R. Schreuder

Poor Readers' Decoding Skills: Effects of Training with Limited Exposure Duration.

Lechec dans le decodage rapide des mots peut etre au coeur des difficultes de lecture. Pour ameliorer la vitesse de decodage des mauvais lecteurs, on recommande souvent un entrainement comportant une pression temporelle. Cette etude experimentale sinteresse au presuppose quun tel entrainement est superieur a un entrainement de type conventionnel. Les AA. decrivent les experiences menee aupres de jeunes mauvais lecteurs et presente les consequences pour les modeles de decodage et les pratiques de reeducation

Morpheme frequency effects in Dutch complex word reading: A developmental perspective

This study examined to what extent advanced and beginning readers, including dyslexic readers of Dutch, make use of morphological access units in the reading of polymorphemic words. Therefore, experiments were carried out in which the role of singular root form frequency in reading plural word forms was investigated in a lexical decision task with both adults and children. Twenty-three adult readers, 37 8-year-old children from Grade 3, 43 11-year-old children from Grade 6, and 33 11-year-old dyslexic readers were presented with a lexical decision task in which we contrasted plural word forms with a high versus low frequency of the singular root form. For the adults, it was found that the accuracy and speed of lexical decision is determined by the surface frequency of the plural word form. The frequency of the constituent root form played a role as well, but in the low-frequency plural words only. Furthermore, a strong developmental effect regarding the accuracy and speed of reading plural word forms was found. An effect of plural word form frequency on word identification was evidenced in all groups. The singular root form frequency also had an impact of the reading of the plural word forms. In the normal reading and dyslexic children, plurals with a high-frequency singular root form were read more accurately and faster than plurals with a low singular root frequency. It can be concluded that constituent morphemes have an impact on the reading of polymorphemic words. The results can be explained in the light of a word experience model leaving room for morphological constituency to play a role in the lexical access of complex words as a function of reading skill and experience and word and morpheme frequency.

Training in phonemic segmentation: The effects of visual support

Two experimental studies examined the effects of different types of phonemic segmentation training on phonemic segmentation, reading and spelling. Children with learning disabilities, who were weak in phonemic segmentation, were trained with the use of diagrams and alphabet letters, with alphabet letters only, or with no visual support at all (the control condition). For this purpose three computer-assisted training programs were developed. In the first experiment, 48 children were assigned to one of the three programs. The training period lasted five weeks. Although in each training program the children improved their phonemic segmentation skill, there were no significant differences among the three training programs. This result may have been influenced by the different types of feedback that were provided in the three training programs. In a second experiment, therefore, these differences in feedback were eliminated and 49 different children were trained with the same three programs. The results of this experiment, however, were the same as those of the first experiment. The finding that visual support had no beneficial effects could therefore not be attributed to differences in explicit feedback. It was concluded that with these children, in contrast to preschoolers, phonemic segmentation training using visual support does not have any advantage over auditory training alone. The results of this study indicate that preschoolers and children with reading and spelling problems cannot be treated in the same way. It underlines the importance of further examination of the problems that poor readers and poor spellers encounter in grasping the structure of spoken language.

Using visual support in preschool phonemic segmentation training

In an earlier training study we found that the use of visual support in phonemic segmentation training provided no additional value for poor readers and spellers from schools for children with learning disabilities, having problems segmenting speech (Kerstholt, van Bon & Schreuder 1994). Previous research (e.g., Hohn & Ehri 1983) suggests, however, that visual support – such as alphabet letters – does facilitate the segmentation teaching of preschoolers. Hence, it was expected that visual support would be beneficial in phonemic segmentation training only prior to formal reading and spelling instruction. The purpose of the present study was to test this expectation. One group of preschoolers was trained in phonemic segmentation with diagrams and alphabet letters as visual support, another group was trained without visual help. Results show the preschoolers to improve their phonemic segmentation, reading and spelling skill significantly. It made no difference, however, whether the children were trained in phonemic segmentation with or without the help of visual support. The findings of the present study and those of our earlier study indicate visual support to be useful in phonemic segmentation training only under certain conditions. It is suggested that differences in orthographic properties of the languages involved may explain the difference between the Anglo-Saxon studies that did show an additional effect of letters and a number of Dutch studies that did not.

