Beginners remember orthography when they learn to read words: The case of doubled letters

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
DONNA-MARIE WRIGHT ◽  
LINNEA C. EHRI

Sight word learning and memory were studied to clarify how early during development readers process visual letter patterns that are not dictated by phonology, and whether their word learning is influenced by the legality of letter patterns. Forty kindergartners and first graders were taught to read 12 words containing either single consonants (e.g., FAN) or doubled consonants in initial illegal or final legal positions (e.g., RRUG or JETT). Children required fewer trials to learn to read legally spelled words with single or doubled consonants than illegally spelled words containing initial doublets. On a spelling posttest, children recalled single consonants somewhat better than final doublets, and final doublets much better than initial illegal doublets. More advanced beginning readers tended to regularize illegal initial doublets by doubling the final rather than initial consonants when they wrote these words. Poorer learning and memory for initial doublets occurred despite the salience of their position in words. Findings indicate that beginning readers use orthographic patterns to read and remember words earlier than predicted by phase theory, but their memory is constrained by their knowledge of written word structure.

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Anne Calhoon ◽  
Lauren Leslie

Beginning readers' rime reading accuracy was assessed over three years to examine the influence of word frequency and rime-neighborhood size (the number of single syllable words with the same rime) on words presented in lists and stories. Twenty-seven 1st- and 2nd- grade students read 54 words and 27 nonwords containing rimes from different size neighborhoods. In Year 1, children showed effects of neighborhood size in high frequency words read in stories and in low frequency words read in lists and stories. In Year 2, rimes from large neighborhoods were read more accurately than rimes from medium and small neighborhoods in high- and low-frequency words. In Year 3, no effects of rime-neighborhood size were found for high-frequency words, but effects on low-frequency words continued. These results support Leslie and Calhoon's (1995) developmental model of the effects of rime-neighborhood size and word frequency as a function of higher levels of word learning.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Jolanta Korycka-Skorupa

Abstract The author discuss effectiveness of cartographic presentations. The article includes opinions of cartographers regarding effectiveness, readability and efficiency of a map. It reminds the principles of map graphic design in order to verify them using examples of small-scale thematic maps. The following questions have been asked: Is the map effective? Why is the map effective? How do cartographic presentation methods affect effectiveness of the cartographic message? What else can influence effectiveness of a map? Each graphic presentation should be effective, as its purpose is to complete written word, draw the recipients’ attention, make text more readable, expose the most important information. Such a significant role of graphics results in the fact that graphic presentations (maps, diagrams) require proper preparation. Users need to have a chance to understand the graphics language in order to draw correct conclusions about the presented phenomenon. Graphics should demonstrate the most important elements, some tendencies, and directions of changes. It should generalize and present a given subject from a slightly different perspective. There are numerous examples of well-edited and poorly edited small-scale thematic maps. They include maps, which are impossible to interpret correctly. They are burdened with methodological defects and they cannot fulfill their task. Cartography practice indicates that the principles related to graphic design of cartographic presentation are frequently omitted during the process of developing small-scale thematic maps used – among others – in the press and on the Internet. The purpose of such presentations is to quickly interpret them. On such maps editors’ problems with the selection of an appropriate symbol and graphic variable (fig. 1A, 9B) are visible. Sometimes they use symbols which are not sufficiently distinguishable nor demonstrative (fig. 11), it does not increase their readability. Sometime authors try too hard to reflect presented phenomenon and therefore the map becomes more difficult to interpret (fig. 4A,B). The lack of graphic sense resulting in the lack of graphic balance and aesthetics constitutes a weak point of numerous cartographic presentations (fig. 13). Effectiveness of cartographic presentations consists of knowledge and skills of the map editor, as well as the recipients’ perception capabilities and their readiness to read and interpret maps. The qualifications of the map editor should include methodological qualifications supported by the knowledge of the principles for cartographic symbol design, as well as relevant technical qualifications, which allow to properly use the tools to edit a map. Maps facilitate the understanding of texts they accompany and they present relationships between phenomenon better than texts, appealing to the senses.


