Lexical and default stress assignment in reading Greek

Greek is a language with lexical stress that marks stress orthographically with a special diacritic. Thus, the orthography and the lexicon constitute potential sources of stress assignment information in addition to any possible general default metrical pattern. Here, we report two experiments with secondary education children reading aloud pseudo‐word stimuli, in which we manipulated the availability of lexical (using stimuli resembling particular words) and visual (existence and placement of the diacritic) information. The reliance on the diacritic was found to be imperfect. Strong lexical effects as well as a default metrical pattern stressing the penultimate syllable were revealed. Reading models must be extended to account for multisyllabic word reading including, in particular, stress assignment based on the interplay among multiple possible sources of information.     

Development of Processing Stress Diacritics in Reading Greek

In Greek orthography, stress position is marked with a diacritic. We investigated the developmental course of processing the stress diacritic in Grades 2 to 4. Ninety children read 108 pseudowords presented without or with a diacritic either in the same or in a different position relative to the source word. Half of the pseudowords resembled the words they were derived from. Results showed that lexical sources of stress assignment were active in Grade 2 and remained stronger than the diacritic through Grade 4. The effect of the diacritic increased more rapidly and approached the lexical effect with increasing grade. In a second experiment, 90 children read 54 words and 54 pseudowords. The pattern of results for words was similar to that for nonwords suggesting that findings regarding stress assignment using nonwords may generalize to word reading. Decoding of the diacritic does not appear to be the preferred option for developing readers.     

Derivational suffixes as cues to stress position in reading Greek

Background

In languages with lexical stress, reading aloud must include stress assignment. Stress information sources across languages include word‐final letter sequences. Here, we examine whether such sequences account for stress assignment in Greek and whether this is attributable to absolute rules involving accenting morphemes or to probabilistic lexical information.

Methods

Pseudowords were constructed to not resemble particular words and were suffixed with derivational morphemes associated with specific stress patterns, to be read aloud, presented either without a stress diacritic or with a diacritic congruent or incongruent with the suffix. Morphemes differed in whether or not there were stress competitors ending in the same letter sequences.

Results

Stress was assigned consistent with the suffix in the absence of the diacritic, more so when there were no stress competitors in the lexicon.

Conclusions

Results suggest a lexically based probabilistic mechanism taking into account pattern distributions rather than absolute rules based on the morphological accenting.     

The Process of Stress Assignment in Reading Aloud: Critical Issues From Studies on Italian

In polysyllabic languages the assignment of stress is crucial for understanding the reading process. Here we review empirical evidence, drawn mainly from studies on Italian, and discuss critical issues in understanding reading. We first discuss the lexical and sublexical mechanisms responsible for stress assignment and propose that the former is based on item-specific knowledge and the latter on the statistical-distributional knowledge that readers have acquired about their language. Then we examine the idea that stress and phonemes pertain to two dimensions of the word, which can be placed at two different representational levels. Finally, we analyze the effects of stress assignment on word articulation, a promising field for future investigation. These issues are addressed by reviewing the studies conducted in adult and young readers to outline the developmental trajectory of stress assignment and discuss how it operates in the reading system.     

The role of nonspeech rhythm in Spanish word reading

Recent literacy research shows an increasing interest in the influence of prosody on literacy acquisition. The current study examines the relationship of nonspeech rhythmic skills to children's reading acquisition, and their possible relation to stress assignment in Spanish, a syllable‐timed language. Sixty‐six third graders with no reading difficulties were scored on measures of nonspeech rhythm, word‐level decoding skill, reading fluency and reading with correct assignment of lexical stress. After controlling for verbal intelligence and working memory, hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that nonspeech rhythm predicted unique variance in reading fluency and correct stress assignment; it did not predict decoding skills. Given that Spanish is a syllable‐timed as opposed to stress‐timed language like English, the association between nonspeech rhythm, reading fluency and stress assignment found in our study suggests that nonspeech rhythm may be a universal factor in reading acquisition, independent of the type of linguistic rhythm.     

