Effects of word and morpheme familiarity on reading of derived words

The purpose of this study is to examine factors that influence students’ reading of derived words. Recent research suggests that the lexical quality of a derived word depends on the familiarity of the word, its morphemic constituents (i.e., base word and affixes), and the frequency with which the base word appears in other words (i.e., members of the same word family or family frequency). On the premise that better and more experienced readers have higher quality lexical representations, we explore the extent to which accuracy of reading derived words by 4th and 6th graders is related to measures of familiarity, including derived and base word frequencies, family size, average family frequency, and word length. The results of an exploratory factor analysis indicated that these measures formed two factors, one representing morphemic constitution and the second representing exposure to the word family; both factors accounted for significant variance in the students’ derived word reading. Comparisons of sets of derived words contrasted on familiarity properties showed that performance on derived words, overall, is better for 6th than 4th graders and for good than poor readers. On the measures of family frequency and family size, there were significant discrepancies between grade level and reading ability and frequency characteristics. These add support to the view that morphemic analysis and wide reading experience contribute to derived word reading.     

The effects of morphological structure on reading proficiency—A developmental study

The present report with three inter-related studies examined the effects of morphological complexity on reading proficiency in 103 fourth graders, 88 fifth graders and 107 sixth graders trichotomized into below average, average and above average readers. The reaction time paradigm and the developmental framework with three age groups provided more sensitive and stable results for inferring mental processes in accessing the lexicon. Study 1 on lexical decision with visually presented words and non-words with different morphemic boundaries suggests that words can be accessed in a decomposed state as morphemes by children. Study 2 and the complementary Study 3 requiring the vocalization of derived or base forms of words primed by target items in sentence frames indicate that words might be accessed in full forms. Further, the depth of derivational morphology and of base morphology with correlated phonological changes affect reading proficiency.     

The effects of phonological transparency on reading derived words

The purpose of this study was to determine whether poor readers have more pronounced problems than average-reading peers reading derived words the base forms of which undergo a phonological shift when a suffix is added (i.e., shift relations as in “natural”), as compared to derived words whose forms are phonologically and orthographically transparent (i.e., stable relations, as in “cultural”). Two computer-based word recognition tasks (Naming and Lexical Decision) were administered to children with reading disability (RD), peers with average reading ability, and adults. Across tasks, there was an effect for transparency (i.e., better performance on stable than shift words) for both child groups and the adults. For the children, a significant interaction was found between group and word type. Specifically, on the naming task, there was an advantage for the stable words, and this was most noteworthy for the children with RD. On the lexical decision task, trade-offs of speed and accuracy were evident for the child reader groups. Performances on the nonwords showed the poor readers to be comparable to the average readers in distinguishing legal and illegal nonwords; further analyses suggested that poor readers carried out deeper processing of derived words than their average reading peers. Additional study is needed to explore the relation of orthographic and phonological processing on poor readers’ memory for and processing of derived words.     

Context-sensitive rules and word naming in Italian children

The present study examines the role of orthographic complexity on Italian children’s word reading. Two experiments are reported in which elementary school children (3rd and 5th graders) read aloud words containing simple or contextual letter-sound conversion rules. In Experiment 1, both groups of participants read words containing contextual rules more slowly and less accurately than words containing simple, non-contextual rules. Experiment 2 showed that the effect of rule complexity held for low but not high frequency words, on both reading speed and accuracy. No interactions with grade were found. This pattern is in line with previous findings on the effects of rule contextuality on adult performance [Burani, C. Barca, L. & Ellis, A. W. (2006). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 346–352]. Despite the regularity of the Italian orthography, the presence of complex rules influences both reading speed and accuracy of young readers. Moreover, the reading system of readers of a shallow orthography seems efficient from the first years of reading instruction.     

Pronouncing new words aloud during the silent reading of text enhances fifth graders?? memory for vocabulary words and their spellings

An experiment with random assignment examined the effectiveness of a strategy to learn unfamiliar English vocabulary words during text reading. Lower socioeconomic status, language minority fifth graders (M?=?10?years, 7?months; n?=?62) silently read eight passages each focused on an unknown multi-syllabic word that was underlined, embedded in a meaningful context, defined, depicted, and repeated three times. Students were grouped by word reading ability, matched into pairs, and randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the strategy condition, students orally pronounced the underlined words during silent reading. In the control condition, students penciled a check if they had seen the underlined words before but did not say the words aloud. Results of ANOVAs showed that the oral strategy enhanced vocabulary learning (ps?<?.01), with poorer readers showing bigger effect sizes than better readers in remembering pronunciation-meaning associations and spellings of the words. In a second experiment, 32 fifth graders from the same school described the strategies they use when encountering unfamiliar words in context. Better readers reported more word-level strategies whereas poorer readers reported more text-based strategies. Our explanation is that application of the word-level strategy of decoding new words aloud strengthened connections between spellings, pronunciations, and meanings in memory compared to silent reading of new words, particularly among poor readers who were less skilled and less likely to use this strategy unless instructed to do so.     

