Taeko N. Wydell
Brunel University London
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Featured researches published by Taeko N. Wydell.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition | 1993
Taeko N. Wydell; Karalyn Patterson; Glyn W. Humphreys
It is generally assumed that access to phonology for words written in logographic Japanese Kanji must be mediated by access to their meaning. This proposal was examined in a semantic categorization task with homophones. If the assumption about Kanji processing were true, then homophony should have no effect on semantic judgments. However, there was a significant homophone effect: Reaction times (RTs) were longer and more errors occurred to homophone foils than to control foils. There was also a significant effect of visual similarity: Incorrect target words that were virually similar to correct exemplars of the category names yielded longer RTs and higher error rates. The effects of both visual similarity and homophony were obtained even under conditions of pattern masking (though only on errors)
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience | 2003
Taeko N. Wydell; T. Vuorinen; Päivi Helenius; Riitta Salmelin
Behavioral studies have shown that short letter strings are read faster than long letter-strings and words are read faster than nonwords. Here, we describe the dynamics of letter-string length and lexicality effects at the cortical level, using magnetoencephalography, during a reading task in Finnish with long (eight-letter) and short (four-letter) word/nonword stimuli. Length effects were observed in two spatially and temporally distinct cortical activations: (1) in the occipital cortex at about 100 msec by the strength of activation, regardless of the lexical status of the stimuli, and (2) in the left superior temporal cortex between 200 and 600 msec by the duration of activation, with words showing a smaller effect than nonwords. A significant lexicality effect was also evident in this later activation, with stronger activation and longer duration for nonwords than words. There seem to be no distinct cortical areas for reading words and nonwords. The early length effect is likely to be due to the low-level visual analysis common to all stimulus letter-strings. The later lexicality and length effects apparently reflect converging lexico-semantic and phonological influences, and are discussed in terms of dual-route and single-route connectionist models of reading.
Reading and Writing | 2003
John T. E. Richardson; Taeko N. Wydell
Using a database of allstudents in higher education in the UK in1995–1996, students with dyslexia and those withno reported disability were compared in termsof demographic properties, programmes of studyand academic attainment. Students with dyslexiaconstituted 0.42% of all students resident inthe UK. Their representation varied with age,gender, ethnicity and entrance qualificationsand with their level, mode and subject ofstudy. Students with dyslexia were more likelyto withdraw during their first year of studyand were less likely to complete theirprogrammes of study, although with appropriatesupport the completion rate of students withdyslexia can match that of students with nodisabilities. In addition, students withdyslexia who completed first-degree programmestended to gain a poorer class of honours thanstudents with no reported disability, but 40%obtained first-class or upper second-classhonours. In short, dyslexia may havedeleterious consequences for progression,completion and achievement in higher education,but it is by no means incompatible with a highlevel of success, given appropriate commitmenton the part of the students and appropriateresources on the part of their institution.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology | 2003
Naoki Shibahara; Marco Zorzi; Martin P. Hill; Taeko N. Wydell; Brian Butterworth
Three experiments investigated whether reading aloud is affected by a semantic variable, imageability. The first two experiments used English, and the third experiment used Japanese Kanji as a way of testing the generality of the findings across orthographies. The results replicated the earlier findings that readers were slower and more error prone in reading low-frequency exception words when they were low in imageability than when they were high in imageability (Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995). This result held for both English and Kanji even when age of acquisition was taken into account as a possible confounding variable, and the imageability effect was stronger in Kanji compared to English.
Neuropsychologia | 2010
Jiuju Wang; Hong-Yan Bi; Li-Qun Gao; Taeko N. Wydell
Previous research into the cognitive processes involved in reading Chinese and developmental dyslexia in Chinese, revealed that the single most important factor appears to be orthographic processing skills rather than phonological skills. Also some studies have indicated that even in alphabetic languages some dyslexic individuals reveal deficits in orthographic processing skills, which are linked to a deficit in the visual magnocellular pathway. The current study therefore employed a visual psychophysical experiment together with visual and auditory event-related potential (ERP) experiments eliciting mismatch negativity (MMN) to investigate the link between visual magnocellular functional abnormalities and developmental dyslexia in Chinese. The performance levels of Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (DD) from the behavioural and electrophysiological experiments were compared to those of the chronological age-matched (CA) children and those of the reading level matched (RL) younger children. Both the behavioural and electrophysiological results suggest that the orthographic processing skills were compromised in the Chinese developmental dyslexics, which in turn is linked to a deficit in the visual magnocellular system.
