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Journal articles on the topic 'Opaque orthography'
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Zeguers, M. H. T., P. Snellings, H. M. Huizenga, and M. W. van der Molen. "Time course analyses of orthographic and phonological priming effects during word recognition in a transparent orthography." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 67, no. 10 (October 2014): 1925–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2013.879192.
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In opaque orthographies, the activation of orthographic and phonological codes follows distinct time courses during visual word recognition. However, it is unclear how orthography and phonology are accessed in more transparent orthographies. Therefore, we conducted time course analyses of masked priming effects in the transparent Dutch orthography. The first study used targets with small phonological differences between phonological and orthographic primes, which are typical in transparent orthographies. Results showed consistent orthographic priming effects, yet phonological priming effects were absent. The second study explicitly manipulated the strength of the phonological difference and revealed that both orthographic and phonological priming effects became identifiable when phonological differences were strong enough. This suggests that, similar to opaque orthographies, strong phonological differences are a prerequisite to separate orthographic and phonological priming effects in transparent orthographies. Orthographic and phonological priming appeared to follow distinct time courses, with orthographic codes being quickly translated into phonological codes and phonology dominating the remainder of the lexical access phase.
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Haisma, Joyce. "Dyslexic Subtypes and Literacy Skills in L2 Opaque English." Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 81 (January 1, 2009): 65–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ttwia.81.07hai.
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In theory, opaque orthographies should pose more difficulties for people with developmental dyslexia than transparent ones. (Frost, 2005). However, studies (Miller-Guron & Lundberg, 2000; Van der Leij & Morfidi, 2006) show that some people with dyslexia are better at reading L2 English than their L1 transparent orthography. The current study suggests that they have a form of dyslexia known as phonological dyslexia. On the basis of the dual-route model (Coltheart, 2005), it is proposed that membership of a dyslexic subtype - phonological or surface - influences success in dealing with orthographic depth. To test this, Dutch teenagers with phonological and surface dyslexia performed Dutch and English orthographic competence and spelling tasks. The results seem to indicate that people with phonological dyslexia are more successful in reading English as an L2 opaque than Dutch as an L1 transparent orthography; however, in the case of spelling, the reverse pattern is observed.
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Georgiou, Georgios P. "How Do Speakers of a Language with a Transparent Orthographic System Perceive the L2 Vowels of a Language with an Opaque Orthographic System? An Analysis through a Battery of Behavioral Tests." Languages 6, no. 3 (July 11, 2021): 118. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages6030118.
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Background: The present study aims to investigate the effect of the first language (L1) orthography on the perception of the second language (L2) vowel contrasts and whether orthographic effects occur at the sublexical level. Methods: Fourteen adult Greek learners of English participated in two AXB discrimination tests: one auditory and one orthography test. In the auditory test, participants listened to triads of auditory stimuli that targeted specific English vowel contrasts embedded in nonsense words and were asked to decide if the middle vowel was the same as the first or the third vowel by clicking on the corresponding labels. The orthography test followed the same procedure as the auditory test, but instead, the two labels contained grapheme representations of the target vowel contrasts. Results: All but one vowel contrast could be more accurately discriminated in the auditory than in the orthography test. The use of nonsense words in the elicitation task eradicated the possibility of a lexical effect of orthography on auditory processing, leaving space for the interpretation of this effect on a sublexical basis, primarily prelexical and secondarily postlexical. Conclusions: L2 auditory processing is subject to L1 orthography influence. Speakers of languages with transparent orthographies such as Greek may rely on the grapheme–phoneme correspondence to decode orthographic representations of sounds coming from languages with an opaque orthographic system such as English.
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Raman, Ilhan, and Brendan Stuart Weekes. "Deep Dysgraphia in Turkish." Behavioural Neurology 16, no. 2-3 (2005): 59–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2005/568540.
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Deep dysgraphic patients make semantic errors when writing to dictation and they cannot write nonwords. Extant reports of deep dysgraphia come from languages with relatively opaque orthographies. Turkish is a transparent orthography because the bidirectional mappings between phonology and orthography are completely predictable. We report BRB, a biscriptal Turkish-English speaker who has acquired dysgraphia characterised by semantic errors as well as effects of grammatical class and imageability on writing in Turkish. Nonword spelling is abolished. A similar pattern of errors is observed in English. BRB is the first report of acquired dysgraphia in a truly transparent writing system. We argue that deep dysgraphia results from damage to the mappings that are common to both languages between word meanings and orthographic representations.
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ESCUDERO, PAOLA. "Orthography plays a limited role when learning the phonological forms of new words: The case of Spanish and English learners of novel Dutch words." Applied Psycholinguistics 36, no. 1 (January 2015): 7–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014271641400040x.
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ABSTRACTSome previous studies have shown that the availability of orthographic information leads to positive effects for second language (L2) phonology, while others document negative effects. In this paper, we examine the role of orthography on novel spoken-word learning by comparing word pairs that differed in most or all of their segments (nonminimal pairs) and those that only differed in one phoneme (minimal pairs) that was considered easy or difficult to discriminate. We tested the performance of learners whose native languages have transparent orthographies as well as learners with opaque orthographies. Our findings show that regardless of linguistic background and native orthographic system, availability of orthographic information during word learning did not have an effect on nonminimal pairs or perceptually easy minimal pairs. However, it had a positive effect on two minimal pairs that had the highest accuracy among the seven perceptually difficult ones, indicating that orthography only helped contrasts that were relatively easy to discriminate. The implications of these findings for L2 teaching and for future directions within L2 phonology are discussed.
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Joshi, R. Malatesha, Kausalai Wijekumar, and Amy Gillespie Rouse. "International Perspectives on Spelling and Writing in Different Orthographies: Introduction to the Special Series." Journal of Learning Disabilities 55, no. 2 (December 17, 2021): 83–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00222194211059836.
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This article serves as an introduction to the special issue on spelling and writing in different orthographies. Most studies and theoretical models of writing are based on the English language, and it is generally assumed that what is true for English is also true for other languages. Further, there are more studies on reading compared to studies of writing and spelling. Considering that 80% of the world’s population speaks a language other than English, we need more studies on writing and spelling in languages other than English. With this intention, we are presenting 6 papers on writing and spelling in different languages of different orthographic depth, from highly transparent orthographies like Spanish and Italian to highly opaque orthography like Cantonese.
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Saletta, Meredith. "Orthography and speech production in children with good or poor reading skills." Applied Psycholinguistics 40, no. 4 (April 22, 2019): 905–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716419000055.
