Nonword reading across orthographies: How flexible is the choice of reading units?

Abstract

International audienceIt was predicted that children learning to read inconsistent orthographies (e.g., English) should show considerable flexibility in making use of spelling-sound correspondences at different unit sizes whereas children learning to read consistent orthographies (e.g., German) should mainly employ small-size grapheme-phoneme strategies. This hypothesis was tested in a cross-language blocking experiment using nonwords that could only be read using small-site grapheme-phoneme correspondences (small-unit nonwords) and phonologically identical nonwords that could be decoded using larger correspondences (large-unit nonwords). These small-unit and large-unit nonwords were either presented mixed together in the same lists or blocked by unit size. It was found that English children, but not German children, showed blocking effects (better performance when items were blocked by nonword type than in mixed lists). This suggests that in mixed lists, English readers have to switch back and forth between small-unit and large-unit processing, resulting in switching costs. These results are interpreted in terms of differences concerning the grain size of the phonological recoding mechanisms developed by English and German children

Manulex-infra: Distributional characteristics of grapheme—phoneme mappings, and infralexical and lexical units in child-directed written material

“…Depending on what language they speak and how well they read, children seem to move rapidly from reliance on surface units (letters) to reliance on more abstract units (graphemes) and larger sublexical units such as onsetrhymes and/or syllables. In English, it is probably because taking word rhymes into account reduces the inconsistencies of GPCs that beginning English readers make greater use of rhyme units (Brown & Deavers, 1999;Goswami et al, 1998;Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003), unlike beginners in languages with a shallower orthography who mostly rely on GPCs. This is true of Spanish and French (Goswami et al, 1998;Sprenger-Charolles et al, 1998), and even German (Goswami et al, 2003), despite the fact that in German, as in English, there are a greater number of closed than open syllables and thus more opportunity to process rhyme units.…”

The influence of reading unit size on the development of Stroop interference in early word decoding

“…According to this view, both unit types are potentially available for use fairly early in the development of reading (Stuart, Masterson, Dixon, & Quinlan, 1999) as learners develop a sight vocabulary. Most modern models of word reading in adults suggest that the lexicon contains information that pertains to both rime and GPC units (e.g., Brown, 1998), some of which seems to be driven by the characteristics of English spelling-sound mappings (Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003). According to this model, words units are applied flexibly and differentially according to the demand characteristics of the task.…”

“…Brown and Deavers (1999) for instance, noted that adults shifted the pronunciation of ambiguous nonwords towards rime pronunciations when the list contained a high proportion of rime-based items on it. Similarly, Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, and Schneider (2003) compared the reading of three kinds of nonword lists: small-unit nonwords (regular GPC pronunciations), large-unit nonwords (rime pronunciations), and a mixed list that combined both types of words. They found that English adults performed more accurately and quickly on small-unit lists and large-unit lists than on the mixed list, showing what the authors called a "switching cost".…”

“…An alternative view is that children make use of larger sublexical units that either engage word analogies or rime units for word decoding (Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003). Rime units consist of recurrent rimes in spoken syllables.…”

Sublexical frequency measures for orthographic and phonological units in German

“…With regard to reading performance, the most economic strategy with the lowest memory effort would therefore be to link graphemes to phonemes, because for reading acquisition it is necessary to assign a phonological representation to a printed word. In the German language this is a suitable reading strategy, since graphemes usually map to only one phoneme 1 (Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003;Jacobs, 2002;Jacobs & Graf, 2005;Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, & Braun, 2001). However, in languages with more inconsistent graphemeto-phoneme correspondences (GPC) larger units may be more suitable for reading acquisition.…”