relevant. For instance, the statement “Some Xs Y” is infelicitous if one knows that all Xs Y. Do children understand the link between speaker knowledge and utterance strength? In Experiment 1, 5‐year‐olds (N = 32) but not 4‐year‐olds (N = 32) reliably connected statements of different logical strength (e.g., “The girl colored all/some of the star”) to observers who were fully or partially informed. Four‐year‐olds’ performance improved when observer knowledge could be assessed more easily (Experiment 2a, N = 25) but remained the same in a nonlinguistic version of Experiment 1 that preserved the epistemic requirements of the original study (Experiment 2b, N = 26). These findings have implications for the development of early communicative abilities.     

Learning to Read and Learning to Teach Reading

The National Curriculum for Initial Teacher Education in English is specific and detailed about the knowledge expected of primary teachers. Shulman (1987) argued that teachers transform this sort of subject content knowledge into something accessible and meaningful to their pupils and this knowledge is described as ‘pedagogic content knowledge’. Medwell et al. (1998) found that effective literacy teachers only knew literacy in the way that they taught it. The research project underpinning this article aimed to explore student teachers' conceptions of the teaching of reading in order to find out what they thought they were teaching when they taught reading. It was thought that the personal reading histories of the students would impact on their developing conceptions of teaching reading. This article traces one student, Gordon, through the year of his PGCE course. In the form of dialogue between Gordon and the researcher developing understanding is articulated. Three different types of reading are described: decoding, making meaning and engaging. Reading is seen as a transformative process, where the reader is both within and outside the text. This has implications both for the conception of reading contained within the curriculum and the way it is implemented within the classroom. A teacher can only introduce children to experiences and ways of reading that are known to herself. It is argued, therefore, that student teachers need to extend the boundaries of their own reading and so appreciate the wide range of ways in which meaning is constructed and readers are created.     

Genres and Learning to Read

The issue of text genre has begun to loom larger in thinking about literacy development, especially with the foregrounding of range in the latest National Curriculum orders for English. Lynne Kirk and Henry Pearson describe their investigation into the effects of text genre upon children's reading and conclude that, although story is the most immediately attractive genre, no one genre has all the qualities for helping children to learn to read.     

Discontinuity of Reference Hinders Children's Learning of New Words

When referring to objects, adults package words, sentences, and gestures in ways that shape children's learning. Here, to understand how continuity of reference shapes word learning, an adult taught new words to 4-year-old children (N = 120) using either clusters of references to the same object or no sequential references to each object. In three experiments, the adult used a combination of labels and other object references, which provided informative discourse (e.g., This is small and green), neutral discourse (e.g., This is really great), or no verbal discourse. Switching verbal references from one object to another interfered with learning relative to providing clustered references to a particular object, revealing that discontinuity in discourse hinders children's encoding of new words.     

Age of Bilingual Exposure Is Related to the Contribution of Phonological and Semantic Knowledge to Successful Reading Development

Bilingual children's reading as a function of age of first bilingual language exposure (AoE) was examined. Bilingual (varied AoE) and monolingual children (N = 421) were compared in their English language and reading abilities (6–10 years) using phonological awareness, semantic knowledge, and reading tasks. Structural equation modeling was applied to determine how bilingual AoE predicts reading outcomes. Early exposed bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on phonological awareness and word reading. Phonology and semantic (vocabulary) knowledge differentially predicted reading depending on the bilingual experience and AoE. Understanding how bilingual experiences impact phonological awareness and semantic knowledge, and in turn, impact reading outcomes is relevant for our understanding of what language and reading skills are best to focus on, and when, to promote optimal reading success.     

西双版纳傣语的念词修辞手法分析

傣族先民信奉万物有灵的原始宗教,认为世间万物包括人和动物、植物,甚至一切无生物都有灵魂。南传上座部佛教传入后,部分地区对原始宗教的信仰仍然有所保留,一些地区开始渐渐转为信仰南传上座部佛教。在田野调查的基础上,对西双版纳傣语念词的类型和特点进行初探,并以萨丕尔语言文化观为理论背景,旨在阐释西双版纳傣语念词中所反映的民族认知、信仰习俗。     

Spelling Dutch Doublets: Children's Learning of a Phonological and Morphological Spelling Rule

This study addresses the question of why spellings determined by morphology are relatively hard to acquire by presenting a latent class model of children's acquisition of a doublet of consonants in the spelling of Dutch verbs. This spelling pattern can be determined either by a phonological rule (after a short vowel, a doublet is spelled) or a morphological rule (doublets are spelled in past-tense forms). The results show that the youngest group of spellers identified by latent class analysis predominantly used an alphabetic strategy. They did not spell doublets at all. The latent class model further shows that the acquisition of phonologically determined spellings occurred at a lower average age than the acquisition of morphologically determined spellings. The latter led to overgeneralizations, and a U-shaped developmental pattern was found as a consequence of these overgeneralizations. Children over generalized doublets for different reasons. At younger ages, overgeneralizations of doublets occurred because children treated the doublet as a phonological alternative to the singleton, whereas at older ages, overgeneralizations of doublets were confined to homophones, indicating lexical effects.     

苏州方言中字母词的语音变异

在言语社区理论的指导下,通过调查并归纳新派苏州方言中字母词的语音变异规律,支持苏州市年轻人构成一个言语社区的假设。在此基础上运用定量分析的实证方法,考察字母词在苏州方言中的使用情况以及年轻人对这一方言读法的语言态度,再从方言学的角度探讨其变化发展趋势及我们对方言的态度和面临的问题,并提出相应的解决方法。     

The Role of Orthographic and Semantic Learning in Word Reading and Reading Comprehension

We tested the theoretically driven hypotheses that children’s orthographic and semantic learning are associated with their word reading and reading comprehension skills, even when orthographic and semantic knowledge are taken into account. A sample of 139 English-speaking Grade 3 children completed a learning task in which they read stories about new inventions. Then they were tested on their learning of the spelling and meaning of the inventions (i.e., orthographic and semantic learning, respectively). Word reading and reading comprehension were assessed with standardised tasks, and orthographic and semantic knowledge were assessed with choice tasks targeting the spelling and meaning of existing words. The results of our structural equation modeling indicated that orthographic learning predicted word reading directly and reading comprehension indirectly via word reading. We also found that semantic learning predicted reading comprehension directly. These findings support integration of the self-teaching hypothesis and the lexical quality hypothesis.