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

Phonological processing deficits and the acquisition of the alphabetic principle in a severely delayed reader: a case study

At the end of first grade, TM did not know the alphabet and could read no words. He could not tap syllables in words, had difficulty producing rhyming words and retrieving the phonological representations of words, and he could not discriminate many phoneme contrasts. He learned letter-sound correspondences first for single-consonant onsets and then later for the final consonant in a word but had difficulty with letter-sound associations for vowels. TM's ability to select a printed word to match a spoken word on the basis of the initial or final letter and sound was interpreted as evidence of Ehri's phonetic-cue reading. Using the Glass Analysis method, the authors taught TM to read and he became an independent reader. We discuss how his phonological processing deficits contributed to his reading difficulties.

Influence of consonantal context on the reading of vowels: Evidence from children

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset. We presented the nonwords used by Treiman and colleagues in their 2003 study to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school students to determine when these context influences emerge. According to some theories of reading development, early decoding is characterized by context-free links from graphemes to phonemes. However, we found that even children reading at the first-grade level (6-year-olds) were influenced to some extent by a vowel's context. The effect of context on vowel pronunciation increased in strength up to around the fifth-grade reading level (8- and 9-year-olds), and sensitivity to coda-to-vowel associations emerged no earlier than did sensitivity to onset-to-vowel associations. A connectionist model of reading reproduced this general pattern of increasing context effects as a function of training.

Syllable splitting in literate and preliterate Hebrew speakers: Onsets and rimes or bodies and codas?

This study examined consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllable splitting among literate (Grade 2) and preliterate (kindergarten) Hebrew speakers. Consideration of both the architecture of Hebrew orthography and phonology led to the prediction that a body-coda rather than an onset-rime subdivision would predominate. Structured and unstructured tasks confirmed the claim that there exists a subsyllabic, supraphonemic level of phonological awareness that is more accessible than individual phonemes. However, as predicted, the syllable body rather than the rime was found to be the more accessible biphonemic unit. Moreover, this preference did not appear to be solely the product of orthographic structure; rather it was also inherent in spoken phonology. Access to single phonemes, in contrast, shifted from an early preliteracy advantage for (monophonemic) onsets to a literacy-based preference for codas.

What do children do in the rime-analogy task? An examination of the skills and strategies used by early readers

Despite the intense debate surrounding the use of orthographic analogy in the clue word paradigm, little is known about the skills and strategies children actually use and how these compare with their everyday reading of single words. This study, with 4- and 5-year-olds (N=125), supports previous work which suggests children rely on phonological, rather than orthographic, priming in the clue word task since children most frequently produced rhyming words in response to the clue word. The extent to which phoneme and rhyme-based skills, along with letter-sound knowledge, predicted children's performance in the analogy task and in a test of single word reading was contrasted and compared. Our findings suggested that the balance of skills which children drew upon was determined by the demands of the task. The implications of these findings for the validity of the 'orthographic'-analogy task and for teaching beginning readers is discussed.

The limitations of orthographic analogy in early reading development: performance on the clue-word task depends on phonological priming and elementary decoding skill, not the use of orthographic analogy

Two experiments investigated the mechanisms underlying analogical transfer in the clue-word reading task developed by Goswami and her colleagues. Across both experiments, an equivalent number of "analogy" responses were made regardless of whether the clue word was seen or just heard. In addition, the number of "analogy" responses to words sharing both orthographic and phonological overlap with the clue words was no greater than that shown to words sharing only pronunciations. These results provide no evidence for the view that beginning readers make genuine orthographic-based analogies. Instead, the findings are interpreted within a framework in which phonological priming, in combination with the children's own partial decoding attempts based on limited orthographic knowledge, account for their performance on the clue-word task. It is concluded that the extent to which beginning readers make orthographic analogies is overestimated and as a consequence, theories that emphasize the importance of orthographic analogy as a mechanism driving the development of early reading skills need to be questioned.

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.

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.

Inferring sublexical correspondences from sight vocabulary: evidence from 6- and 7-year-olds

We report an experiment designed to investigate 6-to-7-year-old children's ability to acquire knowledge of sublexical correspondences between print and sound from their reading experience. A computer database containing the printed word vocabulary of children taking part in the experiment was compiled and used to devise stimuli controlled for grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) frequency and rime neighbourhood consistency according to the children's reading experience. Knowledge of GPC rules and rime units was compared by asking children to read aloud three types of nonword varying in regularity of GPC and consistency of rime pronunciation. Results supported the view that children can acquire knowledge of both GPC rules and rime units from their reading experience. GPC rule strength affects the likelihood of a GPC response; rime consistency affects the likelihood of a rime response.

The limitations of orthographic rime analogies in beginners' word reading: a reply to Goswami (1999)

U. Goswami (1999, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72, 210-219) argues that the findings of J. A. Bowey, L. Vaughan, and J. Hansen (1998, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 68, 108-133) are uninterpretable. This paper examines each of Goswami's criticisms of the methodology employed by Bowey et al. (1998). None can explain the differential analogy and phonological priming effects reported by Bowey et al. More fundamentally, none can explain the critical finding of Bowey et al. that, when phonological priming effects are controlled, the size of the end analogy effect is no greater than that of beginning and medial vowel analogy effects. Furthermore, some of Goswami's criticisms cast considerable doubt on the generalizability of findings from her version of the clue word task.

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.