Individual differences in learning the regularities between orthography, phonology and semantics predict early reading skills

Abstract

Statistical views of literacy development maintain that proficient reading requires the assimilation of myriad statistical regularities present in the writing system. Indeed, previous studies have tied statistical learning (SL) abilities to reading skills, establishing the existence of a link between the two. However, some issues are currently left unanswered, including questions regarding the underlying bases for these associations as well as the types of statistical regularities actually assimilated by developing readers. Here we present an alternative approach to study the role of SL in literacy development, focusing on individual differences among beginning readers. Instead of using an artificial task to estimate SL abilities, our approach identifies individual differences in children's reliance on statistical regularities as reflected by actual reading behavior. We specifically focus on individuals' reliance on regularities in the mapping between print and speech versus associations between print and meaning in a word naming task. We present data from 399 children, showing that those whose oral naming performance is impacted more by print-speech regularities and less by associations between print and meaning have better reading skills. These findings suggest that a key route by which SL mechanisms impact developing reading abilities is

Infant-directed speech becomes less redundant as infants grow: Implications for language learning

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Effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left posterior superior temporal gyrus on picture-word interference

“…Recently, the locus of the semantic interference effect has been the topic of much debate in the field [e.g. 9 , 10 ], despite the well-established evidence for its existence [ 11 ].…”

Are people consistent when reading nonwords aloud on different occasions?

“…The whiskers represent 95% confidence intervals; the boxes span two quartiles (25% and 75%) nature. In line with this, readers' behaviour has been shown to mirror variations in the linguistic environments to which they are exposed (Siegelman et al, 2020;Ulicheva et al, 2020). It is not surprising then that when such variations are present (as for inconsistent patterns), individuals show increased variation from session to session.…”

“…We reasoned that if a stochastic component were added to units within a model of reading (e.g., Rueckl et al, 2019), then the impacts would be greatest on reading aloud those graphemes with multiple possible pronunciations (e.g., EA pronounced as short or long, /ɛ/ as in BREAD or /iː/ as in BREATHE). Likewise, these impacts should be greatest on readers with a high degree of literacy skill likely to have greater knowledge of the multiple pronunciations associated with particular graphemes (e.g., due to their experience with rare words and loan words; see Siegelman et al, 2020;Steacy et al, 2019;Treiman & Kessler, 2006). This rationale led us to predict that intersession variability might be greatest for nonwords comprising graphemes with many possible pronunciations and for participants with a higher degree of reading experience.…”