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AbstractSpeech production is influenced by the orthographic representation of the spoken word. Although previous work has shown that inconsistencies between the word’s sound and spelling may facilitate or disrupt processing (e.g., Alario, Perre, Castel, & Ziegler, 2007; Saletta, Goffman, & Brentari, 2015; Saletta, Goffman, & Hogan, 2016; Ventura, Morais, Pattamadilok, & Kolinsky, 2004), the developmental course of this effect on new readers remains unclear. The current study examines how children’s production of nonwords changes as a function of exposure to the nonwords’ orthography. We tested nonword repetition in 17 children with typical reading skills and 17 children with poor reading skills. Participants heard and repeated nonword stimuli, or read them aloud when the stimuli were written in either a relatively transparent or an opaque spelling. We quantified participants’ segmental accuracy and speech movement stability both before and after their exposure to the nonwords’ orthography. The children improved only in segmental accuracy (and not speech movement stability) and only as a consequence of practice (and not because of exposure to the nonwords’ spellings). Children with poorer reading skills demonstrated a greater change in accuracy from pretest to posttest than children with stronger reading skills. Thus, one’s automaticity in reading and the reorganization of his/her literacy skills throughout development influence speech production.
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Mkandawire, Sitwe Benson. "English versus Zambian Languages: Exploring some Similarities and Differences with their Implication on the Teaching of Literacy and Language in Primary Schools." British Journal of Multidisciplinary and Advanced Studies 3, no. 2 (November 8, 2022): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.37745/bjmas.2022.0037.
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This desk study aimed at comparing English and selected Zambian Languages with a view of identifying some similarities and differences. Data was collected through author introspection and document analysis of existing literature. Publications in English and some Zambian Languages were collected from international databases such JSTOR, Cambridge Journals Online, and Palgrave Macmillan Journals. Searches for literature was extended to Google Scholar, Institutional Repository and visited the University of Zambia library in person. The documents collected were subjected to content analysis where key words, concepts and themes were picked and compared. Findings of the study revealed that English Language has an opaque orthography as there is no grapheme-phoneme correspondence while Zambian Languages have a transparent orthography where each grapheme correspond to individual sounds and that the number of graphemes is almost equal to phonemes. Literacy and language instruction would be much easier for learners in a transparent orthography than opaque. English has certain parts of speech such as articles (determiners) which are not there in Zambian Languages. Unlike English, vowel length is distinctive in all Zambian language. English and Zambian languages use alphabetic writing system with about 93% shared symbols or graphemes. These similarities and variations imply that pedagogically, if learners learn letter knowledge and decoding in a Zambian language, they will transfer such knowledge to English or any other alphabetic language and vice versa. Conversely, in areas where there are differences, literacy and language learners will face difficulties. The study recommended that teachers in early grade classes should understand the variation of English and selected Zambian languages well in their regions to guide learners in schools.
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Borgwaldt, Susanne R., Frauke M. Hellwig, and Annette M. B. de Groot. "Word-initial entropy in five languages." Written Language and Literacy 7, no. 2 (March 22, 2005): 165–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/wll.7.2.03bor.
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Alphabetic orthographies show more or less ambiguous relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling and vice versa. Opaque orthographies, like English, often display unpredictable spelling–sound correspondences. In this paper we present a computational analysis of word-initial bi-directional spelling–sound correspondences for Dutch, English, French, German, and Hungarian, stated in entropy values for various grain sizes. This allows us to position the five languages on the continuum from opaque to transparent orthographies, both in spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling directions. The analysis is based on metrics derived from information theory, and therefore independent of any specific theory of visual word recognition as well as of any specific theoretical approach of orthography.
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Goncalves, Alison Roberto, and Rosane Silveira. "Orthographic effects in speech production: A psycholinguistic study with adult Brazilian-Portuguese English bilinguals / Efeitos ortográficos na produção da fala: um estudo psicolinguístico com adultos bilíngues falantes de Português Brasileiro e Inglês." REVISTA DE ESTUDOS DA LINGUAGEM 28, no. 3 (May 27, 2020): 1461. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2237-2083.28.3.1461-1494.
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Abstract: The present study inquired whether orthography affects phonological processing of English as an L2. To do so, a lexicon that simulated opaque and transparent grapho-phonic English relations in nuclear position was developed (e.g., keet, deit, toud). Bilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and English were compelled to learn this new lexicon through a repeated-exposure training paradigm in which they were introduced to the lexicon phonological forms associated with their visual forms, and then to the phonological forms associated with their visual and orthographic forms. After undergoing training, subjects were tested with a Timed Picture Naming task to investigate orthographic recruitment in spoken production. Results suggested that orthography influenced naming of the trained words, indicating that the process of converting a visual input into its phono-articulatory representations for production involves orthographic activation. Such a finding was interpreted as a frequency effect of the grapho-phonic combination, which resulted in lack of skill to compute this operation in the sublexical route. Overall, the presence of orthographic effects in this task can be interpreted as evidence for such a system to function as a strategic mechanism that aids lexical encoding and, consequently, influences lexical access in initial stages of instructed language acquisition.Keywords: phonological acquisition; orthography; psycholinguistics.Resumo: Este estudo investigou se a ortografia afeta o processamento fonológico do inglês como L2. Para tal, um léxico que simulava as relações grafo-fônicas opacas e transparentes do inglês em posição nuclear (e.g., keet, deit, toud) foi desenvolvido. Bilíngues falantes de português brasileiro e de inglês participaram de um treinamento para adquirir este novo léxico com o paradigma de exposição repetida, através do qual foram introduzidas as formas fonológicas deste léxico associadas às suas formas visuais e, depois, as formas fonológicas associadas às suas formas visuais e ortográficas. Após a fase de treinamento, os participantes foram testados com uma tarefa temporalizada de nomeação de figuras para investigar efeitos do recrutamento ortográfico na produção da fala. Os resultados sugeriram que a ortografia influenciou a nomeação das palavras aprendidas no treinamento, indicando que o processo de conversão de uma representação visual para suas representações fonoarticulatórias na produção da fala em L2 envolve a ativação ortográfica. Este resultado foi interpretado como um efeito de frequência da combinação grafo-fônica, que resultou em inabilidade para executar esta operação na rota sublexical. Assim, a presença de efeitos ortográficos nessa tarefa pode ser interpretada como evidência de que o sistema ortográfico pode funcionar como um mecanismo estratégico que auxilia na codificação lexical e, consequentemente, influencia o acesso lexical nos estágios iniciais da aquisição da linguagem em meios instrucionais.Palavras-chave: aquisição fonológica; ortografia; psicolinguística.