What do spelling errors tell us? Classification and analysis of errors made by Greek schoolchildren with and without dyslexia

In this study we propose a classification system for spelling errors and determine the most common spelling difficulties of Greek children with and without dyslexia. Spelling skills of 542 children from the general population and 44 children with dyslexia, Grades 3–4 and 7, were assessed with a dictated common word list and age-appropriate passages. Spelling errors were classified into broad categories, including phonological (graphophonemic mappings), grammatical (inflectional suffixes), orthographic (word stems), stress assignment (diacritic), and punctuation. Errors were further classified into specific subcategories. Relative proportions for a total of 11,364 errors were derived by calculating the opportunities for each error type. Nondyslexic children of both age groups made primarily grammatical and stress errors, followed by orthographic errors. Phonological and punctuation errors were negligible. Most frequent specific errors were in derivational affixes, stress diacritics, inflectional suffixes, and vowel historical spellings. Older children made fewer errors, especially in inflectional suffixes. Dyslexic children differed from nondyslexic ones in making more errors of the same types, in comparable relative proportions. Spelling profiles of dyslexic children did not differ from those of same-age children with poor reading skills or of younger children matched in reading and phonological awareness. In conclusion, spelling errors of both dyslexic and nondyslexic children indicate persistent difficulty with internalizing regularities of the Greek orthographic lexicon, including derivational, inflectional, and word (stem) families. This difficulty is greater for children with dyslexia.     

Difficulties in Lexical Stress Versus Difficulties in Segmental Phonology Among Adolescents With Dyslexia

Dyslexic difficulties in lexical stress were compared to difficulties in segmental phonology. Twenty-nine adolescents with dyslexia and 29 typically developing adolescents, matched on age and nonverbal ability, were assessed on reading, spelling, phonological and stress awareness, rapid naming, and short-term memory. Group differences in stress assignment were larger than in segmental phonology in reading and spelling pseudowords but not words, indicating a fragility of explicit processes that manipulate stress representations. Despite impaired stress performance in dyslexia at the group level, individual variability failed to reveal evidence for a stress-specific deficit or for a distinct stress-impaired subgroup.     

Sensitivity to linguistic stress,phonological awareness and early reading ability in preschoolers

Recent research has found that sensitivity to linguistic stress is related to phonological awareness and reading development. This study investigated the roles of two types of linguistic stress sensitivity (lexical and metrical stress) in the phonological awareness and reading development of young children. Forty‐five kindergarten children were tested on a battery of tasks that examined linguistic stress sensitivity and early reading ability. Results indicated that lexical stress, but not metrical stress sensitivity, is significantly related to phonological awareness and early reading ability. However, lexical stress is not able to predict unique variance in early reading ability once phonological awareness is controlled for. The relationships of both lexical and metrical stress sensitivity with phonological awareness and early reading development are discussed.     

Spelling development in 6–11‐year‐old Greek‐speaking Cypriot children

The aim of the present study was to examine the spelling development of Greek‐speaking children in the early school grades. Although Greek orthography is regular for reading, it is much less transparent as far as spelling is concerned. Spelling development was investigated using a word spelling task designed to explore the effects of word length, familiarity and spelling regularity. One hundred and fifty normally developing primary school children living in Cyprus took part in the study. Results suggest that the children employed both phonological and lexical strategies in spelling Greek words. Results indicated that sub‐lexical procedures were more marked for younger children, whereas lexical processing was employed more widely by older children. The findings are interpreted in terms of stage developmental models.     

Development of Lexical Mediation in the Relation Between Reading Comprehension and Word Reading Skills in Greek

This study focuses on the shared variance between reading comprehension and word-level reading skills in a population of 534 Greek children in Grades 2 through 4. The correlations between measures of word and pseudoword accuracy and fluency, on the one hand, and vocabulary and comprehension skills, on the other, were sizeable and stable or increasing with grade. However, the unique contribution of word reading to comprehension became negligible after vocabulary measures were entered in hierarchical regression analyses, particularly for higher grades, suggesting that any effects of decoding on comprehension may be mediated by the lexicon, consistent with lexical quality hypothesis. Structural modeling with latent variables revealed an invariant path across grades in which vocabulary was defined by its covariation with reading accuracy and fluency and affected comprehension directly. It is argued that skilled word reading influences comprehension by strengthening lexical representations, at least when phonological decoding can be relatively effortless.     

The Effect of Articulatory Suppression on Greek Children's Reading of Greek

Abstract The objective of this study was to investigate the role of phonological recoding in young children's reading of Greek. For this, third‐grade Greek children were asked to read and comprehend text while they were concurrently suppressing subvocal articulation. Their performance (in terms of reading times and free recall) was compared to that of a control group of normal reading. The results showed a disturbing effect of articulatory suppression on the subjects’ reading latencies and retention of text. These findings were taken to imply that third‐grade children's reading of text was partly based upon pre‐lexical phonological representation and also that their retention of text partly depended upon a phonological memory code.     