Journal of Research in Reading | 2003
Taeko N. Wydell; Tadahisa Kondo
A follow-up study was conducted on AS, previously reported as an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual phonological dyslexia in English (Wydell and Butterworth, 1999). It was hypothesised that ASs fundamental deficit which lead to his dyslexia in English would still persist despite him successfully taking a BSc course in an English-speaking country. AS and his Japanese and English control participants were asked to read aloud a target stimulus first, and then to decide whether the target was a word or nonword. Unlike the control participants, AS showed a marked dissociation between his performance in the lexical (orthographic and phonological) decision and the word naming tasks. Often those words and pseudo-homophones (e.g. neym), which AS read erroneously, were correct in the decision tasks – the target pseudo-homophone or word was substituted by another orthographically similar word. The results thus demonstrated that his reading of unfamiliar words or nonwords is essentially based on orthographic approximation using the visual similarities between words. The results confirmed the earlier finding that AS has a core phonological deficit which led to his dyslexia but never affected his reading in Japanese. The results also confirmed that this deficit persists when reading in English. This implies that whatever the neurological abnormality that AS may have, this only affects certain languages, and this abnormality persists with time.
PLOS ONE | 2014
Tong-Qi Wei; Hong-Yan Bi; B. Chen; Ying Liu; Xuchu Weng; Taeko N. Wydell
The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition | 2009
Kathleen Rastle; Jelena Havelka; Taeko N. Wydell; Max Coltheart; Derek Besner
The interaction between length and lexical status is one of the key findings used in support of models of reading aloud that postulate a serial process in the orthography-to-phonology translation (B. S. Weekes, 1997). However, proponents of parallel models argue that this effect arises in peripheral visual or articulatory processes. The authors addressed this possibility using the special characteristics of the Serbian and Japanese writing systems. Experiment 1 examined length effects in Serbian when participants were biased to interpret phonologically bivalent stimuli in the alphabet in which they are words or in the alphabet in which they are nonwords (i.e., the visual characteristics of stimuli were held constant across lexical status). Experiment 2 examined length effects in Japanese kana when words were presented in the kana script in which they usually appear or in the script in which they do not normally appear (i.e., the phonological characteristics of stimuli were held constant across lexical status). Results in both cases showed a larger length effect when stimuli were treated as nonwords and thus offered strong support to models of reading aloud that postulate a serial component.
Dyslexia | 2009
Laura R. Shapiro; Jane Hurry; Jackie Masterson; Taeko N. Wydell; Estelle Doctor
We outline how research into predictors of literacy underpins the development of increasingly accurate and informative assessments. We report three studies that emphasize the crucial role of speech and auditory skills on literacy development throughout primary and secondary school. Our first study addresses the effects of early childhood middle ear infections, the potential consequences for speech processing difficulties and the impact on early literacy development. Our second study outlines how speech and auditory skills are crucially related to early literacy in normally developing readers, whereas other skills such as motor, memory and IQ are only indirectly related. Our third study outlines the on-going impact of phonological awareness on reading and wider academic achievement in secondary-school pupils. Finally, we outline how teachers can use the current research to inform them about which assessments to conduct, and how to interpret the results.
Reading and Writing | 1998
Taeko N. Wydell
In this paper the contribution or impact of sub-word levels in the computation of word phonology was evaluated for the two very different orthographies of alphabetic English and logographic Japanese kanji. In particular, the studies of Wydell, Butterworth and Patterson (1995), Fushimi, Ijuin and Tatsumi (1996a, b), and Wydell, Butterworth, Shibahara and Zorzi (1997) are reviewed. These studies investigated the sub-word level (i.e., the level of constituent characters in two-character kanji words) as well as whole-word level of contribution in the computation of phonology to the compound kanji words. It is concluded that the available data suggest some involvement of sub-word level processing in the computation of word phonology in kanji, though to a much lesser extent than in English. More importantly, it is suggested that the structural differences between On-reading words (of Chinese origin) and Kun-reading words (of Japanese origin) may prove to be important factors when evaluating the speed and accuracy in the computation of the phonology of kanji words.