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ZHANG, JIE, HONG LI, QIONG DONG, JIE XU, and ELIZABETH SHOLAR. "Implicit use of radicals in learning characters for nonnative learners of Chinese." Applied Psycholinguistics 37, no. 3 (April 13, 2015): 507–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716415000090.
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ABSTRACTThis study investigated whether beginning nonnative learners of Chinese can use phonological and semantic information of radicals to learn the sounds and meanings of new Chinese characters. Thirty-four seventh- and eighth-grade American adolescents, who received intensive Chinese instruction for one semester, were taught 16 compound pseudocharacters paired with novel pictures over three learning trials. After each learning trial, students were asked to produce the sounds and meanings of pseudocharacters in which semantic transparency and phonetic regularity of radicals were manipulated. Results showed a facilitation effect of transparent semantic radicals in learning character meanings in early trials. There was a trend that students learned to read regular and transparent characters better than irregular and opaque characters. The ability to learn orthography–pronunciation association uniquely predicted Chinese word reading after controlling for semantic and phonetic radical knowledge. These findings suggest a predominant use of semantic strategies and the importance of orthography to phonology mappings in learning to read Chinese for beginning nonnative learners of Chinese.
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Chibamba, Agnes Chileshe, and Geoffrey Kazembe Tambulukani. "Learning to Read Words in Cinyanja Language and the Contribution of the Home and School Environments in Lusaka District of Zambia." International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science 06, no. 11 (2022): 465–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.47772/ijriss.2022.61125.
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The focus of this study was to establish how reading developed in children in Cinyanja language by charting their development from home environment, through grade 1 to 2. An embedded explanatory sequential mixed methods design of both quantitative and qualitative methods was employed to collect, analyse and interpret the data. Six grade 1 children with ages ranging from 7 to 9 at entry point, 6 parents and 3 teachers participated in the study. Quantitative data across the three phases were collected through literacy tests: alphabetic knowledge and word reading. Simple tables were generated manually to analyse the data from literacy tests. Qualitative data was collected from parents/guardians and the teachers via a questionnaire with both closed and open-ended questions, and analysed thematically. Results revealed the following: (i) alphabetic knowledge in children start developing very early before formal schooling and continue until children become skillful readers; (ii) there is a strong relationship between rich-literacy home/school environment and literacy development in children; (iii) learning to read in L1 with a transparent orthography is faster and easier than learning to read in a L2 with an opaque orthography; (iv) the number of stages children go through to become proficient in reading in a transparent language was not the same as in English, an opaque language; (v) Learning to read in the L1 is similar to learning to read in L2 in terms of the language and cognitive processes that are involved. The study makes three major recommendations to policy makers and teachers based on the results: (i) literacy curriculum developers should consider the language in which reading is intended to be developed to avoid the tendency by teachers to simply generalize what is known or assumed about reading in English to apply to Bantu language instruction; (ii) teachers should understand that although children are non-readers at school entry point, they bring with them several literacy skills acquired from home and the surrounding environment which can be exploited in lessons; (iii) more studies on reading development in Zambian languages, beyond the Cinyanja language, are needed to confirm whether the four stages of literacy development in English cited in the theoretical framework can apply to other transparent languages.
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Bitan, Tali, Yael Weiss, Tami Katzir, and Tammar Truzman. "Morphological decomposition compensates for imperfections in phonological decoding. Neural evidence from typical and dyslexic readers of an opaque orthography." Cortex 130 (September 2020): 172–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.05.014.
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Alzi'abi, Safi Eldeen. "Arab Efl Learners’ Stress of Compound Words." Research in Language 20, no. 1 (December 29, 2022): 85–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/1731-7533.20.1.06.
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Compound words are ubiquitous in English. Stressing compounds is difficult for EFL learners and native speakers, especially when the meaning is not a sum of the constituent parts. This study explores Arab EFL learners’ stress strategies and outlines their difficulties. It examines whether any of these factors (a) word class, (b) orthography, (c) understanding of phonetics and phonology, (d) age and (e) grade point average (GPA) influence their behaviour and levels of success. It involves 130 second and third-year Jordanian English majors in reading 50 opaque non-frequent compound words, 25 with right-stress and 25 with left-stress. The majority opted for right-stress, producing about half of the stimuli correctly. They right-stressed more often in compound verbs, nouns and adjectives of all spelling forms. Their performance was slightly influenced by the study of phoneticsandphonology, training in stress and GPA. However, there was no noticeable relationship between their stress performance and age. Notably, the subjects needed more training in compound word stress production.
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Whitt, L. A. "Fictional Contexts and Referential Opacity." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15, no. 2 (June 1985): 327–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1985.10716422.
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Quantified modal logic and propositional attitudes have long been regarded as sites susceptible to referential opacity — that curious affliction first diagnosed by Quine. In this paper I suggest a way of alleviating the symptoms of referential opacity as they manifest themselves in fictional contexts, contexts in which we are confronted by discourse about fiction(s). Indeed, a case might be made against Quine that it is fictional, rather than quotational, contexts which are the referentially opaque contexts par excellence. For whether we take a Fregean line on the matter and consider the obliquity of fictional terms as due to shift of reference, or a Quinean line and consider their opacity as due to failure of reference, their non-standard (or as Kaplan might put it, non-vulgar) occurrence is clear and avowed. Moreover, as the non-standardness or non-vulgarity of terms in fictional contexts is by design and not due to some mere accident of orthography, they seem in many ways to be both more interesting and potentially more revealing.
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Zhang, Juan, Chenggang Wu, Tiemin Zhou, and Yaxuan Meng. "Cognate facilitation priming effect is modulated by writing system: Evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals." International Journal of Bilingualism 23, no. 2 (January 10, 2018): 553–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367006917749062.