Prosodic awareness and children’s multisyllabic word reading

Prosodic awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with multisyllabic word reading in a sample of 50 children aged between 7 and 8 years. Prosodic awareness was the strongest predictor of multisyllabic word reading accuracy, after controlling for phoneme awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary and short-term memory. Children also made surprisingly few phonemic errors while, in contrast, errors of stress assignment were commonplace. Prosodic awareness was also the strongest predictor of stress placement errors, although this finding was not significant. Prosodic skills may play an increasingly important role in literacy performance as children encounter more complex reading materials. Once phoneme-level skills are mastered, prosodic awareness is arguably the strongest predictor of single word reading.     

Lexical stress assignment in Italian developmental dyslexia

Stress assignment to Italian polysyllabic words is unpredictable, because stress is neither marked nor predicted by rule. Stress assignment, especially to low frequency words, has been reported to be a function of stress dominance and stress neighbourhood. Two experiments investigate stress assignment in sixth-grade, skilled and dyslexic, readers. In Experiment 1, skilled readers were not affected by stress dominance. Dyslexic children, although affected by word frequency, made more stress regularisation errors on low frequency words. In Experiment 2, stress neighbourhood affected low frequency word reading irrespective of stress dominance for both skilled and dyslexic readers. Words with many stress friends were read more accurately than words with many stress enemies. It is concluded that, in assigning stress, typically developing and developmental dyslexic Italian readers are sensitive to the distributional properties of the language.     

Implicit Knowledge of Word Stress and Derivational Morphology Guides Skilled Readers’ Decoding of Multisyllabic Words

In oral language, morphologically conditioned regularities around stress assignment can be found in two classes of derivational suffixes, one that causes lexical stress to shift to the syllable immediately preceding the suffix (ACtive – acTIVity) and one that has no effect on stress (SILLy – SILLiness). In this study, adults listening to spoken “derived” nonwords judged as preferable those wherein the stress placement was consistent with morphological regularities of English. When reading nonwords and a set of nonwords derived from them, readers reliably assigned stress to the syllable predicted by the morphology. This effect was significantly associated with scores on standardized measures of word reading after controlling for nonword reading ability, showing that the relationship was not merely an artifact of decoding skill. These findings support the importance of the interface between morphology and suprasegmental phonology as a key factor in the way English-speaking readers approach multisyllabic, morphologically complex words.     

Does the PMSP connectionist model of single word reading learn to read in the same way as a child?

The Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg and Patterson (1996) connectionist model of reading was evaluated at two points early in its training against reading data collected from British children on two occasions during their first year of literacy instruction. First, the network's non‐word reading was poor relative to word reading when compared with the children. Second, the network made more non‐lexical than lexical errors, the opposite pattern to the children. Three adaptations were made to the training of the network to bring it closer to the learning environment of a child: an incremental training regime was adopted; the network was trained on grapheme–phoneme correspondences; and a training corpus based on words found in children's early reading materials was used. The modifications caused a sharp improvement in non‐word reading, relative to word reading, resulting in a near perfect match to the children's data on this measure. The modified network, however, continued to make predominantly non‐lexical errors, although evidence from a small‐scale implementation of the full triangle framework suggests that this limitation stems from the lack of a semantic pathway. Taken together, these results suggest that, when properly trained, connectionist models of word reading can offer insights into key aspects of reading development in children.     

Stress sensitivity and reading performance in Spanish: A study with children

This paper investigates the relationship between ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 7–8 years. Their tasks consisted of reading words, reading non‐words, stressing non‐words and reproducing sequences of two, three or four non‐words by pressing the corresponding keys on the computer keyboard. Non‐word sequences were constructed with minimal non‐word pairs differing in a single phoneme (/kúpi/ ‐ /kúti/) or in the stress pattern (/mípa/ ‐ /mipá/). Results showed that performance on phoneme contrast sequences (e.g. /kúpi/ ‐ /kúti/) predicted word reading. In contrast, performance on stress contrast sequences (e.g. /mípa/ ‐ /mipá/) predicted non‐word reading, but only when two‐non‐word sequences were analysed. This suggests that stress sensitivity may be one of the factors related to reading fluency as most errors at reading non‐words consisted of false starts and pauses between syllables. Results also showed that stress sensitivity (scored in two non‐word sequences) predicted stress assignment, and that knowledge of stress rules predicted both word and non‐word reading. This suggests that stress sensitivity may help in learning stress rules, and that knowledge of stress rules is relevant for reading.     

