The development of linguistic stimuli for the Swedish Situated Phoneme test

The speech perception ability of people with hearing loss can be efficiently measured using phonemic-level scoring. We aimed to develop linguistic stimuli suitable for a closed-set phonemic discrimination test in the Swedish language called the Situated Phoneme (SiP) test. The SiP test stimuli that we developed consisted of real monosyllabic words with minimal phonemic contrast, realised by phonetically similar phones. The lexical and sublexical factors of word frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, phonotactic probability, and orthographic transparency were similar between all contrasting words. Each test word was recorded five times by two different speakers, including one male and one female. The accuracy of the test-word recordings was evaluated by 28 normal-hearing subjects in a listening experiment with a silent background using a closed-set design. With a few exceptions, all test words could be correctly discriminated. We discuss the results in terms of content- and construct-validity implications for the Swedish SiP test.

Beyond words: An analysis of skills underlying reading and vocabulary acquisition in three foreign languages

To capture the complexity of foreign language literacy acquisition, we investigated cognitive skills underlying word reading, sentence reading, word vocabulary and sentence vocabulary in three different foreign languages. Students fluent in Dutch simultaneously acquired three foreign languages that differed in orthographic transparency and writing system (Spanish, French, Chinese). Cognitive skills at the start of literacy acquisition (Grade 7) were longitudinally related to literacy attainment in each of the foreign languages after two years of instruction (end of Grade 8). Structural equation regression models indicated that three areas (word and sentence vocabulary, and sentence reading) related most strongly to verbal and nonverbal intelligence, indicating the involvement of academic skills. For word reading the influence of cognitive skills appeared language specific. Across languages, native reading skills seemed to be employed to varying degrees of efficiency to decipher foreign words, more so for foreign languages with a smaller orthographic distance from the native language.

The Effect of Orthographic Transparency on Auditory Word Recognition Across the Development of Reading Proficiency

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.

WHAT DO WE LEARN FROM MISTAKES: PROCESSING DIFFICULTIES WITH FREQUENTLY MISSPELLED WORDS

Even if we know how to spell, we often see words misspelled by other people — especially nowadays when we constantly read unedited texts on social media and in personal messages. In this paper, we present two experiments showing that the incidence of orthographic errors reduces the quality of lexical representations in the mental lexicon—even if one knows how to spell a word, repeated exposure to incorrect spellings blurs its orthographical representation and weakens the connection between form and meaning. As a result, it is more difficult to judge whether the word is spelled correctly, and — more surprisingly — it takes more time to read the word even when there are no errors. We show that when all other factors are balanced the effect of misspellings is more pronounced for the words with lower frequency. We compare our results with the only previous study addressing the problem of misspellings’ influence on the processing of correctly spelled words — it was conducted on the English data. It may be interesting to explore this issue in a cross-linguistic perspective. In this study, we turn to Russian, which differs from English by a more transparent orthography. Much larger corpora of unedited texts are available for English than for Russian, but, using a different way to estimate the incidence of misspellings, we obtained similar results and could also make some novel generalizations. In Experiment 1 we selected 44 words that are frequently misspelled and presented in two conditions (with or without spelling errors) and were distributed across two experimental lists. For every word, participants were asked to determine whether it is spelled correctly or not. The frequency of the word and the relative frequency of its misspelled occurrences significantly influenced the number of incorrect responses: not only it takes longer to read frequently misspelled words, it is also more difficult to decide whether they are spelled correctly. In Experiment 2 we selected 30 words from the materials of Experiment 1 and for every selected word, we found a pair that is matched for length and frequency, but is rarely misspelled due to its orthographic transparency. We used a lexical decision task, presenting these 60 words in the correct spelling, as well as 60 nonwords. We used LMMs for statistics. Firstly, the word type factor was significant: it takes more time to recognize a frequently misspelled word, which replicates the results obtained for English. Secondly, the interaction between the word type factor and the frequency factor was significant: the effect of misspellings was more pronounced for the words of lower frequency. We can conclude that high frequency words have more robust representations that resist blurring more efficiently than low frequency ones. Finally, we conducted a separate analysis showing that the number of incorrect responses in Experiment 1 correlates with RTs in Experiment 2. Thus, whether we consciously try to find an error or simply read words orthographic representations blurred due to exposure to frequent misspellings make the task more difficult.

Universal brain signature of emerging reading in two contrasting languages

Despite dissimilarities among scripts, a universal hallmark of literacy in adults is the convergent brain activity for print and speech. Little is known, however, how early it emerges. Here we compare speech and orthographic processing systems in two contrasting languages, Polish and English, in 100 7-year-old children performing identical fMRI tasks. Results show limited language variation, with speech-print convergence evident mostly in left fronto-temporal perisylvian regions. Correlational and intersect analyses revealed subtle differences in the strength of this coupling in several regions of interest. Specifically, speech-print convergence was higher for transparent Polish than opaque English in right temporal area, associated with phonological processing. Conversely, speech-print convergence was higher for English than Polish in left fusiform, associated with visual reading. We conclude that speech-print convergence is a universal marker of reading even at the beginning of reading acquisition while minor variations can be explained by the differences in the orthographic transparency.

L1 and L2 reading skills in Dutch adolescents with a familial risk of dyslexia

Background The present study investigated differences in reading and spelling outcomes in Dutch and English as a second language (ESL) in adolescents with a high familial risk of dyslexia, of whom some have developed dyslexia (HRDys) while others have not (HRnonDys), in comparison to a low familial risk control group without dyslexia (LRnonDys). This allowed us to investigate the persistence of dyslexia in the first language (L1) and the effect of dyslexia on the second language (L2), which has, in this case, a lower orthographic transparency. Furthermore, the inclusion of the HRnonDys group allowed us to investigate the continuity of the familial risk of dyslexia, as previous studies observed that the HRnonDys group often scores in between the HRDys and LRnonDys group, and whether these readers without reading deficits in Dutch, have more reading difficulties in ESL. Methods The data of three groups of adolescents were analyzed; 27 LRnonDys, 25 HRdys 25 HRnonDys. The mean age was 14;1 years; months, and 37 were male. All were native speakers of Dutch, attended regular secondary education (grade 7–10), and were non-native speakers of English. Using MANOVA the groups were compared on Dutch and English word reading fluency (WRF), spelling and vocabulary, Dutch pseudoword and loanword reading fluency, phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal short term and working memory. A repeated measures ANOVA was used to compare English and Dutch WRF, spelling and vocabulary directly within the three groups. Results The analyses revealed that the HRDys group had a deficit in both reading and spelling in Dutch and ESL. They also performed poorer than the LRnonDys group on all other measures. Effect sizes were especially large for pseudoword reading and the reaction times during the PA task. The HRnonDys group scored generally poorer than the LRnonDys group but this difference was only significant for Dutch pseudoword reading, PA reaction times and verbal short term memory. In general the HRDys and HRnonDys group scored similar in Dutch and English, except for English WRF where the HRDys group scored slightly better than expected based on their Dutch WRF. Discussion There was a high persistence of dyslexia. Adolescents with dyslexia had large impairments in reading and spelling, and reading related measures, both in Dutch and ESL. Despite high inter-individual differences, an overall three-step pattern was observed. Adolescents in the HRnonDys group scored in between the HRDys and LRnonDys group, supporting the polygenetic origin of dyslexia and the continuity of the familial risk of dyslexia. The lower orthographic transparency did not have a negative effect on L2 reading, spelling and vocabulary, both in the HRnonDys and HRDys group. The latter group performed slightly better than expected in L2, which may be a result of the massive exposure to English and high motivation to use English by adolescents.