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Aims: The present study aims to examine the cross-script cognate facilitation effect that cognates have processing advantages over non-cognates and this effect is strong evidence supporting the non-selective access hypothesis for bilinguals. Methodology: By adopting a masked translation priming paradigm, Experiment 1 used 48 Chinese–English cognates (Chinese words) and 48 non-cognates (Chinese words) as primes and their English translation equivalences as targets. Chinese–English bilinguals were instructed to judge whether the target stimuli were real words or not. In Experiment 2, another group of participants took the same lexical decision task as in Experiment 1, except that English–Chinese cognates and non-cognates (English words) served as primes and their Chinese translation equivalences were targets. Data and analysis: Response latency and accuracy data were submitted to a repeated-measures analysis of variance. Findings/conclusions: Experiment 1 showed that Chinese–English cognates (Chinese words) and non-cognates (Chinese words) produced similar priming effect, while Experiment 2 revealed that English–Chinese cognates (English words) generated a significant priming effect, whereas non-cognates (English words) failed to induce any priming effect. Overall, Chinese words did not show cognate advantage, while English words produced a significant cognate facilitation effect. These results might be attributed to different mappings from orthography to phonology in English and Chinese. Opaque mapping from orthography to phonology in Chinese hindered phonological activation and reduced Chinese–English cognate phonological priming effect. However, English–Chinese cognates benefited from transparent mapping from sound to print and thus generated a significant phonological priming effect. Implications of the current findings for bilingual word recognition models were discussed. Originality: The present study is the first to investigate the cross-script cognate facilitation effect by ensuring both the heterogeneity of primes and targets (English and Chinese) and the homogeneity of primes (Chinese or English). The results indicated that the writing systems of the primes constrained the cross-script cognate priming effect.
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Shum, Simon S. P., W. S. Lau, Matthew M. F. Yuen, and K. M. Yu. "Solid reconstruction from orthographic opaque views using incremental extrusion." Computers & Graphics 21, no. 6 (November 1997): 787–800. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0097-8493(97)00058-7.
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LI, MAN, NAN JIANG, and KIRA GOR. "L1 and L2 processing of compound words: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 20, no. 2 (October 28, 2015): 384–402. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1366728915000681.
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This study reports results from a series of masked priming experiments investigating early automatic processes involved in the visual recognition of English bimorphemic compounds in native and non-native processing. Results show that NSs produced robust and statistically equivalent masked priming effects with semantically transparent (e.g., toothbrush-TOOTH) and opaque (e.g., honeymoon-HONEY) compound primes, but no priming with orthographic controls (e.g., restaurant-REST), irrespective of constituent position. Similarly, advanced Chinese learners of English also produced robust and statistically equivalent priming effects with transparent and opaque compound primes in both positions. However, a clear orthographic priming effect was observed in the word-initial overlap position but no such effect in the word-final position. We argue that L2 compound priming originates from a different source from form priming. We conclude that these findings lend support to the sublexical morpho-orthographic decomposition mechanism underlying early English compound recognition not only in L1 but also in L2 processing.
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Tse, Chi-Shing, and Melvin J. Yap. "The role of lexical variables in the visual recognition of two-character Chinese compound words: A megastudy analysis." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, no. 9 (January 1, 2018): 2022–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021817738965.
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To examine the effect of lexical variables on two-character Chinese compound word processing, we performed item-level hierarchical regression analyses on lexical decision megastudy data of 18,983 two-character Chinese compound words. The first analysis determined the unique item-level variance explained by orthographic (frequency and stroke count), phonological (consistency, homophonic density), and semantic (transparency) variables. Both character and word variables were considered. Results showed that orthographic and semantic variables, respectively, accounted for more collective variance than phonological variables, suggesting that Chinese skilled readers rely more on orthographic and semantic information than phonological information when processing visually presented words. The second analysis tested interactive effects of lexical variables and showed significant semantic transparency × cumulative character frequency and word frequency × cumulative character frequency interactions. The effect of cumulative character frequency was stronger for transparent words than for opaque words and was stronger for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words. However, there was no semantic transparency × word frequency interaction in reaction time. Implications of the current findings on models of Chinese compound word processing are discussed.
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Artuso, Caterina, and Paola Palladino. "The role of memory updating in shallow native and opaque second language learning." Second Language Research 35, no. 3 (June 7, 2018): 377–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267658318777022.
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The current study investigates the relation between working memory updating and second language learning (L2) outcomes in typically-developing fourth grade children. Our primary aim was to replicate and extend previous findings on the relationship between updating and low-level reading skills, i.e. fluency. Our second objective was to examine possible updating transfer effects across languages, from the native language (L1) to L2 learning. The languages considered have different orthographic features; shallow for L1 (Italian), and opaque for L2 (English). Mediation analyses were tested using the bootstrapping method; we found that updating was directly related to reading fluency in L2 learning. Moreover, we showed evidence of the mediating role of L1 fluency in the relation between memory updating and L2 fluency. Our findings suggest that updating processes may act at a low level for reading, and are potentially independent from specific language features, both for opaque and regular orthographies.
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Qasem, Mousa, and Rebecca Foote. "CROSSLANGUAGE LEXICAL ACTIVATION." Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32, no. 1 (February 5, 2010): 111–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0272263109990271.
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This study tested the predictions of the revised hierarchical (RHM) and morphological decomposition (MDM) models with Arabic-English bilinguals. The RHM (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) predicts that the amount of activation of first language translation equivalents is negatively correlated with second language (L2) proficiency. The MDM (Frost, Forster, & Deutsch, 1997) claims that in nonconcatenative languages, including Arabic, activation spreads by morphological identity rather than orthographic similarity. To test these two models, native speakers of Arabic at two levels of English L2 proficiency completed a translation recognition task. In the critical conditions, the Arabic word was not the correct translation of the English word (shoulder-katif) but was orthographically related (shoulder-kahf“cave”), morphologically related but semantically opaque (shoulder-takaatuf“unity”), or semantically related (shoulder-raqaba“neck”). Results show more morphological- than orthographic-form interference for all participants, in line with the MDM. Contrary to the RHM, however, both proficiency groups experienced interference in the semantic condition as well as in the form conditions.
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De Martino, Maria, Giulia Bracco, Francesca Postiglione, and Alessandro Laudanna. "The influence of grammatical gender and suffix transparency in processing Italian written nouns." Mental Lexicon 12, no. 1 (June 18, 2017): 107–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ml.12.1.05dem.
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Abstract In some languages the grammatical gender of nouns can be probabilistically detected using formal cues; for instance, in Italian, the majority of feminine nouns end in ‘-a’(e.g., casa, ‘home’) and the majority of masculine nouns end in ‘-o’ (e.g., albero, ‘tree’). It has been hypothesized that the match/mismatch between the formal information of the suffix and the abstract grammatical information on gender affects lexical processing of nouns. An alternative account is that a default option available for gender poses constraints to mechanisms of lexical access for words exhibiting gender markers in the surface form. In the present study, nouns with highly predictive gender suffix (regular), nouns whose gender cannot be recovered from surface form (opaque) and nouns with misleading gender suffix (irregular) were compared in two reading aloud and two lexical decision experiments. Results confirmed that regular nouns are processed better than irregular nouns. No difference was detected between masculine and feminine opaque nouns. The results allow the conclusion that a formal gender feature (the gender orthographic regularity) is more likely to affect lexical processing of bare nouns than the activation of a gender default option.