Word length and word frequency affect eye movements in dyslexic children reading in a regular (German) orthography

We combined independently the word length and word frequency to examine if the difficulty of reading material affects eye movements in readers of German, which has high orthographic regularity, comparing the outcome with previous findings available in other languages. Sixteen carefully selected German-speaking dyslexic children (mean age, 9.5 years) and 16 age-matched controls read aloud four lists, each comprising ten unrelated words. The lists varied orthogonally in word length and word frequency: high-frequency, short; high-frequency, long; low-frequency, short; low-frequency, long. Eye movements were measured using a scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO). In dyslexic children, fixation durations and the number of saccades increased both with word length and word frequency. The percentage of regressions was only increased for low-frequency words. Most of these effects were qualitatively similar in the two groups, but stronger in dyslexic children, pointing to a deficient higher-level word processing, especially phonological deficit. The results indicate that reading eye movements in German children are modulated by the degree of difficulty, and orthographic regularity of the language can determine the nature of modulation. The findings suggest that, similar to Italian but unlike English readers, German children prefer indirect sub-lexical strategy of grapheme-phoneme conversion.     

Reading Development and Attention to Letters in Words

Four groups of Dutch readers, (a) beginners, second grade elementary school students with 2 years of reading experience, (b) advanced readers, sixth grade elementary school students with 6 years of reading experience, (c) expert readers, university students with 14 years of reading experience, and (d) poor readers, aged 13 years with 2 years of delay in reading skill, were presented with short stories followed by multiple-choice text comprehension questions. Participants were asked to read the stories for meaning and to circle the letter t whenever it occurred in the text. Five types of detection locations were defined: (1) verb suffix, (2) noun final, (3) intra word, second letter, (4) intra word, prefinal letter, and (5) definite article, final t. Differential detection patterns as a function of reading development were obtained. Beginning readers did not differ in detecting the final t in verbs and nouns, whereas expert readers showed a strong attentional bias to verb suffixes as compared with noun endings. Expert readers missed more intra word letters. In all groups prefinal letters were detected better than second letters in words, thus suggesting a general attentional bias for orthographic information in the second part of Dutch words. The t in the definite article was missed most often in all groups, which suggests sensitivity to word frequency at early stages in reading development. Poor readers did not show differential performance patterns as compared to the other reading groups. The overall developmental pattern can be characterized as a shift from attention for single letter information to attention for more complex morphological information in text. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.     

Lexical decision and oral reading by poor and normal readers

The primary goal of this study was to compare a paper-and-pencil version of the lexical decision task, which can be administered groupwise, with reading aloud a differently ordered list of the same words and pseudowords. Participants were first and second graders (“normal readers”) and students from schools for children with learning difficulties. On the average, the latter “poor readers” scored at the same oral reading level as the normal readers, but were older. The correlation between both tasks appeared to be high and both tasks had comparable correlations with third variables, suggesting that performance is determined by the same processes. Because the lexical decision task showed little evidence for guessing, it may be an — even better — alternative for oral reading. No differences between participant groups were found that point to different reading strategies. Error analysis, however, indicates that the poor readers probably have a specific problem in the oral reading of pseudowords.     

A comprehensive evaluation of lexical reading in Italian developmental dyslexics

Italian developmental dyslexic readers show a striking length effect and have been hypothesised to rely mostly on nonlexical reading. Our experiments tested this hypothesis by assessing whether or not the deficit underlying dyslexia is specific to lexical reading. The effects of lexicality, word frequency and length were investigated in the same group of children in four separate experiments. Although dyslexics were slower and less accurate than skilled readers and had large length effects, they showed lexicality and word frequency effects in both reading aloud and lexical decision. In a cross‐experiment comparison, we show that a single global factor explains a large proportion of the difference in reading performance between dyslexic and skilled readers. This factor may indicate a deficit at a prelexical level of analysis. Lexical activation seemed spared in the dyslexic children based on the effects of lexicality and frequency. These findings contrast the hypothesis that Italian dyslexics primarily engage in nonlexical reading.     