Reading and Spelling in Dutch First and Second Graders: Do They Use an Orthographic Strategy?

The present experiment investigates whether Dutch first and second graders use an orthographic strategy to read and spell words, and whether the strategy is used in reading before it is used in spelling (Frith, 1985). Thirty-seven first graders (mean age 7–0 years) and 34 second graders (mean age 8–0 years) participated in the experiment. They were required to read aloud words, pseudohomophones, and pseudowords that were presented one by one on a computer screen, and to write words that were presented to them orally. The naming time data provide evidence that Dutch beginning readers use lexical information — both stored phonological representations and stored orthographic representations — in reading words aloud. The spelling data provide evidence that Dutch children first use a nonlexical phonological strategy. Already in an early stage of the development of spelling skill knowledge of word-specific orthographic patterns is used. No evidence was found that an orthographic strategy is used in reading before it is used in spelling.

Clusters of word properties as predictors of elementary school children's performance on two word tasks

Often, the classification of words does not go beyond “difficult” (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or “easy” (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word properties into seven clusters of words. Each cluster represents a group of words that share a particular configuration of word properties. This model was empirically validated with three data sets from Grades 2 to 4 children who made either a lexical decision task or a use decision task with a selection of the words. Significant differences were found between the clusters of words within the three data sets. Implications for further study and for practice are discussed.

Adjective-Noun Combinations and the Generative Lexicon

The present paper reports two experimental studies on cognitive processing of adjective-noun combinations in which lexical sematic representations and processes are modeled according to the Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky J. The generative lexicon. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995). The focus of these studies is on investigating the effects of the factors adjectival formal type, and compatibility of concepts in combinations on computational complexity and on the content of semantic interpretation of adjective-noun combinations. Three types of adjective-noun combinations were distinguished namely, intersective (e.g., yellow car), subsective compatible (e.g., interesting car), and subsective incompatible (e.g., fast car). In Experiment 1, the hypothesis is tested that semantic interpretation of the three types of combinations varies in terms of computational complexity with intersective combinations being the simplest and the two subsective types being progressively more complex. The analysis of the results obtained in Experiment 1 showed a significant effect of the factor adjectival formal type in predicted direction. Intersective combinations were processed significantly faster (M_(I) = 794 ms) than the two subsective types (M_(SC) = 851 ms, and M_(SI) = 855 ms, respectively). In Experiment 2, written paraphrases for the three types of combinations were compared. The analysis of the results showed that the proportion of responses congruent with the combination type was highest for the intersective and the subsective incompatible combinations (approximately 75%), and lowest for the subsective compatible ones (39%). The low congruence in this category of combinations is possibly due to a high level of adjectival semantic underspecification. Generally, the findings obtained in the two experiments support the proposed model of semantic interpretation of adjective-noun combinations in which generative, type-driven meaning computation processes are emphasized.

The effects of a flash card training program on normal and poor readers' phonological decoding skills

Numerous studies that investigated the reading problems of poor readers have centered on whether or not poor readers employ the same strategies in word reading as do normally developing readers. These studies showed that both normal and poor readers are able to employ a grapheme-phoneme conversion strategy, but that poor readers are less skillful in using this strategy (e.g., Beech & Awaida, 1992; Holligan & Johnston, 1988). Poor readers are slower and less efficient in grapheme-phoneme decoding than normal readers with a comparable reading level. As a consequence, poor readers and reading-level-matched normal controls differ most in reading pseudowords (Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992). Pseudowords (orthoxadgraphically regular and phonologically legal letter strings that do not form existing words), in contrast to words, do not have a reprexadsentation in the mental lexicon, and therefore, place heavy demands on phonological decoding. Thus, a deficit in phonological decoding manifests itself most clearly in pseudoword reading.