Written Language & Literacy - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2005

The objective of this study was to explore the relationship of reading rate to reading comprehension using different scales for reading rate. Although fluency research typically measures reading rate as speed (in words-per-minute) using whole texts as the text unit of interest, reading research investigating situation models measures rate as time (in seconds) using individual sentences as the unit of interest. The current study compared the predictive powers of these contrasting metrics. Time was shown to be the superior metric when both text- and sentence-reading times were included as predictors of comprehension, along with an interaction between them. The time model accounted for the curvilinear nature of the relationship and explained almost half of the variance in comprehension without violating the homoscedasticity assumption.

We taught adult learners the meanings of rare words to test hypotheses about modality effects in learning word forms. These hypotheses are that (1) written (orthographic) training leads to a better representation of word form than phonological training, that (2) recognition memory for a word is partly dependent upon congruence between training and testing modality (written vs. spoken) but that (3) skilled learners are less dependent on the episodic context of training than are less skilled readers. These hypotheses were confirmed by results of a word recognition test following form-meaning training. We discuss these results in terms of an episodic account of word learning (Reichle & Perfetti, 2003) and variations in lexical quality (Perfetti & Hart, 2001) that can arise through differences in code generation during learning.

This paper proposes an approach for studying the structure and development of the mental lexicon based on morphological family size. For adults, the number of morphologically related words has been shown to facilitate word recognition (Schreuder, & Baayen, 1997). This effect is assumed to be caused by connections in the mental lexicon between morphologically related words. Because children still have to acquire word representations and their interconnectedness, family size effects in children are considered to be smaller. So far, however, developmental data on morphological family size effects are generally lacking. As a first step, we wanted to find out to what extent word frequency and morphological family size effects will appear in adult lexical decision data while using adult versus child language corpora as a frame of reference. Two findings were obtained. First, the materials specifically constructed for children evoked both frequency and family size effects. Second, frequency counts based on a Dutch corpus of child language (Schrooten & Vermeer, 1994) showed reliable frequency effects.

Because it is often assumed that difficulties in spelling are of phonological origin, the aim of this study was to examine whether emphasis on the pronunciation of individual graphemes is beneficial for learning to spell words in poor spellers. In the first experiment Dutch children with a spelling deficit had to practice words in two types of exercises: (1) full production after memorizing the orthographic pattern, and (2) a special pronunciation, so-called spelling pronunciation, accompanied by full production after memorizing. Spelling pronunciation showed to have no additional effect on spelling. The orthographic information might have overruled the effect of spelling pronunciation. Therefore, in Experiment 2 orthographic information was excluded from the comparison between training with spelling pronunciation and training with normal pronunciation. Spelling pronunciation appeared to be more effective than normal pronunciation. However, spelling pronunciation was as effective as priming the orthography in memorization training, which may indicate that the common process of uncovering orthographic details is the main driving force for accelerated learning.

The outcomes of computerized training in the correspondences between phonological and orthographic units are reported. Forty-four Finnish-speaking first-graders with poor pre-reading skills were assigned to one of two groups, intervention or control. The children in the intervention group received computerized training over a 6-week period (mean 170 minutes in total) while the children in the control group received regular reading instruction only. Although the short intervention program produced accelerated growth in letter naming, no differential outcomes emerged between the groups in terms of reading acquisition. The outcomes for the poorest performers on six cognitive-linguistic disadvantages were analysed to identify the factors mediating responsiveness to the training. In terms of reading acquisition, the intervention was more effective than ordinary instruction for children with low phoneme awareness skills and attention difficulties as defined by teacher ratings.

The present study compared the early Hebrew (L2) literacy development of three groups; two groups of bilinguals — bi-literate and mono-literate Russian-Hebrew speakers, and a third group of monolingual Hebrew-speakers. We predicted that bi-literacy rather than bilingualism is the key variable as regards L2 literacy learning. In a longitudinal design, a variety of linguistic, meta-linguistic and cognitive tasks were administered at the commencement of first grade, with Hebrew reading and spelling assessed at the end of the year. Results demonstrated that bi-literate bilinguals were far in advance of both mono-literate (Russian-Hebrew) bilinguals and mono-lingual Hebrew-speakers on all reading fluency measures at the end of Grade 1. Bi-literate bilinguals also showed a clear advantage over mono-literate bilingual and mono-lingual peers on all phonological awareness tasks. The mono-literate bilinguals also demonstrated some modest gains over their monolingual peers in Grade 1 reading accuracy. All three groups performed similarly on L2 linguistic tasks. These findings confirm Bialystok’s (2002) assertion that bilingualism per se may not be the most influential factor in L2 reading acquisition. Early (L1) literacy acquisition, however, can greatly enhance L2 literacy development. The present findings also suggest that the actual mechanism of cross-linguistic transfer is the insight gained into the alphabetic principle common to all alphabetic writing systems and not merely the knowledge of a specific letter-sound code such as the Roman orthography.

The present study examined the relative role played by three cognitive processes — phonological processing, verbal working memory, syntactic awareness — in understanding the reading comprehension performance among 884 native English (L1) speakers and 284 English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) speakers in sixth-grade (mean age: 11.43 years). The performance of both groups of speakers were comparable on measures of word reading, word reading fluency, phonological awareness, phonological decoding fluency and verbal working memory. However, the ESL speakers lagged behind L1 speakers in terms of syntactic awareness. This study also emphasizes the importance of the three cognitive processes in establishing a common model of reading comprehension across English L1 and ESL reading.

We examined the word-to-text integration processes of less skilled comprehenders using ERPs recorded during text reading. The first sentence of each text controlled the accessibility of an antecedent referent for a critical word, which was the first content word of the second sentence. In the explicit condition, the critical word had occurred in the first sentence; in the paraphrase condition, a word or phrase similar in meaning had occurred in the first sentence; in the inference condition, a referent could have been established during the first sentence only if the reader made a forward inference; a baseline condition provided no obvious antecedent for the critical word. PCA, topographic results, and mean amplitude analyses converged on a picture of integration difficulty. Integration effects emerged in the expected mid-latency ranges for the explicit and inference conditions. The pattern of effects differed from that of skilled comprehenders, who, in another study, showed earlier integration effects for explicit and paraphrase conditions, but not reliably for the inference condition. Paraphrase effects were especially weak and late occurring for less skilled comprehenders. Compared with skilled comprehenders, less skilled comprehenders show slow word-to-text integration processes.