There's more to children's spelling than the errors they make: Strategic and automatic processes for one-syllable words.

Researchers have attempted to understand the cognitive processing used in spelling by looking at children's spelling errors. The authors examined 2 other types of data—children's self-reported verbal protocols and on-line measures of spelling latencies. Elementary school children spelled 3 types of common 4-letter words, consonant–consonant–vowel–consonant, consonant–vowel–consonant–consonant, and consonant–vowel–consonant–silent e. Correctly and incorrectly spelled words were analyzed as a function of word type, verbal report, and keystroke latencies. Different typing patterns emerged for strategic and automatic reports and for different word types. Children seemed to use a relatively sequential read-out from long-term memory when directly retrieving a spelling, whereas they used a consonant pair strategy for final consonant clusters when sounding out words. Implications for spelling instruction are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of grade, syllable segmentation, and speed of presentation on children's word-blending ability.

Subsyllabic awareness was investigated with a word synthesis task. Children from kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade attempted to blend auditorily presented CCVC word segments (where C?=?consonant and V?=?vowel) to produce words. Subsyllabic segmentation and presentation rate of the word segments were varied, and the dependent measure was percentage correct in each condition. Several posttests were administered to measure the children's preexisting ability to recognize visually presented consonants, consonant clusters, rimes, and words. Second graders performed better than 1st graders, who in turn performed better than kindergarteners. Performance of all children was best on words that were segmented between onset and rime and poorest for words that were segmented into individual phonemes. Performance for word segrnents that were presented at the fast rate was better than for those presented at the slow rate. The authors suggest that preliterate children are able to manipulate suprasegmental units such as onset and rime, and that those units should be emphasized in early reading instruction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of word linguistic properties on phonological awareness in Spanish children.

We investigated whether some word linguistic properties studied by R. Treiman and S. Weatherston (see record 1992-37025-001) in the English language have the same influence on phonological awareness of preschoolers and kindergartners in the Spanish language. We examined the effects of these word linguistic properties on children's ability to isolate the initial consonant: phoneme articulatory properties, the position of stressed syllables in the words, the presence of initial consonant clusters, and the word length. We found that effects due to word length and the syllable-initial consonant cluster were similar in English and Spanish. In contrast to English-speaking children, the Spanish-speaking children could pronounce the first consonant regardless of the position of the stressed syllable, and continuant consonants were easier to isolate than stop consonants. Implications for the training of phonological awareness in the Spanish language are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ease of segmenting two- or three-phoneme words in kindergarten: Rime cohesion and vowel salience?

The ability to segment phonemes in words is fundamental for learning to read and spell. In two experiments, kindergartners segmented 2- and 3-phoneme words in an oral task using blank markers. Children segmented vowel–consonant (VC) words (e.g., age) more easily than consonant–vowel (CV) words (e.g., me) and much more easily than consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) words (e.g., same). The greater ease of segmenting VC over CV words is attributed to the salience of vowels in initial position. The rime-cohesion hypothesis predicted segmentation performance with CVC but not with CV and VC words, indicating that rimes are a structural property of 3- but not 2-phoneme words. A practical implication is that instruction in phoneme segmentation should begin with 2-phoneme words before 3-phoneme words are taught. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography.

The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant–vowel–consonant phonological structure were examined. Orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency of pronunciation of the orthographic rime accounted for variance in latencies and errors beyond that contributed by the consistency of pronunciation of the individual graphemes and by other factors. In 3 experiments, as well, children and adults made more errors on words with less consistently pronounced orthographic rimes than on words with more consistently pronounced orthographic rimes. Relations between spellings and sounds in the simple monomorphemic words of English are more predictable when the level of onsets and rimes is taken into account than when only graphemes and phonemes are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The sequential curing effect in speech production

How are the sounds of words represented in plans for speech production? In Experiment 1, subjects produced sequences of four CVCs as many times as possible in 8s. We varied the number of repetitions of the initial consonant, vowel, final consonant, CV, rhyme, and whole CVC each sequence required, and measured subjects' speaking rate. Subjects produced more CVCs when the final consonant or whole word was repeated, but were slowed when only initial sounds or CVs were repeated. Two other experiments replicate the location-based effects and extended them to bisyllabic words. We attribute the locational effects to competition between words that are formally similar, and specifically, to competition between discrepant phonemes in the two words to occupy a particular wordframe position. The fact that only discrepant initial, but not final sounds slow production suggests that phonemes are activated sequentially, from left to right.     

Word context during initial exposure influences degree of priming in word fragment completion.

Priming in word fragment completion is revealed by the increased probability of correctly completing a fragment like "_ll_p_e' when the word "ellipse' was seen recently. Three experiments investigated the effects on priming of manipulating the context in which the words were seen. Three principal results emerged. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that there was much more priming for words studied in a to-be-learned list than read in meaningful passages. In these same two experiments, low-frequency words were subject to more priming than were higher frequency words, regardless of context. Experiment 3 revealed more priming for words when they did not fit sensibly into connected discourse than when they did. The results suggest that context plays a critical role in priming: As a word moves from being contextually bound in meaningful discourse to being isolated in a list, its probability of priming increases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual constraints in phonotactic learning.