Lexical and sub-lexical effects on accuracy, reaction time and response duration: impaired and typical word and pseudoword reading in a transparent orthography

In an opaque orthography like English, phonological coding errors are a prominent feature of dyslexia. In a transparent orthography like Spanish, reading difficulties are characterized by slower reading speed rather than reduced accuracy. In previous research, the reading speed deficit was revealed by asking children to read lists of words. However, speed in list reading sums the time required to prepare an utterance, reaction time (RT), with the time required to say it, response duration (RD). Thus, the dyslexic speed deficit in transparent orthographies could be driven by slow RTs, by slow RDs, or both. The distinction is especially important if developmental readers rely on phonological coding to achieve lexical access because the whole word would have to be encoded before it could be identified. However, while the factors that affect reading RT have been extensively investigated, no attention has been paid to RD. We studied the performance of typically developing and dyslexic Spanish children in an oral reading task. We analysed the impact of word frequency and length on reading accuracy, RT, and RD. We found that accuracy, RT, and RD were affected by word frequency and length for both control and dyslexic readers. We also observed interactions between effects of reader group—dyslexic, typically developing (TD) younger or TD older readers—and effects of lexicality, frequency, and word length. Our results show that children are capable of reading aloud using lexical and sub-lexical coding processes in a transparent orthography.     

Orthographic Neighborhood-Size Effects on the Reading Aloud of Italian Children With and Without Dyslexia

This study examines the effects of orthographic neighborhood size (N-size) in relationship with word frequency on the reading aloud of children with and without dyslexia whose language has a consistent orthography. Participants included 22 Italian fourth-grade children with dyslexia and 44 age-matched typically developing readers. Children with dyslexia read low-frequency words with high N-size faster than words that had no neighbors; by contrast, typically developing readers showed no N-size effects, irrespective of word frequency. The facilitating effect of N-size on low-frequency word reading in children with dyslexia indicates that they benefit from lexical activation spreading from dense neighborhoods.     

Development of text reading in Japanese: an eye movement study

This study examined age-group differences in eye movements among third-grade, fifth-grade, and adult Japanese readers. In Experiment 1, Japanese children, but not adults, showed a longer fixation time on logographic kanji words than on phonologically transparent hiragana words. Further, an age-group difference was found in the first fixation duration on hiragana words but not on kanji words, suggesting character-type-dependent reading development in Japanese children. Examination of the distributions of saccade landing positions revealed that, like adults, both third and fifth graders fixated more on kanji than on hiragana characters, which suggests that even young children utilize the same oculomotor control strategy (the kanji targeting strategy) as Japanese adults. In Experiment 2, we examined whether the proportion of kanji characters in a text affected adult reading performance. Japanese adults made more refixations and regressions in texts with a high proportion of hiragana characters. The results of both experiments suggest that differences between kanji and kana affect the reading efficiency of school-age children and that maturation of reading skills allows adults to optimize their strategy in reading kanji and kana mixed texts.     

Effects of repeated reading on the length effect in word and pseudoword reading

In this study the effect of repeated reading on the acquisition of orthographic knowledge was examined. Acquisition of orthographic knowledge was assessed by the effect of word length on reading speed. We predicted that the effect of length in a set of words and pseudowords would decrease after the repeated reading of these (pseudo)words. The study involved fourth and fifth grade dyslexic children, in addition to normal readers in second and fourth grade. Words and pseudowords ranged from four to six letters and were read 16 times. A length effect was found in the dyslexic and younger normal readers, but not in the older normal readers. The length effect did not change from pre‐test to post‐test, although a large overall improvement in reading speed was found in all groups. These results suggest that repeated reading did not alter the predominantly sub‐lexical reading procedure of the dyslexic and younger normal readers. Implications for the interpretation of the length effect and the notion of word‐specific orthographic knowledge are discussed.     

Putting the "Noun Bias" in Context: A Comparison of English and Mandarin

Recently, researchers have been debating whether children exhibit a universal "noun bias" when learning a first language. The present study compares the proportions of nouns and verbs in the early vocabularies of 24 English- and 24 Mandarin-speaking toddlers ( M age = 20 months) and their mothers. Three different methods were used to measure the proportion of noun types, relative to verb types: controlled observations in three contexts (book reading, mechanical toy play, regular toy play), identical across languages; a vocabulary checklist (MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory); and mothers' reporting of their children's "first words." Across all measures, Mandarin-speaking children were found to have relatively fewer nouns and more verbs than English-speaking children. However, context itself played an important role in the proportions of nouns found in children's vocabularies, such that, regardless of the language spoken, children's vocabularies appeared dominated by nouns when they were engaged in book reading, but not when they were playing with toys. Mothers' speech to children showed the same language differences (relatively more verbs in Mandarin), although both Mandarin- and English-speaking mothers produced relatively more verbs than their children. In sum, whether or not language-learning toddlers demonstrate a "noun bias" depends on a variety of factors, including the methods by which their vocabularies are sampled and the contexts in which observations occur.     