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Heyer, Vera, and Dana Kornishova. "Semantic transparency affects morphological priming . . . eventually." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, no. 5 (January 1, 2018): 1112–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1310915.
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Semantic transparency has been in the focus of psycholinguistic research for decades, with the controversy about the time course of the application of morpho-semantic information during the processing of morphologically complex words not yet resolved. This study reports two masked priming studies with English - ness and Russian - ost’ nominalisations, investigating how semantic transparency modulates native speakers’ morphological priming effects at short and long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In both languages, we found increased morphological priming for nominalisations at the transparent end of the scale (e.g. paleness – pale) in comparison to items at the opaque end of the scale (e.g. business – busy) but only at longer prime durations. The present findings are in line with models that posit an initial phase of morpho-orthographic (semantically blind) decomposition.
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Fiorentino, Robert, and Ella Fund-Reznicek. "Masked morphological priming of compound constituents." Mental Lexicon 4, no. 2 (November 11, 2009): 159–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ml.4.2.01fio.
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Recent masked priming studies suggest that complex words are rapidly segmented into potential morphological constituents during initial visual word recognition. Much of this evidence involves affixation or other formally regular operations, leaving open the question of whether these effects rely heavily on the identification of a closed-class affix or other formal regularity. In two masked priming experiments with English transparent and opaque bimorphemic compound primes consisting solely of open-class morphemes, we find significant constituent priming, but no significant priming for purely orthographic overlap. We conclude that masked morphological priming generalizes across word-formation types to include compounds with no affix or other regular form. These results provide new evidence for across-the-board morphological-level segmentation during visual word recognition and for morpheme-based compound processing.
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Rueckl, Jay G., Pedro M. Paz-Alonso, Peter J. Molfese, Wen-Jui Kuo, Atira Bick, Stephen J. Frost, Roeland Hancock, et al. "Universal brain signature of proficient reading: Evidence from four contrasting languages." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 50 (November 30, 2015): 15510–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509321112.
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We propose and test a theoretical perspective in which a universal hallmark of successful literacy acquisition is the convergence of the speech and orthographic processing systems onto a common network of neural structures, regardless of how spoken words are represented orthographically in a writing system. During functional MRI, skilled adult readers of four distinct and highly contrasting languages, Spanish, English, Hebrew, and Chinese, performed an identical semantic categorization task to spoken and written words. Results from three complementary analytic approaches demonstrate limited language variation, with speech–print convergence emerging as a common brain signature of reading proficiency across the wide spectrum of selected languages, whether their writing system is alphabetic or logographic, whether it is opaque or transparent, and regardless of the phonological and morphological structure it represents.
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Lehtonen, Minna, Philip J. Monahan, and David Poeppel. "Evidence for Early Morphological Decomposition: Combining Masked Priming with Magnetoencephalography." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23, no. 11 (November 2011): 3366–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00035.
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Are words stored as morphologically structured representations? If so, when during word recognition are morphological pieces accessed? Recent masked priming studies support models that assume early decomposition of (potentially) morphologically complex words. The electrophysiological evidence, however, is inconsistent. We combined masked morphological priming with magneto-encephalography (MEG), a technique particularly adept at indexing processes involved in lexical access. The latency of an MEG component peaking, on average, 220 msec post-onset of the target in left occipito-temporal brain regions was found to be sensitive to the morphological prime–target relationship under masked priming conditions in a visual lexical decision task. Shorter latencies for related than unrelated conditions were observed both for semantically transparent (cleaner–CLEAN) and opaque (corner–CORN) prime–target pairs, but not for prime–target pairs with only an orthographic relationship (brothel–BROTH). These effects are likely to reflect a prelexical level of processing where form-based representations of stems and affixes are represented and are in contrast to models positing no morphological structure in lexical representations. Moreover, we present data regarding the transitional probability from stem to affix in a post hoc comparison, which suggests that this factor may modulate early morphological decomposition, particularly for opaque words. The timing of a robust MEG component sensitive to the morphological relatedness of prime–target pairs can be used to further understand the neural substrates and the time course of lexical processing.
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ELLIS, NICK C., and A. MARI HOOPER. "Why learning to read is easier in Welsh than in English: Orthographic transparency effects evinced with frequency-matched tests." Applied Psycholinguistics 22, no. 4 (December 2001): 571–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716401004052.
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This study compared the rate of literacy acquisition in orthographically transparent Welsh and orthographically opaque English using reading tests that were equated for frequency of written exposure. Year 2 English-educated monolingual children were compared with Welsh-educated bilingual children, matched for reading instruction, background, locale, and math ability. Welsh children were able to read aloud accurately significantly more of their language (61% of tokens, 1821 types) than were English children (52% tokens, 716 types), allowing them to read aloud beyond their comprehension levels (168 vs. 116%, respectively). Various observations suggested that Welsh readers were more reliant on an alphabetic decoding strategy: word length determined 70% of reading latency in Welsh but only 22% in English, and Welsh reading errors tended to be nonword mispronunciations, whereas English children made more real word substitutions and null attempts. These findings demonstrate that the orthographic transparency of a language can have a profound effect on the rate of acquisition and style of reading adopted by its speakers.
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Rashid, Mohammed Abubakari, and Ibrahim Alhassan. "Appellative Names: Nanuŋ Towns in Context." International Journal of Culture and History 9, no. 1 (May 12, 2022): 149. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijch.v9i1.19854.
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In this paper, we focus on studying the appellative names of some towns in Nanuŋ and how these appellative names came into existence so as to uncover the important historical information, such as settlement history, folklore and social conditions about these places. Town names (toponyms) have attracted a lot of scholarly attention. However, appellative names, Nanuŋ appellative town names for that matter is yet to catch the eyes of scholars. No study has been sighted in relation to this study and thus triggers the study. Nanuŋ appellative town names are not haphazardly labeled, but sociocultural driven with sociocultural functions and meanings. Therefore, analysis is done with Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory. We established that numerous appellative town names of Nanuŋ reveal the culture of Nanuni speakers over many thousands of years. Many of these place names are complex and their meanings can only be explained by tracing the formative history and not the phonological, orthographic or morphological underpinnings. The researchers also established that, the processes of appellatively naming new places varies: contracted proverbial name, role of the place in the kingdom, expected behaviour of the skin occupant, socioeconomic activities, surrounding feature or place descriptive name, names after an earth-spirit/god and contextual obscure and opaque are the variations in the naming process. It is also evident that, the appellative town names of Nanuŋ are metaphorically constructed. However, these names have connections with the identity of the community members, since they taboo certain animals believed to be the gods of which these places are named after. The researchers employed purposive random sampling in the selection of the towns. However, snowballing technique was also employed to select the participants for primary data through interviews which were recorded with audio recorder and notepad.
