Judith A. Bowey

Nonword Repetition and Young Children's Receptive Vocabulary: A Longitudinal Study.

A longitudinal study investigated the claim that phonological memory contributes to vocabulary acquisition in young children. In the first phase, children were given tests of receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, nonword repetition, phonological sensitivity (or awareness), and performance IQ. In the second phase, children were given the nonword repetition and receptive vocabulary tests. In Session 1, both nonword repetition and phonological sensitivity accounted for variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar after performance IQ effects were controlled. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled, nonword repetition did not account for significant additional variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar, When performance IQ and autoregression effects were controlled, all Session I verbal ability measures predicted Session 2 vocabulary, but only Session 1 vocabulary predicted Session 2 nonword repetition. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled. Session 1 nonword repetition (leniently scored) predicted Session 2 vocabulary. Overall, these findings show qualified support for the claim that the capacity component of nonword repetition contributes directly to vocabulary in young children. They suggest that the association between nonword repetition and vocabulary in young children may, to a substantial extent, reflect a latent phonological processing ability that is also manifest in phonological sensitivity.

Syntactic Awareness in Relation to Reading Skill and Ongoing Reading Comprehension Monitoring.

Abstract This research was designed to test the hypotheses that less skilled readers are delayed relative to skilled readers in their awareness of grammatical well formedness and that this delay is associated with relative failure to monitor ongoing reading comprehension. Fourth- and fifth-grade children varying in decoding ability were observed to differ in syntactic awareness, as reflected in their ability to correct grammatically deviant sentences within an oral language task, even with general verbal ability effects covaried. Performance on the syntactic awareness task (“syntactic control”) was correlated with measures of ongoing reading comprehension and comprehension monitoring and with performance on standardized tests of reading comprehension. These correlations remained significant when Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test verbal ability and, where appropriate, subjective text decoding effects were statistically controlled.

Metalinguistic ability and early reading achievement

This study explored the conceptual status of metalinguistic ability by determining whether or not metalinguistic ability can account for variation in early reading achievement independently of more general language abilities. First-grade children were given a test battery assessing phonemic awareness, syntactic awareness, receptive vocabulary, syntactic proficiency, word decoding ability, and reading comprehension ability. Strong zero-order correlations were observed among all experimental measures. However, multiple regression analyses revealed that metalinguistic ability did not contribute to the prediction of early reading achievement when general language ability effects were statistically controlled.

Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Acquisition

The ability to read is a traditional criterion of academic achievement and is basic to success in almost every aspect of the school curriculum. It is a prerequisite skill for nearly all jobs and the primary key to lifelong learning. Despite its importance, however, it is well documented that not all children attending school attain full literacy in their native language. With regard to monolingual English-speaking children it is estimated that somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of school children having no apparent visual, hearing, or mental deficits encounter unusual difficulty of one kind or another in learning to read [Downing and Leong, 1982]. A significant number of children never learn to read efficiently or effectively. For those of us who can read, it is hard to understand why anyone should have trouble acquiring the skill, since once acquired reading seems so easy and natural. But even the average child does not learn to read easily. Citing the results of standardized reading achievement tests as evidence, Gough and Hillinger [1979] argue that “children almost never learn to read without instruction and even when given explicit, devoted, daily instruction, the average child learns to read very slowly, and with great difficulty” [p.4].

Orthographic onsets and rimes as functional units of reading

Three experiments are described in which a partial identity priming procedure was used to investigate the hypothesis that orthographic onsets and rimes serve as units of visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, partial identity priming using word-final trigrams was observed only when the trigram constituted the orthographic rime unit. Nonrime trigrams were ineffective primes. In Experiment 2, partial identity priming using word-final bigrams in which both experimental and control primes were similar in bigram frequency was observed only when the bigram corresponded to the orthographic rime unit. Nonrime primes were again ineffective primes. In Experiment 3, partial identity priming using word-initial bigrams was observed only when the bigram corresponded to the orthographic onset unit. Non-onsetbigramswere ineffective-primes. These differential priming outcomes cannot be explained by graphemic priming, prime frequency, or practice effects. They are consistent with the hypothesis that syllable onset and rime units serve as functional units of reading.

Syntactic awareness and verbal performance from preschool to fifth grade

Children from preschool to fifth grade were given two independent series of language tasks. The first tested aural sentence memory and was designed to assess childrens ability to exploit syntactic structure and semantic cohesion to facilitate sentence recall. The second tested childrens syntactic awareness, as reflected in their ability to correct grammatically deviant sentences. Results showed increases with grade level both in childrens syntactic awareness and in their use of linguistic structure in sentence recall. Further, syntactic awareness increased with age, independently of vocabulary age. Syntactic awareness was significantly related both to reading achievement and to the use of syntactic structure and semantic structure to facilitate sentence recall, even with the effects of vocabulary age and grade statistically controlled. Although strongly correlated with verbal ability, syntactic awareness appears to constitute a higher-order language skill that is associated with other aspects of verbal performance.

Word Awareness in Children

To literate adults, the word appears as an obvious unit of language. However, to a large extent, this obviousness is more apparent than real, being the result of years of seeing words in print separated by spaces. This suggestion is well illustrated by the difficulties experienced even by linguists in attempting to define the term word [e.g., Lyons, 1968; Kramsky, 1969].

Orthographic Rime Priming

Three experiments are described, each using a partial priming technique in which a target word was briefly preceded by a masked trigram. The relative strength of priming effects was assessed by comparing the difference in target word naming times between unprimed and primed trials in different priming conditions. Experiment 1 replicated previous work in demonstrating stronger priming when the target word was primed by the orthographic rime than when the prime constituted otherwise comparable word-final trigrams that do not constitute orthographic rimes. Experiment 2 compared orthographic, phonological rime, and control primes. Only orthographic rime primes reliably increased target word naming speed, although the priming effect was less selective with longer prime durations. In Experiment 3 priming was observed for both orthographic rime and phonological rime primes shown for 150 msec. However, stronger priming was observed with orthographic rime primes. These experiments demonstrate that orthographic rime priming effects do not simply reflect the activation of an intact subunit of the target word articulation program.

Need for systematic synthetic phonics teaching within the early reading curriculum

Both the New Zealand Ministry of Educations Literacy Experts Group and the Australian National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy have recently acknowledged the centrality of systematic instruction in synthetic phonics to early reading instruction, but this conclusion remains contentious in some circles. This paper briefly summarises empirical research in basic psychology and evidence-based evaluation studies supporting the inclusion of systematic synthetic phonics instruction within the early reading curriculum, allowing practising psychologists to develop an informed opinion on this issue.

On Rhyme, language, and children's reading

This article provides a commentary on Bryant MacLean, and Bradley (1990). It is argued that their results do not differ greatly from those reported by Bowey and Patel (1988), with the discrepancies in the outcomes of multiple regression analyses reflecting the relative size of simple correlations, which are probably attributable to differences in the design of the two studies. These differences can only be settled by future replication work. Methodological suggestions are made for maximizing the generalizability of such work.