Ratings for Welsh words and their English equivalents

Abstract

The rating of English words and their Welsh equivalents provided the opportunity to compare subjective ratings in two languages as well as the opportunity to compare ratings in a deep and a shallow orthography (English and Welsh, respectively). Four variables-age of acquisition (AOA),familiarity, concreteness, and imageability-were rated. AOAand imageability emerged as the two most important extralingual variables (r = .8 and.73, respectively). Although the patterns of ratings were generally consistent within and between languages, some differences did emerge when these patterns were compared with those from other studies. Using similar instructions to rate familiarity and AOAresulted in a low correlation in English (r = -.5) and a high correlation in Welsh (r = -.84). The mean ratings for familiarity, concreteness, and imageability were higher in Welsh than in English (5.23 vs. 3.35, 5.46 vs. 4.41, and 5.29 vs. 4.38, respectively). Both ofthese findings are explained in terms of differences in orthographic depth, and it is suggested that Welsh may be a more imageable language than English.The majority of work on word recognition and production has taken place in the English language with monolingual subjects. In the past decade, however, research on word recognition and production has been proceeding in languages other than English, as well as with bilinguals. A developing bilingual literature has begun to focus on cognitive and psycholinguistic issues (see, e.g., Boyce, Browman, & Goldstein, 1987; Caramazza & Brones, 1979; Gerard & Scarborough, 1989). In particular, the work of de Groot and others (see, e.g., de Groot, 1992; de Groot, Dannenburg, & van Hell, 1994; de Groot & Nas, 1991) has begun to develop a strong theoretical foundation for bilingual word recognition based on shared conceptual representations of words. Bilingualism potentially presents some of the strongest challenges--outside ofmultilingualism-to existing theories of lexical processing, which are based on monolingual research. At the same time, it has the potential to present powerful evidence in support of these theories.A related line of developing research compares word recognition and production in deep and shallow orthographies; such a comparison allows an important variable in word recognition-orthography-to be manipulated (see, e.g., Frost, 1994; Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987; Katz & Feldman, 1983). A deep orthography is one in which the spelling-to-sound rules are inconsistent. That is, a This study was based in part on an MSc (Econ) dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MSc degree at the University of Wales College ofCardiff. The research was supported by Grants K00429413158 and R0042953438I from the Economic and Social Research Council. I would like to thank Diane Ellis and C. Barry for their help and support during the research. Thanks are also extended to the two reviewers of this paper for their comments and suggestions. Correspondence should be addressed to W.1. Fear, School of Psycholog...

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Effects of orthographic transparency on reading and phoneme awareness in children learning to read in Wales

“…Because it was considered of paramount importance that the English and Welsh words were of equal familiarity, the words used in the Welsh list were translations of the words used in the English list. Fear (1997) has shown that familiarity ratings for English words and their Welsh translations are highly correlated. The order of the words on the Welsh list was the same as the order of their translations on the English list.…”

Age-of-Acquisition Effects in Word and Picture Identification.

“…In addition to Gilhooly and Logie (1980a), published AoA norms exist for English (Bird, Franklin, & Howard, 2001; Carroll & White, 1973a; Fear, 1997; Gilhooly & Hay, 1977; Gilhooly & Logie, 1980b; Masterson & Druks, 1998; Stratton, Jacobus, & Brinley, 1975), as well as Spanish (Cuetos, Ellis, & Alvarez, 1999; see also Piñeiro & Manzano, 2000, for AoA classification based on children's speech), French (Alario & Ferrand, 1999; Bonin, Peereman, Malardier, Meot, & Chalard, 2003), Welsh (Fear, 1997), Italian (Barca, Burani, & Arduino, 2002; Dell'Acqua, Lotto, & Job, 2000), Dutch (Ghyselinck, Custers, & Brysbaert, 2003; Ghyselinck, De Moor, & Brysbaert, 2000), and Icelandic (Pind, Jonsdottir, Gossurardottir, & Jonsson, 2000). There is also a new online source of AoA ratings for pictures of objects and actions for seven languages (Szekely et al, 2004).…”