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Smith, Adam D. "EARLY CHINESE MANUSCRIPT WRITINGS FOR THE NAME OF THE SAGE EMPEROR SHUN 舜, AND THE LEGACY OF WARRING STATES-PERIOD ORTHOGRAPHIC VARIATION IN EARLY CHINESE RECEIVED TEXTS." Early China 40 (2017): 63–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/eac.2017.12.
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AbstractThe graph used to write the name of the mythical emperor Shun 舜 in received texts is a puzzling one. It is not obvious that any component in the graph, as it appears today, is semantically motivated, nor is there any element well suited to representing the name Shun phonetically. Texts like theShuowen jiezi說文解字 preserve an alternate writing of the name under the rubric “guwen古文,” but this too is hard to analyze in terms of the semantic and phonological motivation of the graph components. Without a clear understanding of why the name Shun is written the way it is, a reliable reconstruction of its Old Chinese pronunciation is difficult, and many of the graphic and phonological associations with “Shun” and related words made by early Chinese script, texts, and commentaries would be opaque.A graph that is clearly writing the name Shun, seen for the first time in two of the Warring States-period manuscripts from Guodian 郭店, partially resolved these difficulties, and in particular the question of the phonological spelling of the name. This in turn allows a series of interesting textual problems to be resolved. This article presents a selection of these, and discusses their implications for the history of the Chinese script and for textual transmission.
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Zhang, Jie, Hong Li, and Yang Liu. "THE INFLUENCE OF ORTHOGRAPHY ON ORAL VOCABULARY ACQUISITION IN LEARNERS OF CHINESE AS A SECOND LANGUAGE." Studies in Second Language Acquisition, June 24, 2021, 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0272263121000139.
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Abstract The present study investigated the effects of exposure to Chinese orthography on learning phonological forms of new words in learners of Chinese as a second language. A total of 30 adult learners of Chinese studied spoken label and picture associations presented either with phonologically accurate characters, characters with partial phonological information, or no orthography. Half the phonologically accurate or partially accurate characters were semantically transparent or opaque. Spoken labels were recalled without orthography presence. Results showed that exposure to phonologically accurate and semantically transparent characters during learning did not enhance the recall of the spoken labels compared to no orthography. But exposure to characters with partial phonological information and semantically opaque characters significantly hindered vocabulary learning. The implications for Chinese as a second language vocabulary acquisition and instruction are discussed.
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Deng, Wenxiyuan, Kit Ying Chan, and Ka Man Au Yeung. "Orthographic effects on L2 production and L2 proficiency in ESL learners with non-alphabetic and orthographically opaque L1." Applied Psycholinguistics, December 6, 2022, 1–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s014271642200039x.
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Abstract This study examined the role of first language (L1) transparency in intra-orthographic effects on second language (L2) pronunciation by studying L2 learners with a non-alphabetic and orthographically opaque L1 and an alphabetic L2. Relations between orthographic effects, phonological awareness, and L2 proficiency were examined. Fifty-four Cantonese-speaking English as a second language (ESL) learners participated in Experiment 1 with orthographic effect tasks (homophone and silent-letter read-aloud) and phonological awareness tasks. Thirty Cantonese-speaking and 30 Mandarin-speaking ESL learners participated in Experiment 2 with orthographic effect tasks and an L2 proficiency task. The L2 pronunciation of Cantonese and Mandarin participants was subjected to intra-orthographic effects. Phonological awareness and L2 proficiency were associated with less orthographic effects on L2 pronunciation in Cantonese participants. Mandarin participants did not subject to more orthographic effects than Cantonese participants when controlling L2 proficiency, implying that shared alphabetic scripts between Pinyin and English did not interfere with L2 production. Overall, transferring the L1 reading strategy that relies on orthography to decode phonology to L2 reading seemed not to be the key mechanism behind intra-orthographic effects. L2 graphemes were likely to be decoded with incorrect L2 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, resulting in intra-orthographic effects.
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Probert, Tracy, and Mark De Vos. "Word recognition strategies amongst isiXhosa/English bilingual learners: The interaction of orthography and language of learning and teaching." Reading & Writing 7, no. 1 (May 27, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/rw.v7i1.84.
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Word recognition is a major component of fluent reading and involves an interaction of language structure, orthography, and metalinguistic skills. This study examined reading strategies in isiXhosa and the transfer of these strategies to an additional language, English. IsiXhosa was chosen because of its agglutinative structure and conjunctive orthography. Data was collected at two schools which differed with regards to their language of learning and teaching (LoLT) in the first three years of schooling: isiXhosa and English respectively. Participants completed a wordand pseudo-word reading aloud task in each of two languages which hypothetically impose different cognitive demands. Skills transfer occurs to a limited extent when the language of first literacy uses a transparent orthography, but is less predictable when the language of first literacy uses an opaque orthography. We show that although there is transfer of word recognition strategies from transparent to deep orthographies, felicitous transfer is limited to sublexical strategies; infelicitous transfer also occurs when lexical strategies are transferred in problematic ways. The results support the contention that reading strategies and cognitive skills are fine tuned to particular languages. This study emphasises that literacies in different languages present readers with different structural puzzles which require language-particular suites of cognitive reading skills. Keywords: Foundation phase education; multilingual education; reading; word recognition; automaticity; isiXhosa reading
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Harvey, Robin E., and Patricia J. Brooks. "Effects of text messaging using digital Pinyin input on literacy skills of elementary school Chinese immersion learners." Language Teaching Research, June 14, 2022, 136216882210999. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13621688221099909.
