Phonological activation of word meanings in grade 5 readers.

ABSTRACTDo older English as a second language (ESL) children have the same knowledge of word meanings as English as a first language (EL1) children? How important is vocabulary's role in predicting word recognition in these groups? This study sought to answer these questions by examining the profiles of ESL and EL1 upper elementary aged children, for a 2-year period starting in Grade 5. Multivariate analyses revealed that (a) EL1 and ESL groups did not differ on underlying processing components (e.g., phonological awareness [PA], rapid automatized naming [RAN], and working memory [WM]) or on word recognition, but ESL children continued to lag behind their EL1 peers on knowledge of word meanings that correspond approximately to their grade level; and (b) vocabulary knowledge (root words and receptive vocabulary), explained a small proportion of additional variance on word recognition concurrently and longitudinally after accounting for the contributions of PA, RAN, and WM.

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Orthographic and phonological activation in Hong Kong deaf readers: An eye-tracking study

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology ◽

10.1177/1747021820940223 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 73 (12) ◽

pp. 2217-2235

Author(s):

Philip Thierfelder ◽

Gillian Wigglesworth ◽

Gladys Tang

Keyword(s):

Reading Fluency ◽

Reading Time ◽

Contextual Information ◽

Error Recovery ◽

Word Meanings ◽

Recovery Processes ◽

Deaf Readers ◽

Orthographic Representations ◽

Total Reading Time ◽

Phonological Activation

We used an error disruption paradigm to investigate how deaf readers from Hong Kong, who had varying levels of reading fluency, use orthographic, phonological, and mouth-shape-based (i.e., “visemic”) codes during Chinese sentence reading while also examining the role of contextual information in facilitating lexical retrieval and integration. Participants had their eye movements recorded as they silently read Chinese sentences containing orthographic, homophonic, homovisemic, or unrelated errors. Sentences varied in terms of how much contextual information was available leading up to the target word. Fixation time analyses revealed that in early fixation measures, deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations. However, in contexts where targets were highly predictable, fixation times on homophonic errors decreased relative to those on unrelated errors, suggesting that higher levels of contextual predictability facilitated early phonological activation. In the measure of total reading time, results indicated that deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations, but they also appeared to activate word meanings through visemic representations in late error recovery processes. Examining the influence of reading fluency level on error recovery processes, we found that, in comparison to deaf readers with lower reading fluency levels, those with higher reading fluency levels could more quickly resolve homophonic and orthographic errors in the measures of gaze duration and total reading time, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings as they relate to the lexical quality hypothesis and the dual-route cascaded model of reading by deaf adults.

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Eye Movements of Children and Adults While Reading Television Subtitles

European Psychologist ◽

10.1027/1016-9040.12.3.196 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 196-205 ◽

Cited By ~ 57

Author(s):

Géry d'Ydewalle ◽

Wim De Bruycker

Keyword(s):

Eye Movements ◽

Foreign Language ◽

Age Differences ◽

Information Sources ◽

Native Language ◽

Verbal Information ◽

Single Text ◽

Grade 5 ◽

Reading Patterns ◽

Attentional System

Abstract. Eye movements of children (Grade 5-6) and adults were monitored while they were watching a foreign language movie with either standard (foreign language soundtrack and native language subtitling) or reversed (foreign language subtitles and native language soundtrack) subtitling. With standard subtitling, reading behavior in the subtitle was observed, but there was a difference between one- and two-line subtitles. As two lines of text contain verbal information that cannot easily be inferred from the pictures on the screen, more regular reading occurred; a single text line is often redundant to the information in the picture, and accordingly less reading of one-line text was apparent. Reversed subtitling showed even more irregular reading patterns (e.g., more subtitles skipped, fewer fixations, longer latencies). No substantial age differences emerged, except that children took longer to shift attention to the subtitle at its onset, and showed longer fixations and shorter saccades in the text. On the whole, the results demonstrated the flexibility of the attentional system and its tuning to the several information sources available (image, soundtrack, and subtitles).

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