1977 ◽  
Vol 45 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1076-1078 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Bassett ◽  
Edward B. Blanchard ◽  
William F. Gayton ◽  
Kenneth L. Ozmon

To examine the relationship between performance on the Frostig Developmental Test of Visual Perception and birth order, 578 first-graders were tested. Later-born children performed significantly better than did firstborns on specific subtests of the Frostig (Visual-motor Coordination and Figure-ground Perception). There was a significant interaction on Perceptual Constancy which indicated that later-born males performed significantly better than did firstborn males. A secondary finding was a r of .547, a stronger relationship between intelligence level and global perceptual performance than previously reported.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Aleck Shih-wei Chen

This article reports a study examining whether foreign language (FL) word learning can be improved with reduction in cognitive load. Cognitive load theory has received substantial supports in various fields of learning but never in FL word learning. Due to the defined poverty in exposure to the FL, hence deprived cognitive pre-requisites for natural FL development, cognitive load could be critical to FL learning success. Thus while word learning may be a simple attempt of associating word forms with their meanings for L1 children, for FL learners, the cognitive load is multiplied by the additional task of taming the often intractable phonological forms (both perceptive and productive) at the same time they are making the association. In light of cognitive burden reduction, FL learners could thus benefit from learning phonological forms first as their L1 counterparts do. The present study examined whether beginning learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) learn English novel names better if first familiarized with the phonological rimes of target names whose referents are taught only later. Chinese-speaking first graders were assigned to one of three teaching conditions: rime familiarization, which familiarized children with rimes through rhyming activities without any meanings involved; spoken vocabulary, which taught words in rhyming groups together with their referents; and semantic control, which focused on word use. As the results showed, the rime familiarization group outperformed the other two by an improvement score several times greater, suggesting the critical role of cognitive load in FL word learning success.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Eneko Antón ◽  
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia

The effects of cognate synonymy in L2 word learning are explored. Participants learned the names of well-known concrete concepts in a new fictional language following a picture-word association paradigm. Half of the concepts (set A) had two possible translations in the new language (i.e., both words were synonyms): one was a cognate in participants’ L1 and the other one was not. The other half of the concepts (set B) had only one possible translation in the new language, a non-cognate word. After learning the new words, participants’ memory was tested in a picture-word matching task and a translation recognition task. In line with previous findings, our results clearly indicate that cognates are much easier to learn, as we found that the cognate translation was remembered much better than both its non-cognate synonym and the non-cognate from set B. Our results also seem to suggest that non-cognates without cognate synonyms (set B) are better learned than non-cognates with cognate synonyms (set A). This suggests that, at early stages of L2 acquisition, learning a cognate would produce a poorer acquisition of its non-cognate synonym, as compared to a solely learned non-cognate. These results are discussed in the light of different theories and models of bilingual mental lexicon.


2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (7) ◽  
pp. 1518-1525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eveleen Sng ◽  
Emily Frith ◽  
Paul D. Loprinzi

Purpose: To evaluate the temporal effects of acute exercise on episodic memory. Design: A quasi-experimental study. Sample: Eighty-eight college students (N = 22 per group). Measures: Four experimental groups were evaluated, including a control group, exercising prior to memory encoding, exercising during encoding, and exercising during memory consolidation. The exercise stimulus consisted of a 15-minute moderate-intensity walk on a treadmill. Participants completed the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) to assess learning and memory. Prospective memory was assessed via a Red Pen Task. Long-term memory (recognition and attribution) of the RAVLT was assessed 20 minutes and 24 hours after exercise. Analysis: Repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) assessed the performance of RAVLT scores of trials 1 to 5 across groups. One-way ANOVA assessed the performance of individual trials across groups, whereas χ2 assessed the performance of the Red Pen Task across groups. Results: Regarding learning, the interaction of groups × trial was marginally statistically significant ( F12,332 = 1.773, P = .05), indicating that the group which exercised before encoding did better than the group that exercised during encoding and consolidation. For both 24-hour recognition and attribution performance, the group that exercised before memory encoding performed significantly better than the group that exercised during consolidation ( P = .05 recognition, P = .006 attribution). Discussion: Engaging in a 15-minute bout of moderate-intensity walking before a learning task was effective in influencing long-term episodic memory.


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