Rebecca Treiman

The English Lexicon Project.

The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.

The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography.

The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant-vowel-consonant phonological structure were examined. orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency of pronunciation of the orthographic rime accounted for variance in latencies and errors beyond that contributed by the consistency of pronunciation of the individual graphemes and by other factors. In 3 experiments, as well, children and adults made more errors on words with less consistently pronounced orthographic rimes than on words with more consistently pronounced orthographic rimes. Relations between spellings and sounds in the simple monomorphemic words of English are more predictable when the level of onsets and rimes is taken into account than when only graphemes and phonemes are considered.

Onsets and rimes as units of spoken syllables: evidence from children.

The effects of syllable structure on the development of phonemic analysis and reading skills were examined in four experiments. The experiments were motivated by theories that syllables consist of an onset (initial consonant or cluster) and a rime (vowel and any following consonants). Experiment 1 provided behavioral support for the syllable structure model by showing that 8-year-olds more easily learned word games that treated onsets and rimes as units than games that did not. Further support for the cohesiveness of the onset came from Experiments 2 and 3, which found that 4- and 5-year-olds less easily recognized a spoken or printed consonant target when it was the first phoneme of a cluster than when it was a singleton. Experiment 4 extended these results to printed words by showing that consonant-consonant-vowel nonsense syllables were more difficult for beginning readers to decode than consonant-vowel-consonant syllables.

Levels of Phonological Awareness.

ABSTRACT While previous studies have investigated childrens awareness of two units within words--syllables and phonemes, there is experimental evidence that children are also aware of intrasyllabic units (units intermediate in size between the syllable and the phoneme), and that these units may be useful for teaching phonological awareness and reading. Two experiments investigated childrens awareness of phonemes and of two intrasyllabic units, onset (the initial consonant or consonant cluster) and rime (the vowel and any following consonants) in spoken words. Fifty-six kindergarten students participated in the first experiment, and results indicated that while they were aware of both syllables and intrasyllabic units in a word comparison task, they were not aware of phonemes in the same task. Results of the second experiment, in which 20 first grade students compared words differing only in onset complexity, yielded similar results, which again indicates that children find it easier to divide syllables into onsets and rimes than into phonemes. The findings suggest that word segmentation instruction should be sequenced with syllable segmentation instruction and precede instruction in onset and rime segmentation, leaving phoneme segmentation instruction last. Findings also suggest that the ideal approach to reading instruction is a compromise between the whole word approach, which ignores childrens ability to segment words, and the phonics approach, which over-emphasizes phonemic segmentation. (References, figures, and tables conclude the document.) (SRC)

The structure of spoken syllables: Evidence from novel word games*

Abstract Several linguists and psychologists have proposed that the syllable has a hierarchical internal structure. Its primary constituents, according to the model, are the onset and the rime. The onset contains the initial consonant or consonant cluster. The rime contains the peak (vowel nucleus) and coda (final consonant or cluster). The psychological validity of this model was tested in seven experiments involving novel word games. The results provided strong support for the validity of onset and rime. Adults preferred rules that referred to these units over rules that referred to other units. Further, they learned rules that kept the onset and the rime intact more easily than rules that divided these units. The experiments did not find strong support for the notion that the rime is subdivided into peak and coda. Taken together, the results show that there is at least one level of structure intermediate between the syllable and the phoneme. Implications for several aspects of speech processing are discussed.

How to see a reading unit.

Abstract When briefly presented with a string of colored letters, subjects sometimes report seeing letters and colors in incorrect combinations. We asked whether these illusory conjunctions of letter shape and identity can illuminate the units of analysis that are used by the visual system in word perception. Specifically, are illusory conjunctions more likely between letters within the same syllable of a word than between letters within different syllables? The results of five experiments show that when syllables are defined by orthographic constraints or by morphological boundaries, syllables are functional units in the visual analysis of words and word-like stimuli. Syllables defined by purely phonological criteria do not affect feature integration. We propose that illusory conjunctions can reveal the units of analysis in word perception.