Syllable-based reading improvement: Effects on word reading and reading comprehension in Grade 2

This study examined the effects of a syllable-based reading intervention for German second graders who demonstrated difficulties in the recognition of written words. The intervention focused on fostering word reading via syllable segmentation. The materials consisted of the 500 most frequent syllables typically read by 6- to 8-year-old children. The aims were to practice phonological recoding, consolidate orthographic representations of syllables, and routinize the access to these representations. Compared to children randomly assigned to a wait-list group, poor readers in the treatment condition showed significant improvements in standardized measures of phonological recoding, direct word recognition, and text-based reading comprehension after the 24-session intervention. Poor readers in the treatment condition also showed greater improvements in development of word recognition compared to children with efficient word recognition skills. The results provide evidence that a syllable-based reading intervention is a promising approach to increase struggling readers’ word recognition skills, which in turn will improve their reading comprehension.     

Sensitivity to the positional information of morphemes inside Chinese compound words and its relationship with word reading

The purpose of the present study was to investigate developmental differences in lexical processing and sensitivity to the positional information of constituent morphemes with reference to Chinese word-reading ability. One hundred mainland Chinese children (50 s graders and 50 third graders) and 22 high school students were tested with a lexical decision task. The primary school children were also tested for Chinese character reading, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and non-verbal intelligence. We found that although both primary school children and high school students performed worse in the reversed condition (i.e., the pseudo-words were created by reversing the order of the two characters in real Chinese words) than in the real (i.e., real Chinese compound words) and random conditions (i.e., the pseudo-words were constructed by randomly combining the characters in the reversed condition), the performances of high school students in the reversed condition were closer to their performances in the other two conditions. Correlational analyses conducted on the primary school children revealed that the responses of second- and third-grade children on the lexical decision task were moderately correlated with their Chinese character reading. We also found that, after controlling for age and non-verbal IQ, the reaction time difference between the real and reversed conditions significantly predicted Chinese character reading. The results were discussed by exploring the nature of the lexical decision task, the sensitivity of Chinese children to the positional information of morphemes inside compound words, and the association of such sensitivity with their word-reading performance.     

英语习得中的搭配辨识及分类

对英语搭配的习得和积累是英语学习者向高级水平进阶的重要途径。搭配与自由组合及成语的区别主要在于词与词之间在形式和意义方面结合的紧密程度不同。按照性质，搭配可分为语法搭配和词汇搭配两类。语法搭配又可据其中心词不同分为名词、形容词、动词、限定词四类；词汇搭配可据组合关系不同分为“动词＋名词”、“形容词或名词＋名词”、“名词＋动词”、“名词＋of＋名词”、“动词＋副词”、“副词＋形容词”六类。不同习得阶段，搭配习得的重点不同。     

Words correct per minute: The variance in standardized reading scores accounted for by reading speed

The measure words correct per minute (WC/M) incorporates a measure of accurate aloud word reading and a measure of reading speed. The current article describes two studies designed to parse the variance in global reading scores accounted for by reading speed. In Study I, reading speed accounted for more than 40% of the reading composite score variance in 4th‐, 5th‐, and 10th‐grade students. In Study II, reading speed accounted for more than 30% of the reading/language arts composite score variance of fourth‐ and fifth‐grade students. Across both studies, when reading speed was combined with words read correctly and converted to WC/M the additional variance accounted for was less than 10% with one exception, fourth‐grade students' reading/language arts scores. These findings are consistent with various theories regarding reading speed, provide direction for future researchers, and may assuage those concerned that WC/M is primarily a measure of aloud, accurate word reading (i.e., word calling). © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Continued access to syntactic information in reading

Reliable access to syntactic information beyond its use in first-pass reading was probed using a task labeled syntactic reading task. This task draws on an orthographic marker for syntactic structure, the capitalization of nouns in German. Subjects read written text strings containing a unit that could be taken as a noun or as a verb. The strings were disambiguated by the unit being capitalized or not. Thus subjects could interpret the text only when taking the capitalization marker into account. Data were collected from 231 German-speaking secondary school students. The results show that even subjects who were capable of reliably using capitalization markers in writing varied considerably in their use of these markers to identify syntactic structure in reading. High-achieving subjects profited more than others in situations where they could tie syntactic information to a prominent capitalization marker. This suggests that focus on syntactic form alone does not guarantee reliable access to syntactic information.     

Children's Ideas about Aging before and after an Intergenerational Read-aloud

This study describes a pilot project that included senior volunteer readers reading aloud to third graders in diverse schools across a district in northeast Florida. The researchers interviewed students about their perceptions of the aging process before and after the read aloud as well as their view of the read aloud events. The children enjoyed being read to by the senior volunteers, who were able to support the children's understanding of a fairly complex book. Further, the senior volunteers, who had expressed some hesitancy about reading to older children, greatly enjoyed the interaction. The study supports the idea that children's ideas about aging may be impacted both by book selection and the reader, and it posits that reading aloud to older children by senior volunteers may be beneficial to all parties involved.