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Children learning Chinese must cope with an opaque orthography lacking transparent relations between oral pronunciations and written characters: a challenge heightened for L2 learners. Use of digital Pinyin input may facilitate connections between oral and written language by allowing learners to access vocabulary they cannot yet write. We assessed the effects of promoting digital Pinyin writing by engaging students in text messaging in digital chat rooms as part of the 4th grade Chinese language arts curriculum at an American Chinese immersion school. Students in two classes engaged in text messaging over eight weeks while a matched group of students in other classes taught by the same teachers ( N = 28 per condition) completed their regular pencil-and-paper word work, which emphasized morphological and orthographic analysis of meaning- and sound-based radicals and sets of related characters. Post-intervention, children who engaged in text messaging showed lesser gains in Chinese writing as compared to the children who completed word work, though within texting groups children who did well at texting showed greater gains in writing as compared to children with lesser success at texting. Given the urgent need for effective online learning, the findings indicate that care should be taken when introducing digital Pinyin input into the Chinese language arts curriculum as it should supplement, but not replace, multi-component word work exercises that promote awareness of orthographic patterns, meaning, and Pinyin.
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Arfé, Barbara, and Tamara Zancato. "Language-Specific Effects in Response to Spelling Intervention in Italian and in English as an Additional Language." Journal of Learning Disabilities, April 3, 2021, 002221942110017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00222194211001757.
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According to a language-integrated view of spelling development, learning to spell involves the same language-learning skills across alphabetic systems. A prediction based on this view is that the same spelling training should be equally effective for learning to spell in a shallow (Italian, native language) or an opaque (English, additional language) orthography. We tested this prediction by teaching 6- to 9-year-old Italian children to use multiletter spelling units to spell words in Italian and English. The children were trained on the spelling of Italian words containing orthographic difficulties that required switching from phoneme–grapheme spelling correspondences to larger grain size (multiletter) spelling units. In a stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial, 108 Italian children (ages 6–9 years) were assigned to the experimental spelling training or a waiting list condition. Their ability to spell the trained (Italian and English) word lists and to generalize the acquired knowledge to new (untrained) words was assessed. Similar learning effects were found in the two languages for the trained word lists. However, generalization of the acquired spelling knowledge to new words occurred only in English. The influence of language-specific factors on learning to spell could account for these findings.
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Land, Sandra. "Automaticity in reading isiZulu." Reading & Writing 7, no. 1 (June 2, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/rw.v7i1.90.
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Automaticity, or instant recognition of combinations of letters as units of language, is essential for proficient reading in any language. The article explores automaticity amongst competent adult first-language readers of isiZulu, and the factors associated with it or its opposite - active decoding. Whilst the transparent spelling patterns of isiZulu aid learner readers, some of its orthographical features may militate against their gaining automaticity. These features are agglutination; a conjoined writing system; comparatively long, complex words; and a high rate of recurring strings of particular letters. This implies that optimal strategies for teaching reading in orthographically opaque languages such as English should not be assumed to apply to languages with dissimilar orthographies.Keywords: Orthography; Eye movement; Reading; isiZulu
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Gonçalves, Fábio, Alexandra Reis, Filomena Inácio, Inês Salomé Morais, and Luís Faísca. "Reading Comprehension Predictors in European Portuguese Adults." Frontiers in Psychology 12 (December 2, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.789413.
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Research on the predictors of reading comprehension has been largely focused on school-aged children and mainly in opaque orthographies, hindering the generalization of the results to adult populations and more transparent orthographies. In the present study, we aim to test two versions of the Simple View of Reading (SVR): the original model and an extended version, including reading fluency and vocabulary. Additional mediation models were analyzed to verify if other reading comprehension predictors (rapid automatized naming, phonological decoding, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and working memory) have direct effects or if they are mediated through word reading and reading fluency. A sample of 67 typical adult Portuguese readers participated in this study. The SVR model accounted for 27% of the variance in reading comprehension, with oral language comprehension displaying a larger contribution than word reading. In the extended SVR model, reading fluency and vocabulary provided an additional and significant contribution of 7% to the explained variance. Moreover, vocabulary influenced reading comprehension directly and indirectly, via oral language comprehension. In the final mediation model, the total mediation hypothesis was rejected, and only morphological awareness showed a direct effect on reading comprehension. These results provide preliminary evidence that the SVR (with the possible addition of vocabulary) might be a reliable model to explain reading comprehension in adult typical readers in a semitransparent orthography. Furthermore, oral language comprehension and vocabulary were the best predictors in the study, suggesting that remediation programs addressing reading comprehension in adults should promote these abilities.
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Bakhtiar, Mehdi, Maryam Mokhlesin, Chotiga Pattamadilok, Stephen Politzer-Ahles, and Caicai Zhang. "The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency." Frontiers in Psychology 12 (July 27, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.691989.
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A question under debate in psycholinguistics is the nature of the relationship between spoken and written languages. Although it has been extensively shown that orthographic transparency, which varies across writing systems, strongly affects reading performance, its role in speech processing is much less investigated. The present study addressed this issue in Persian, whose writing system provides a possibility to assess the impact of orthographic transparency on spoken word recognition in young children at different stages of reading acquisition. In Persian, the long vowels are systematically present in the script, whereas the spelling correspondence of short vowels is progressively omitted from the script in the course of reading acquisition, thus, turning transparent into opaque spelling. Based on this unique characteristic, we tested 144 monolingual Persian-speaking nonreaders (i.e., preschoolers) and readers (second graders to fifth graders and young adults) in an auditory lexical decision task using transparent and opaque words. Overall, the results showed that, in accordance with the fact that the diacritics of short vowels are progressively omitted during the second year of schooling, the stimuli containing short vowels (opaque words) were recognized more slowly than transparent ones in third graders. Interestingly, there is a hint that the emergence of the transparency effect in the third graders was associated with an overall slower recognition speed in this group compared to their younger peers. These findings indicate that learning opaque spelling-sound correspondence might not only generate interference between the two language codes but also induce a general processing cost in the entire spoken language system.
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Lázaro, Miguel, Lorena García, and Víctor Illera. "Morpho-orthographic segmentation of opaque and transparent derived words: New evidence for Spanish." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, December 9, 2020, 174702182097703. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820977038.
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Semantic transparency has been extensively analysed in research on visual word recognition. Under the masked priming paradigm, it has consistently been shown that opaque and transparent words are facilitated relative to form-related controls, but differences in priming between one condition and another have not been conclusively proven. Hence, research has been unable to theoretically elucidate the possible value of semantic transparency in the processing of derived words. This study describes two lexical decision experiments in Spanish. Experiment 1 revealed differences between the transparent and orthographic conditions, with no differences between the other conditions in the analyses of the error rates. In the second experiment, the participants visited the laboratory on two occasions, separated by a week. The task was administered twice, with participants responding to one of the experimental lists on each day. The results of this second experiment revealed significant differences in the size of the priming effect of the opaque and transparent conditions compared with the form-related condition, but without differences between these two effects. We discuss these findings from the perspective of current models of visual lexical processing.