Syllabification of intervocalic consonants

Two tasks were used to study the syllabification of intervocalic consonants like the /V’s of melon and collide. In an oral task, subjects reversed the syllables in words; in a written task, they selected between alternative syllabifications. Even in the oral task, subjects’ responses were influenced by whether their spellings of the words contained a single letter (r) or a double letter (10. Responses in the two tasks were also affected by the stress pattern of the word, the phonetic category of the intervocalic consonant, and the nature of the preceding vowel. The results are discussed in relation to theories of syllabification. o 1988 Many investigators (e.g., Spoehr, 1981; Segui, 1984) have proposed that the syllable plays a role in the processing of spoken and written language. However, studies of the syllable’s role in language processing have been hindered by uncertainty about how words are divided into syllables. With a word like demon, for instance, is the /m/ part of the first syllable, part of the second syllable, or part of both syllables? Different theories of syllabification offer different answers. In this paper, we ask how adults syllabify spoken and written words. We focus on intervocalic consonants like the /ml of demon and the /r/ of erase, asking what factors affect their syllabification.

the Development of Spelling Skill

. By the time the children were 4, adults could easily tell which of the children’s productions were meant as writing and which were meant as drawing. The 4-year-olds’ writings generally consisted of linearly arranged strings of units separated by blanks. The writings tended to be smaller than the drawings. When writing, 3-year-olds either used characters of unidentifiable origin, mostly undifferentiated into units, or nonletters that bore some resemblance to Hebrew letters. Four-year-olds used a combination of real Hebrew letters, digits, and letters of the Roman alphabet, which these children had probably seen in addition to Hebrew letters. It was not until age 5 that children predominantly used real Hebrew letters in their writing. Still, these letters were often not the ones found in the conventional spelling of the utterance. The majority of 5-year-olds wrote in the direction that is standard for Hebrew, from right to left. Although children as young as 3 or 4 know that writing looks different than drawing, they do not yet understand that the function of alphabetic writing is to represent the sounds of language. Instead, young children seem to believe that the written forms of words reflect their meanings. Children think that

Phonemic-analysis training helps children benefit from spelling-sound rules

It has been frequently suggested that the ability to analyze spoken words into phonemes facilitates children’s learning of spelling-sound rules. This research attempts to demonstrate that link by showing that phonemic-analysis training helps children take advantage of spelling sound rules in learning to read. In two experiments, preschool and kindergarten prereaders participated in an analysis condition and a control condition on each of 4 test days. In the analysis condition, children learned to segment (and in Experiment 2, also to blend) selected spoken syllables. In the control condition, they merely repeated syllables. Children were then introduced to printed items that corresponded to the spoken syllables with which they had worked. The pronunciation of the “related” item could be deduced from those of other printed items in the set; the pronunciation of the “unrelated” item could not be so deduced. Both experiments revealed a significant interaction between condition (analysis vs. control) and item type (related vs. unrelated). In the control condition, children tended to make more errors on the related item than on the unrelated item; in the analysis condition, they tended to make fewer errors on the related item than on the unrelated item. These results suggest a causal link between the ability to analyze spoken syllables and the ability to benefit from spelling-sound relations in reading.

Not all nonwords are alike: Implications for reading development and theory

Three experiments were designed to examine children’s and adults’ ability to pronounce consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense words. Some ofthe nonwords, liketain andgoach, shared their VC unit with a number of real words. Other nonwords, likegoan andtaich, shared their VC unit with few or no real words. Pooling across items, the very same grapheme-phoneme correspondences occurred in the two types of nonwords. First graders, good and poor third grade readers, and adults all performed better on the nonwords with the more common VC units than on the nonwords with the less common VC units. Although readers appeared to use VC units in the pronunciation of nonwords, we did not find evidence for use of initial CV units. Implications of the results for reading development, dyslexia, and models of nonword pronunciation are discussed.