Structural regularities in language have often been attributed to symbolic or statistical general purpose computations, whereas perceptual factors influencing such generalizations have received less interest. Here, we use phonotactic-like constraints as a case study to ask whether the structural properties of specific perceptual and memory mechanisms may facilitate the acquisition of grammatical-like regularities. Participants learned that the consonants C? and C? had to come from distinct sets in words of the form C?VccVC? (where the critical consonants were in word edges) but not in words of the form cVC?C?Vc (where the critical consonants were in word middles). Control conditions ruled out attentional or psychophysical difficulties in word middles. Participants did, however, learn such regularities in word middles when natural consonant classes were used instead of arbitrary consonant sets. We conclude that positional generalizations may be learned preferentially using edge-based positional codes, but that participants can also use other mechanisms when other linguistic cues are given. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teaching rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategies to prereaders: Effects on prereading skills and word reading.

Two experiments and a longitudinal study examined teaching rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategies to prereaders. Grade 1 children with weak prereading skills were assigned to rime analogy, letter recoding, or control groups. Treatment groups had equal word reading except for with words like sight, where the rime analogy group excelled. Experience with rime analogy increased letter recoding ability, but teaching in letter recoding did not enhance rime analogy. Treatment groups read as many nonwords as did children with high prereading skills, and this was maintained 4 months later. Treatment effects on prereading skills with kindergartners paralleled the Grade 1 results, but reading effects were weaker. Children changed reading strategies when a clue word was present that shared a rime spelling with the test word. Children learned to read with a rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategy, and many developed new reading strategies independently. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonword naming: Further exploration of the pseudohomophone effect in terms of orthographic neighborhood size, graphemic changes, spelling-sound consistency, and reader accuracy.

Five experiments examined nonword pronunciation. As reported by R. S. McCann and D. Besner (1987), accurate, regular pronunciation increased as the number of orthographic neighbors (N) increased. Adults read pseudohomophones (nonwords that sound like a word) more accurately than other nonwords only when the nonwords were low n, shared the consonants with the words on which they were based, and overall accuracy was lower. Children showed a pseudohomophone advantage even when N was high. Adults pronounced nonwords comprised of inconsistent endings (with existing regular and irregular pronunciations) in an irregular fashion when this resulted in a word; this applied to relatively high-N items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word recognition cues used in matching verbal stimuli within and between auditory and visual modalities.

Administered a matching-to-sample task to 60 first graders under 4 conditions, 2 intra- and 2 intermodal. The 5 matching cues (letters and segments) were used differentially within the 4 conditions with the initial segment selected most frequently in all conditions. The 5 cues were also used differentially across the 4 task conditions. Cue choice was related to reading achievement in the visual-to-visual matching condition, with the good readers using the final word segment cue significantly more often than the initial and final consonant cue. The reading achievement of those selecting the reversal, initial word segment, or final word segment did not differ. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The possible-word constraint in the segmentation of continuous speech

We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to constraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language. This Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input which could not be a word--for instance, a single consonant. In two word-spotting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detect apple, for example, in fapple (where [f] alone would be an impossible word), than in vuffapple (where vuff could be a word of English). We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based model of continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process of competition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced. This implementation accurately simulates both the present results and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation.     

Individual differences in 4-year-old children's acquisition of vocabulary during storybook reading.

Two experiments were conducted to assess how children who differ in vocabulary knowledge learn new vocabulary incidentally from listening to stories read aloud. In both experiments, 4-yr-old children were classified as having either high or low word knowledge on the basis of a median split of their Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test—Revised (PPVT—R) standard scores. In Exp 1, children either listened passively or labeled pictures using novel words during the book readings. We found that children with larger vocabularies produced more novel words than did children with smaller vocabularies, and children who answered questions during the book readings comprehended and produced more words than did children who passively listened to the story. In Exp 2, children either listened to readings of a book, pointed to pictures during the readings, or labeled pictures during the readings. Children with larger vocabularies comprehended more novel words than did children with smaller vocabularies. Children who actively participated by labeling or pointing learned more words than did children who listened passively to book readings. Findings clarify the role of active responding by demonstrating that verbal and nonverbal responding are effective means of enhancing vocabulary acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syllable and letter knowledge in early Korean Hangul reading.

This study examined the development of Korean consonant–vowel (CV) syllable identification, consonant and vowel letter knowledge, and their relationships to phonological awareness and the reading of regular Hangul words among Korean kindergartners as a 6-month longitudinal study. Results showed that Korean children identified CV syllables better than consonant and vowel letters. In regression analyses, CV syllable identification at Time 1 strongly contributed to Hangul word recognition concurrently over and above letter knowledge, as well as longitudinally after controlling for letter knowledge and reading at Time 1. However, letter knowledge did not predict Hangul reading once CV syllable identification was controlled. In addition, CV syllable knowledge facilitated subsequent letter knowledge and phoneme onset and coda awareness. The results, in general, shed light on the salient roles of syllables in the early literacy development of Korean. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

External sources of individual differences? A cross-linguistic analysis of the phonetics of mothers' speech to 1-yr-old children.