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Hubers, Ferdy, Catia Cucchiarini, Helmer Strik, and Ton Dijkstra. "EXPRESS: Individual Word Activation and Word Frequency Effects during the Processing of Opaque Idiomatic Expressions." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, September 10, 2021, 174702182110479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17470218211047995.
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Idiom processing studies have paid considerable attention to the relationship between idiomatic expressions as a whole and their constituent words. Although most research focused on the semantic properties of the constituent words, their orthographic form could also play a role in processing. To test this, we assessed both form and meaning activation of individual words during the processing of opaque idioms. In two primed word naming experiments, Dutch native speakers silently read sentences word by word and then named the last word of the sentence. This target word was embedded in either an idiomatic or a literal context, and was either expected/correct in this context (COR), or semantically related (REL) or unrelated (UNREL) to the expected word. The correct target word in the idiomatic context was always part of an opaque idiom. Faster naming latencies for the idiom-final noun than for the unrelated target in the idiomatic context indicated that the idiom was activated as a whole during processing. In addition, semantic facilitation was observed in the literal context (COR<REL<UNREL), but not in the idiomatic context (COR<REL=UNREL). This is evidence that the idiom-final noun was not activated at the meaning level of representation. However, an inhibitory effect of orthographic word frequency of the idiom-final noun indicated that the idiom-final noun was activated at the form level. These results provide evidence in favor of a hybrid model of idiom processing in which the individual words and the idiom as a whole interact on form and meaning levels of representation.
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Mauti, Marika, Chiara Valeria Marinelli, Richard J. O’Connor, Pierluigi Zoccolotti, and Marialuisa Martelli. "Decision times in orthographic processing: a cross-linguistic study." Experimental Brain Research, January 11, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-022-06542-0.
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AbstractReading comparisons across transparent and opaque orthographies indicate critical differences that may reveal the mechanisms involved in orthographic decoding across orthographies. Here, we address the role of criterion and speed of processing in accounting for performance differences across languages. We used binary tasks involving orthographic (words–pseudowords), and non-orthographic materials (female–male faces), and analyzed results based on Ratcliff’s Diffusion model. In the first study, 29 English and 28 Italian university students were given a lexical decision test. English observers made more errors than Italian observers while showing generally similar reaction times. In terms of the diffusion model, the two groups differed in the decision criterion: English observers used a lower criterion. There was no overall cross-linguistic difference in processing speed, but English observers showed lower values for words (and a smaller lexicality effect) than Italians. In the second study, participants were given a face gender judgment test. Female faces were identified slower than the male ones with no language group differences. In terms of the diffusion model, there was no difference between groups in drift rate and boundary separation. Overall, the new main finding concerns a difference in decision criterion limited to the orthographic task: English individuals showed a more lenient criterion in judging the lexicality of the items, a tendency that may explain why, despite lower accuracy, they were not slower. It is concluded that binary tasks (and the Diffusion model) can reveal cross-linguistic differences in orthographic processing which would otherwise be difficult to detect in standard single-word reading tasks.
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Gabel, Lisa A., Alexandria Battison, Dongnhu T. Truong, Esther R. Lindström, Kelsey Voss, Yih-Choung Yu, Sorawit Roongruengratanakul, et al. "Orthographic depth may influence the degree of severity of maze learning performance in children at risk for reading disorder." Developmental Neuroscience, October 12, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000527480.
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Reading disability (RD), which affect between 5-17% of the population worldwide, is the most prevalent form of learning disability, and is associated with underactivation of a universal reading network in children. However, recent research suggests there are differences in learning rates on cognitive predictors of reading performance, as well as differences in activation patterns within the reading neural network, based on orthographic depth (i.e. transparent/shallow vs. deep/opaque orthographies) in children with RD. Recently, we showed that native-English-speaking children with RD exhibit impaired performance on a maze learning task that taps into the same neural networks that are activated during reading. In addition, we demonstrated that genetic risk for RD strengthens the relationship between reading impairment and maze learning performance. However, it is unclear whether the results from these studies can be broadly applied to children from other language orthographies. In this study we examined whether low reading skill was associated with poor maze learning performance in native English-speaking and native German-speaking children, and the influence of genetic risk for RD on cognition and behavior. In addition, we investigated the link between genetic risk and performance on this task in an orthographically diverse sample of children attending an English-speaking international school in Germany. The results from our data suggest that children with low reading skill, or with a genetic risk for reading impairment, exhibit impaired performance on the maze learning task, regardless of orthographic depth. However, these data also suggest that orthographic depth influences the degree of impairment on this task. The maze learning task requires the involvement of various cognitive processes and neural networks that underlie reading, but is not influenced by potential differences in reading experience due to lack of text or oral reporting. As a fully automated tool, it does not require specialized training to administer, and current results suggest it may be a practicable screening tool for early identification of reading impairment across orthographies.
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Chee, Qian Wen, and Melvin J. Yap. "Are there task-specific effects in morphological processing? Examining semantic transparency effects in semantic categorisation and lexical decision." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, February 25, 2022, 174702182210792. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17470218221079269.
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Current theories of morphological processing include form-then-meaning accounts, form-with-meaning accounts, and connectionist theories. Form-then meaning accounts argue that the morphological decomposition of complex words is based purely on orthographic structure, while form-with meaning accounts argue that decomposition is influenced by the semantic properties of the stem. Connectionist theories, however, argue that morphemes are encoded as statistical patterns of occurrences between form and meaning. The weight of evidence from the literature thus far suggests that morphological decomposition is best explained by form-then-meaning accounts. That said, conflicting empirical findings exist, and more importantly, semantic transparency effects in morphological processing have been examined almost exclusively with the lexical decision task, in which participants discriminate between words and nonwords. Consequently, the extent to which observed results reflect the specific demands of the lexical decision task remains unclear. The present study extends previous work by testing whether the processing dynamics of early morphological processing are moderated by task requirements. Using the masked morphological priming paradigm, this hypothesis was tested by examining semantic transparency effects for a common set of words across semantic categorisation and lexical decision. In both tasks, priming was stronger for transparent (e.g., painter-PAINT) than opaque (e.g., corner-CORN) prime–target pairs; these results speak against form-then-meaning accounts. These findings further inform theories of morphological processing and underscore the importance of examining the interplay between task-general and task-specific mechanisms.