Orthographic rimes as functional units of reading in fourth-grade children

OBSTACLES TO INNOVATION FOR SMEs: EVIDENCE FROM GERMANY

Achieving effective innovation is a complex task and during this process, firms [especially small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs)] often face obstacles. However, research into obstacles to innovation focusing on SMEs is very scarce. In this study, we propose a theoretical framework for describing these obstacles to innovation and investigate their influence on the innovative performance of SMEs. Data were collected in 2013 through face-to-face interviews with executives of 49 technology SMEs from Germany. The semi-structured interviews were designed on the basis of scales for measuring innovativeness, financial/competitive performance and obstacles to innovation, next to purely open questions. We find that the internal obstacles, lack of know-how, capacity overloading, unclear roles and tasks as well as the external obstacle governmental bureaucracy negatively influence innovative performance of SMEs. However, in contrast to prior findings, this study shows that cooperation ties of firms might also negatively influence the innovative performance.

Units of analysis in nonword reading: evidence from children and adults

Four experiments examined variations in children's (chronological age range: 5 years 7 months to 9 years 10 months) and adults' reading strategy as a function of task demands. Experiment 1 found that less skilled readers (mean reading age: 8 years 8 months), though able to make use of rime-based spelling-to-sound correspondences (reading "by analogy"), predominantly used simple grapheme-phoneme-level correspondences in reading isolated unfamiliar items. Skilled children (mean reading age: 11 years 6 months) were more likely to adopt an analogy strategy. Experiments 2 and 3 adopted versions of the "clue word" technique used by U. Goswami (1986, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 42, 73-83; 1988, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40A, 239-268) and found a much higher incidence of analogical responding by children of all ages, suggesting that reading strategy is task-dependent. Experiment 4 showed that adults' nonword-reading strategy is determined by list composition, in that grapheme-phoneme correspondences are used more when the list context contains nonwords. It is concluded that both adults and young children exhibit considerable flexibility and task-dependence in the levels of spelling-to-sound correspondence (analogies vs decoding) that they use and that grapheme-phoneme correspondences are preferred when maximum generalization to unfamiliar items is required.

Sublexical Inferences in Beginning Reading: Medial Vowel Digraphs as Functional Units of Transfer

Two experiments evaluated young children's use of lexical inference. Experiment 1 compared transfer from shared rimes (e.g., "beak"-"peak"), or heads (e.g., "beak"-"bean"), under three conditions: (a) when both clue word pronunciation and orthography were present at transfer; (b) when only the pronunciation of the clue word was given; and (c) when the clue was pretaught. Equivalent transfer occurred in both conditions (a and b) where clue word pronunciations were provided at transfer, but no transfer was found when the clue word was pretaught (condition c). Experiment 2 investigated transfer from three pretaught clue words sharing rimes (e.g., "leak"-"peak"), or vowel digraphs (e.g., "leak"-"bean"). Children demonstrated lexical transfer under these conditions, but improvements were equivalent for vowel and rime analogous words. Results are interpreted in terms of models of vowel transfer. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Beginning readers' use of orthographic analogies in word reading

This research re-investigated the claim that beginning readers exploit information from the orthographic rime of clue words to help them to decode unfamiliar words. In Experiment 1, first-grade children were equally able to use orthographic information from the beginning, middle, and end of clue words to identify unfamiliar target words. Moreover, the improvement in reading end-(or orthographic rime-) same target words following clue word presentation reflected phonological priming. In second-grade children, with correction for retesting effects, improvement following clue word presentation for end-same and beginning-same target words was equivalent, although end-same target words improved more than middle-same target words. In Experiment 2, both first- and second-grade children were able to use orthographic information from the beginning, middle, and end of clue words to identify unfamiliar words. Clue word presentation enhanced the reading of beginning-same and end-same target words more than middle-same target words. Improvement was the same for beginning-same and end-same target words. Target word improvement following clue word presentation was greater than that for phonologically primed words only in children reading target words sharing the beginning sequence of the clue word.

Do children need concurrent prompts in order to use lexical analogies in reading?

In two experiments, children were taught a word and then given reminders of that word while reading unfamiliar analogous words. Reminders of the pronunciation of taught words facilitated reading of rime analogous words (e.g. beak-peak) over head analogous words (e.g. beak-bean) in Experiment 1, and onset analogous words (e.g. stilt-stem), over medial analogous words (e.g. stilt-milk) in Experiment 2. Importantly, however, privileged improvement for rime and onset analogous words was not evident in the absence of these concurrent prompts. The findings suggest that the analogy model developed by Goswami (1993) may have limited applicability in naturalistic settings.