Written Language & Literacy - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2008

International research findings have repeatedly confirmed the significance of speech and language processing skills and letter knowledge for successful literacy acquisition. However, the importance of these skills for early literacy success in German speakers remains uncertain. The present longitudinal study aimed to explore this issue. Sixty-nine German-speaking children were assessed in nursery a few months before starting school (mean age 5;11) and in Grade 1 (mean age 6;11) with tests of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, expressive vocabulary, grammar comprehension, letter knowledge, and nonverbal reasoning. Grade 1 assessments also included measures of reading accuracy, speed, comprehension, and spelling. The results confirmed that speech and language processing skills and letter knowledge before and around the time of school enrolment explain individual differences in early literacy development, with letter knowledge and phonological awareness emerging as most important predictors. No variance in literacy performance was uniquely predicted by nonverbal reasoning.

Phonological awareness is usually considered to be an important prerequisite for success in literacy acquisition. Children who had phonological awareness training in preschool not only show a better performance in phonological awareness tasks at elementary school but also perform better in reading and writing than untrained children. As part of the EVES longitudinal study, reading and spelling skills of 1520 children who entered school in the fall of 2001 and 2002 were assessed throughout elementary school. The comparison of a matched sample of 107 trained with 107 untrained children shows that untrained children are outperformed by trained children in reading. The best training effects can be found with girls while boys seem to profit from the intervention only towards the end of elementary school. Training phonological awareness in preschool thus facilitates reading acquisition, even if there are other important influencing factors (e.g. class context).

The goal of this paper is to investigate the role phonology plays for visual word recognition and the change this role undergoes in the course of reading acquisition by providing data on German readers at different stages of reading proficiency. Erroneous responses in a semantic decision task, which employs words that are either homophonous or graphemically similar to a word of a previously introduced semantic field, were compared at different stages of reading development (i.e. in second- and fourth-grade school children and adults). In all age groups, subjects committed significantly more errors with homophones than with words graphemically similar to a word related to the given semantic field. The results show that phonological recoding plays an important role for visual word recognition not only with beginners but also in skilled readers and, hence, corroborate phonological models of reading.

This paper discusses one experiment on the French language which shows that distinctive phonological feature similarity between consonants influences the processing of a C1VC2V pseudo-word during a high demanding reading task. When participants were asked to recall one of the two consonants, they made more errors in recalling the voicing of C2 (but not C1) when C1 and C2 disagreed in voicing than when they agreed, a pattern which is reminiscent of progressive harmony. A similar trend was found for manner similarity. This study confirms that sub-phonemic information about voicing is extracted rapidly in reading and can cause early phonetic priming. The elaboration of lateral inhibitory relations between phoneme detectors during reading acquisition can serve to counter errors from this early phonetic priming.1

In this study, we present an experiment in which we examined the time course of typing German compounds. The compounds varied according to three criteria: (1) whole word frequency (high vs. low), (2) head frequency (high vs. low) and (3) semantic transparency (transparent vs. opaque). In this experiment, we recorded the interkey intervals (IKIs) and concentrated on the IKI measurements found at the boundary of the two immediate constituents in compounds. We refer to this boundary type as an SM-boundary because (S)yllable and (M)orpheme boundaries coincide at this word position. As we found effects of lexical frequency for SM-IKIs in a series of previous studies, we argue that possible differences in SM-IKIs found for compounds of different frequency classes and of different degrees of semantic transparency can give an insight into the processes involved in the written production of German compounds: whole word procedures and/or compositional procedures. Our findings show that SM-IKIs are affected by compound frequency, head frequency and semantic transparency. We therefore argue that both whole word procedures and compositional procedures are involved in the written production of German compounds. These findings are in line with those versions of dual-route models which postulate that the two routes run in parallel and interact.