Philip H. K. Seymour

Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies.

Several previous studies have suggested that basic decoding skills may develop less effectively in English than in some other European orthographies. The origins of this effect in the early (foundation) phase of reading acquisition are investigated through assessments of letter knowledge, familiar word reading, and simple nonword reading in English and 12 other orthographies. The results confirm that children from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year. There are some exceptions, notably in French, Portuguese, Danish, and, particularly, in English. The effects appear not to be attributable to differences in age of starting or letter knowledge. It is argued that fundamental linguistic differences in syllabic complexity and orthographic depth are responsible. Syllabic complexity selectively affects decoding, whereas orthographic depth affects both word reading and nonword reading. The rate of development in English is more than twice as slow as in the shallow orthographies. It is hypothesized that the deeper orthographies induce the implementation of a dual (logographic + alphabetic) foundation which takes more than twice as long to establish as the single foundation required for the learning of a shallow orthography.

Developmental dyslexia: a cognitive experimental analysis of phonological, morphemic, and visual impairments

Abstract The results of a cognitive experimental analysis of the reading functions of four developmentally dyslexic subjects are presented. Data are considered on an individual basis in an attempt to specify the primary source of disturbance in each case, and the manner in which the normal course of reading development has been distorted. Subject RO showed an effect on the analytic functioning of the visual processor, which affected speed of non-word reading, but appeared not to have prevented the construction of a normal visual word recognition system. In subject LT a phonological impairment was implicated, and this was associated with a pattern of performance similar to that of adult phonological dyslexics. Subjects GS and SE gave evidence of serial letter-by-letter reading (impaired wholistic function of the visual processor), which produced a pattern not unlike that of adult surface dyslexics (effects of spelling regularity, regularisation errors). The manner in which these impairments might disrupt t...

Beginning reading without phonology

Abstract The reading development of the individual members of a class of new entrants to primary school (aged 4 1/2–5 1/2 years) was studied over a period of a year. The teaching they received emphasised the formation of a “sight vocabulary”. Instruction in letter-sound associations was restricted to spelling and writing. The children appeared to “read without phonology”, that is without the application of letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) associations. Words could be read only after they had been taught. Errors involved visual confusions and occasional semantic, visual-then-semantic, derivational, and functor substitution paralexias. Error responses were generally selected from the set of words the child had been taught and this set was represented in episodic memory. In many cases spatial distortions which were destructive of word shape were not effective in abolishing reading. The results are discussed in terms of the formation of a rudimentary word recognition system, termed a “logographic lexicon”.

How important are rhyme and analogy in beginning reading

Current debate over the influence of phonological awareness on early reading development is polarised around small-unit (phoneme) processing and large-unit (onset-rime) processing. These opposing theories were contrasted by assessing the impact of pre-school phonological skills on reading amongst children experiencing their first year of formal instruction by a mixed method. Those beginning readers who could decode nonwords were found to have accomplished this by employing their letter-sound knowledge rather than by making analogies based on familiar rime units. Children displayed this pattern of performance regardless of their pre-school rhyming skills. Further investigations revealed that explicit awareness of onset and rime units was poor, even amongst children whose implicit rhyming skills were excellent. This evidence, together with the childrens knowledge of orthographic units, was consistent with the view that letter-sound correspondences rather than onset or rime units formed the basis of their first attempts to utilise phonology in reading. The findings are discussed with reference to instructional influences on early reading and phonological awareness.

Socio-economic differences in foundation-level literacy.

The foundation literacy skills of children from differing socio-economic backgrounds were investigated in a cross-sectional study. The children were aged between 4 and 8 years and attended Nursery or Primary 1, 2 or 3 classes. Low socioeconomic status (SES) was associated with impairments for chronological age in letter knowledge as well as in both logographic and alphabetic foundation components. There was also an effect on metaphonological++ skill. However, once the SES groups were equated for reading age, high and low SES performance was indistinguishable. The results suggest that delayed acquisition of foundation literacy skills is traceable to a delay in acquiring letter-sound knowledge. Implications for intervention are discussed in the context of the foundation literacy framework.

