Rules versus analogies in children's spelling: Evidence for task dependence

Two experiments were conducted to investigate developmental changes in children's use of rime-level units of sound-to-spelling correspondence when spelling nonwords under varying task demands. In Experiment 1, nonwords were presented in isolation. Older children spelled more of the nonwords by analogy than younger children. Experiment 2 adopted versions of the clue word technique employed by Goswami (1988a) and found that significantly more analogous, rime-based responses were given to the same stimuli in both younger and older children. However, fewer analogous responses were given when the salience of the clue word was reduced by presentation of multiple target nonwords. The results suggest that while children in the early stages of development possess the ability to use rime-based units in spelling, they do not always make spontaneous use of this analogy strategy. However, when the potential to use rime-based units is highlighted by task demands, as is the case in Experiment 2 when a clue word is provided, even young children make considerable use of analogy in spelling.     

Word-Decoding Deficits in Norwegian: The Impact of Psycholinguistic Marker Effects

The effects of regularity, frequency, lexicality, and granularity on single word reading in Norwegian children with dyslexia and control children matched for age and reading level were examined. The reading impaired children showed the same pattern of performance as younger children matched for reading level on most tasks except for the fact that they worse at nonword reading. The findings are discussed against different theoretical models of reading.     

Phonological and lexical encoding processes in beginning readers: Effects of age and word characteristics

The aim of this study was two-fold. First to find out whether the prelexical phonological route develops prior to the visual route or whether the direct visual route develops first in the process of learning to read Greek. Second, to see whether the subjects' chronological age deviation affects decisively the overall reading accuracy and the processes employed in word reading. For this an investigation was conducted involving two age groups of Primary-one class children regarded as normal readers and differing between them by 10 months. The subjects were tested in three word (and nonword) reading tasks in which psycholinguistic properties of words (such as grammatical class, imagery level, semantic content, regularity and frequency) had been manipulated. The main findings were: first that reading accuracy was not significantly affected by the main psycholinguistic properties of words. Second, that the chronological age factor is unlikely to influence decisively and consistently reading acquisition in the long term. Third, that Primary-one children although tending to use mainly phonological information in reading, nevertheless seem to have started making the transition towards the use of the direct visual route as well.Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. C. D. Porpodas, Section of Psychology, Department of Education, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Patras, 26110 Patras, Greece.     

The early manifestation of developmental dyslexia: Evidence from German children

The present study retrospectively examined early difficulties with phonological coding and phonemic segmentation of German children who after four years in school were diagnosed as dyslexic. German, in comparison to English, exhibits rather simple and straight-forward grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and the initial teaching approach was phonics oriented. Despite these favorable circumstances for the acquisition of phonological coding, the majority of the later dyslexic children had particular difficulties with the accurate reading of nonwords and of unfamiliar words after about seven months of reading instruction. However, there were enormous differences between the dyslexic children. Two of them were completely unable to blend phonemes into pronunciations, another seven were slow and error prone decoders, and three children had slow and laborious pronunciation assembly as the core problem. The majority of the later dyslexic children also exhibited phonemic segmentation deficits as tested with a nonword spelling task and a phoneme reversal task. In correspondence with findings from older German dyslexic children, the early difficulties with accurate phonological coding and phonemic segmentation were no longer found at the end of grade four. Children then suffered from very slow reading and poor spelling. In general, the difficulties of German dyslexic children emphasize the phonological impairment account of dyslexia. More specifically, these findings suggest that the assembly of letter sounds into pronunciations is particularly affected in the early phase of learning to read a consistent orthography.     