The role of stress processing abilities in the development of bilingual reading

French and Dutch differ regarding the manifestations and lexical functions of the stress pattern of words. The present study examined group differences in stress processing abilities between French‐native and Dutch‐native listeners, thus extending previous cross‐linguistic comparisons involving Spanish‐native and French‐native adults. The results show that Dutch‐native first‐graders significantly outperformed French monolinguals, and that French‐native listeners schooled in Dutch produced intermediary performances, suggesting that stress‐processing abilities are a learnable set of skills. The present study also examined the contribution of stress processing abilities to reading development in Dutch, a stress‐based language, compared to that in French, a syllable‐based language. Although the expected correlation between stress processing abilities and reading was not observed in the Dutch monolinguals, such correlation was observed in the French‐native bilinguals schooled in Dutch and not in the Dutch‐native bilinguals schooled in French. This suggests that stress processing abilities influence reading development in a second, stress‐based, language. Moreover, the monolinguals and bilinguals schooled in Dutch showed significant associations between lexical development and stress processing abilities. Ways in which prosody might be involved in lexical and reading development are explored and discussed.     

The Impact of High versus Low Linguistic Levels in Swedish Beginning Readers' Oral Reading of Running Texts

The impact of high (e.g. syntax and semantics) and low (graphemes) linguistic levels in 50 Swedish beginners' oral reading of running texts is explored, by means of a qualitative analysis of reading errors collected in a longitudinal study. The hypothesis, based on previous quantitative results from the same data, was that the graphemic and/or lexical levels could explain some of the reading errors, but that, for example, syntactic complexity or unexpected contexts could explain others. Unfamiliar words and words with complex graphemic structures did result in many reading errors, but a relatively large number of errors seem to be caused by, for example, syntactical or contextual constraints. In the longitudinal perspective, the readers tended to advance through various phases regarding their utilisation of higher linguistic levels, revealing a possible transition from a concentration mainly on the graphemic level via a dependency on and finally a sensitivity to context.     

What can spelling errors tell us about the causes and treatment of dyslexia?

Until recently the majority of research undertaken into dyslexia focused on English‐speaking dyslexics, who tend to make significantly more phonological than visual errors. This led to a major assumption about the possible cause of dyslexia being a lack of phonological awareness. According to the phonological deficit theory, the level of phonological consistency of a language determines not only the reading speed but also the amount and types of reading and spelling errors made by dyslexic people. This theory has been seriously challenged by the results of a number of studies in more phonologically consistent languages, such as Greek, Italian and Japanese, where morphology seemed to play a more crucial role than the phonological structure of a language per se. The 116 dyslexic people who took part in this experiment were matched on age, sex, IQ and psycho‐educational performance. A total of 58 US English‐speaking dyslexic people were compared to 58 Greek dyslexic people. Both groups met the diagnostic criteria. Results demonstrated that Greek dyslexics were found to make significantly fewer phonological errors (11.0%) than the US dyslexics (85.5%, p < .000), but comparatively more visual (66.8% to US 14.0%, P < .000) and grammatical errors (22.2% to US 0.1%, p < .000) than their English‐speaking counterparts. These data showed highly significant quantitative and qualitative spelling differences. Greek dyslexics could be accurately differentiated from the US English dyslexics based on the three types of spelling errors.     

The influence of lexical and sublexical variables in normal and poor Spanish readers

The main aim of our study was to find out the effect of several lexical and sublexical variables (lexical category, lexical frequency, syllabic structure, and word length) in the acquisition of reading in a transparent language such as Spanish. The second goal of our study was the comparison of the effect of these variables in normal and poor Spanish readers. One hundred and forty children (aged between 6 and 12), twenty of whom were poor readers, were tested using a reading test of 306 items in which we balanced all the variables. The dependent variable was the percentage of correct responses in a decontextualized word reading test. Our results showed that all the above mentioned variables produced a significant effect on the number of errors made by the children. This pattern of results suggests no difference between the processes involved in the reading acquisition of Spanish and those implicated in deep orthographies such as English. Our results also showed no qualitative differences between normal and poor readers. The four variables studied showed the same behaviour in their effect on reading performance for both normal and poor readers, indicating that poor readers also use both the lexical and the phonological route. Our data suggest the universality of the dual route model, independent of the transparency or opaqueness of the different alphabetical languages.