Lexical priming and sound-to-spelling contingency effects in nonword spelling

Campbell (1983) demonstrated that nonword spelling may be influenced by the spelling patterns of previously heard, rhyming words (“lexical priming”). We report an experiment that compares two nonword spelling tasks: an experimental (“priming”) task, in which nonwords were preceded by rhyming words of different spellings (as in Campbells task), and a free-spelling task in which only nonwords are presented. The frequency of production of critical spelling patterns was significantly greater in the experimental task than in the free-spelling task (a lexical priming effect). However, there were, and equally for both tasks, significant and substantial effects of sound-to-spelling contingency (i.e. the frequency with which spelling patterns represent vowel phonemes in words): subjects produced more high-contingency (i.e. common) spelling patterns of vowels than low-contingency (rare) spellings. Further, within high-contingency spelling patterns, subjects more frequently produced the most common spelling correspondence of vowels than the second most common spelling. The results are interpreted within a proposed model of assembled spelling, in which it is suggested that there exist a set of probabilistic sound-to-spelling mappings that relate vowel phonemes to weighted lists of alternative spelling patterns ordered by sound-to-spelling contingency, but that the selection of a spelling pattern from such lists is open to lexical influence.

Conceptual encoding and locus of the Stroop effect

Subjects reacted to coloured season and month names by naming the season associated with the print colour of the word, or by naming the season opposite to the one associated with the print colour. Reactions were facilitated in both tasks when the word on the display named the season associated with the colour or was a month belonging to that season. Opposite season naming was not facilitated when the word named the response which the subject made. A comparable effect of print colour was found when subjects reacted to season names by naming the colour associated with the name, or with its opposite. These results suggest that Stroop congruity and interference effects occur during conceptual encoding, and not during response production.

Levels of phonological awareness and learning to read.

The paper reports studies of segmentation performance by a Nursery group of children, who had not yet started to learn to read, and by Primary 1 and 2 groups, who were in the early stages of learning by a standard method of whole word acquisition combined with letter-sound learning. Rhyme and alliteration production tasks were applied, together with segmentation tasks requiring division of monosyllabic words or non-words of simple or complex structure into two parts, three parts, or as many parts as possible. Performance was related to the hierarchical model of the syllable which distinguishes a two-dimensional (2D) level (onset/rime), a three-dimensional (3D) level (initial consonants, vowel, terminal consonants) and many-dimensional (nD) level (phonemes). The hypothesis that ‘phonological awareness’ (PA) normally develops down the hierarchy, from larger to smaller units, predicts that segmentation ability should emerge in the sequence 2D → 3D → nD. In practice, the reverse of this order was found. The results are discussed in relation to theories of the relationship between literacy development and the different levels of PA.

A small-to-large unit progression in metaphonological awareness and reading?

The paper reports a series of studies of reading and metaphonological processing by children in their second year in primary school(aged 6 years). An earlier study had established that, in the first year of learning, performance was characterized by a small-unit approach in which graphemes and phonemes were emphasized. In the second year, reading became more sensitive to the frequencies of rime structures in the lexicon. Capacity to generate word analogies for nonwords also showed increasing commitment to rime-based responses, and this trend was strongly linked to reading age. The present results suggest that a small-unit approach to reading is augmented by a large-unit approach as development proceeds. This trend was reflected in performance on a test of explicit phonological awareness. When asked to report the segment of sound shared by two spoken words, Primary 1 children were poor in reporting shared rimes but relatively adept in reporting shared phonemes. During Primary 2 there was an improvement in ability to report shared rimes, and this trend was also related to reading age. These results are discussed in relation to the influence of instruction and the nature of the orthography in determining the course of reading development.

Differing sequences of metaphonological development in French and English

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable --> onset-rime --> phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a childs native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English speakers aged 4;11 (N = 10), 5;3 (N = 21), and 6;5 (N = 23) and French speakers aged 5;6 (N = 35), and 6;8 (N = 34). Experiment 2 assesses performance in the common unit task using English speakers aged 4;7 (N = 22), 5;7 (N = 23), and 6;11 (N = 22), and French speakers aged 4;7 (N = 20), 5;6 (N = 35), and 6;7 (N = 33). The experiments reveal crosslinguistic differences in the processing of syllables prior to school entry with French speakers exhibiting a greater consistency in manipulating syllables. Phoneme awareness emerges in both languages once reading instruction is introduced and rime awareness appears to follow rather than precede this event. Thus, the emergence of phonological awareness did not show a universal pattern but rather was subject to the influence of both native language and literacy.