Wide individual differences in early word production characterize children learning the same language, but the role of specific adult input in this interchild variability is unknown. Sampling the speech of American, French, and Swedish mothers (5 in each language group) to their 1-yr-old children, this study analyzed the distribution of consonantal categories, word length, and final consonants in running speech, content words, initial consonant of content words, and target words (adult models of words attempted by the children) as well as the children's own early words (from age 9 mo to about 18 mo). Variability is greater in child words than adult speech, and individual mother–child dyads show no evidence of specific maternal influence on the phonetics of the child's speech. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Consequences of lexical stress on learning an artificial lexicon.

Four experiments examined effects of lexical stress on lexical access for recently learned words. Participants learned artificial lexicons (48 words) containing phonologically similar items and were tested on their knowledge in a 4-alternative forced-choice (4AFC) referent-selection task. Lexical stress differences did not reduce confusions between cohort items: KAdazu and kaDAzeI were confused with one another in a 4AFC task and in gaze fixations as often as BOsapeI and BOsapaI. However, lexical stress did affect the relative likelihood of stress-initial confusions when words were embedded in running nonsense speech. Words with medial stress, regardless of initial vowel quality, were more prone to confusions than words with initial stress. The authors concluded that noninitial stress, particularly when word segmentation is difficult, may serve as "noise" that alters lexical learning and lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological words and stuttering on function words

Stuttering on function words was examined in 51 people who stutter. The people who stutter were subdivided into young (2 to 6 years), middle (6 to 9 years), and older (9 to 12 years) child groups; teenagers (13 to 18 years); and adults (20 to 40 years). As reported by previous researchers, children up to about age 9 stuttered more on function words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs), whereas older people tended to stutter more on content words (nouns, main verbs, adverbs, adjectives). Function words in early positions in utterances, again as reported elsewhere, were more likely to be stuttered than function words at later positions in an utterance. This was most apparent for the younger groups of speakers. For the remaining analyses, utterances were segmented into phonological words on the basis of Selkirk's work (1984). Stuttering rate was higher when function words occurred in early phonological word positions than other phonological word positions whether the phonological word appeared in initial position in an utterance or not. Stuttering rate was highly dependent on whether the function word occurred before or after the single content word allowed in Selkirk's (1984) phonological words. This applied, once again, whether the phonological word was utterance-initial or not. It is argued that stuttering of function words before their content word in phonological words in young speakers is used as a delaying tactic when the forthcoming content word is not prepared for articulation.     

Processing of illegal consonant clusters: A case of perceptual assimilation?

Evidence is presented for a perceptual shift affecting consonant clusters that are phonotactically illegal, albeit pronounceable, in French. They are perceived as phonetically close legal clusters. Specifically, word-initial /dl/ and /tl/ are heard as /gl/ and /kl/, respectively. In 2 phonemic gating experiments, participants generally judged short gates—which did not yet contain information about the 2nd consonant /l/—as being dental stops. However, as information for the /l/ became available in larger gates, a perceptual shift developed in which the initial stops were increasingly judged to be velars. A final phoneme monitoring test suggested that this kind of shift took place on-line during speech processing and with some extratemporal processing cost. These results provide evidence for the automatic integration of low-level phonetic information into a more abstract code determined by the native phonological system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When does length cause the word length effect?

The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, has been termed one of the benchmark findings that any theory of immediate memory must account for. Indeed, the effect led directly to the development of working memory and the phonological loop, and it is viewed as the best remaining evidence for time-based decay. However, previous studies investigating this effect have confounded length with orthographic neighborhood size. In the present study, Experiments 1A and 1B revealed typical effects of length when short and long words were equated on all relevant dimensions previously identified in the literature except for neighborhood size. In Experiment 2, consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) words with a large orthographic neighborhood were better recalled than were CVC words with a small orthographic neighborhood. In Experiments 3 and 4, using two different sets of stimuli, we showed that when short (1-syllable) and long (3-syllable) items were equated for neighborhood size, the word length effect disappeared. Experiment 5 replicated this with spoken recall. We suggest that the word length effect may be better explained by the differences in linguistic and lexical properties of short and long words rather than by length per se. These results add to the growing literature showing problems for theories of memory that include decay offset by rehearsal as a central feature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye Movements and Phonological Parafoveal Preview: Effects of Reading Skill.

Eye movements of skilled and less skilled readers were monitored as they read sentences containing a target word. The boundary paradigm was used such that when their eyes crossed an invisible boundary location, a preview word changed to the target word. The preview could either be identical to the target word (beach as a preview for beach), a homophone of the target word (beech as a preview for beach), an orthographic control (bench as a preview for beach), or an unrelated consonant string (jfzrp as a preview for beach). Consistent with prior research, skilled readers obtained more preview benefit from the homophone preview than from the orthographic preview. The less skilled readers, however, did not show such an effect. The results indicate that less skilled readers do not use phonological codes to integrate information across eye movements. Indeed, the results also indicate that less skilled readers do not show normal preview benefit effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)