Age of acquisition and the completeness of phonological representations

The age of acquisition effect(faster recognition and production of earlierlearnt than later learnt words) is a robustfinding in both picture naming and written wordrecognition and naming. One possibleexplanation of this effect is the PhonologicalCompleteness Hypothesis of Brown and Watson[(1987) Memory & Cognition 15: 208–216], which proposes that early acquired wordsare recognised and produced faster than lateacquired words because they have lessfragmented phonological representations. Thoughoften cited, this hypothesis has never beentested experimentally. The present study setout to test this hypothesis using aphonological segmentation task. If earlyacquired words are stored in a more completeform, then adult participants should be slowerto segment early words than late acquiredwords. In addition, if the AoA effect is aconsequence of the quality of an individual'sphonological representations then there shouldbe a clear relationship between phonologicalskill (as measured by the phonologicalsegmentation task) and the magnitude of the AoAeffect size. In order to assess therelationships between phonological skill andthe AoA effect in adults, participants werealso given a word and nonword naming task. Theword naming task manipulated AoA andspelling-sound consistency. The results of thesegmentation task failed to provide any supportfor Brown and Watson's (1987) phonologicalcompleteness hypothesis. Phonological skill wasfound to predict the size of the AoA effect inthe word naming task, but not the size of theAoA effect in the segmentation task.     

Serial recall and nonword repetition in reading disabled children

This study examined the performance on verbalshort-term memory tasks of specifically readingdisabled children relative to reading-age matched andchronological-age matched control groups. Memory spanfor words, highly wordlike nonwords and less wordlikenonwords, speech rates for these items, and nonwordrepetition were examined. The reading disabled groupperformed equivalently to the reading-age controls onall tasks, and worse than the chronological-agecontrols. An effect of the wordlikeness of thenonwords was found in all tasks. Differences inspeech rate accounted for the effect of wordlikenessin memory span but not for the difference betweenwords and nonwords, or for the difference betweengroups. The stimulus effects did not vary between thegroups suggesting that reading disabled children arenot impaired on the process which gives rise to theseeffects, however they are impaired on the taskoverall, even after speech rate differences are takeninto account. These results are consistent with thenotion that there is a long-term memory contributionto memory span which is related to reading ability.     

Spelling correction in the PubMed search engine

It is known that users of internet search engines often enter queries with misspellings in one or more search terms. Several web search engines make suggestions for correcting misspelled words, but the methods used are proprietary and unpublished to our knowledge. Here we describe the methodology we have developed to perform spelling correction for the PubMed search engine. Our approach is based on the noisy channel model for spelling correction and makes use of statistics harvested from user logs to estimate the probabilities of different types of edits that lead to misspellings. The unique problems encountered in correcting search engine queries are discussed and our solutions are outlined.     

Are nonword and other phonological deficits indicative of a failed reading process?

Phonological processing problems have been consideredcritical in explaining developmental readingdisability. Reading disabled children were comparedwith two matched reading-level normal control groupson indicators of phonological processing. The readingdisabled children had lower nonword readingperformance than the phonics taught controls. However, performance was equivalent to that of thecontrols without phonics teaching. Therefore anonword reading deficit was not in itself diagnosticof developmental reading disability. The readingdisabled children and the non-phonics control groupwho exhibited lower nonword reading did not differfrom the phonics taught control group in phonemeawareness, nor in magnitude of the word regularityeffect. Nevertheless, within all groups thosechildren with higher phonemic awareness skills showedlarger word regularity effects and better nonwordreading. Processes involving two sources of knowledgefor phonological recoding are discussed asexplanations of these and many previous results onphonological deficits and of the phonological effectsof phonics instruction.     

How does phonological awareness relate to nonword reading skill amongst poor readers?

This study examined phonological awareness at the level of phonemes and rhyme and related this to nonword naming ability. Poor readers were compared with 11 year old chronological-age controls and 8 year old reading-age controls. The poor reader group was impaired for chronological age in all tasks, and impaired for reading age at nonword naming and phoneme deletion. The poor readers' rhyming skills, however, were commensurate with reading age. Individual variation was observed together with exceptions to the group findings; most poor readers performed within the range of the reading-age controls on the phonological tasks and in nonword naming. Dissociations in phonological skills were evident, including indications that intact awareness of rhyme may not be a prerequisite for the development of phoneme awareness. Furthermore, phoneme awareness correlated significantly with poor readers' word and nonword reading ability, whereas rhyming skill did not. Therefore, phoneme awareness may be more important than rhyming skill in understanding reading disorders.