The Changing Role of Phonology in Reading Development

Evaluation of the multiple-deficit hypothesis among dyslexic Arabic-speaking children

This study examined the multiple-deficit hypothesis among Arabic-speaking elementary school students. A total of 90 students, divided into three main groups based on their performance on an Arabic word-reading task: dyslexic (n = 30), regular age-matched (n = 30), and 3rd-grade regular students, who were matched to the dyslexic group in regard to their reading proficiency level (n = 30). Participants underwent a nine-domain Arabic reading experiment that measured accuracy and fluency to evaluate general reading proficiency. The performance of Arabic dyslexic students was significantly worse than age-matched controls, but similar to young matched controls based on the reading level of each cognitive task. Moreover, dyslexic students showed deficits in three or more cognitive functions, depending on severity. This study adds to the limited empirical research on the double-deficit hypothesis and its extension to the multiple-domain model among young Arabic students.

Phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian children and adults

Studies on German and English have shown that children and adults can rely on phonological and orthographic information from the parafovea during reading, but this reliance differs between ages and languages. In the current study, we investigated the development of phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian-speaking 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The participants read sentences with embedded nouns that were presented in original, pseudohomophone, control for pseudohomophone, transposed-letter, and control for transposed-letter conditions in the parafoveal area to assess phonological and orthographic preview benefit effects. The results revealed that all groups of participants relied only on orthographic but not phonological parafoveal information. These findings indicate that 8-year-old children already preprocess parafoveal information similarly to adults.

Start shallow and grow deep: The development of a Hebrew reading brain

Brain plasticity implies that readers of different orthographies can have different reading networks. Theoretical models suggest that reading acquisition in transparent orthographies relies on mapping smaller orthographic units to phonology, than reading opaque orthographies; but what are the neural mechanisms underlying this difference? Hebrew has a transparent (pointed) script used for beginners, and a non-transparent script used for skilled readers. The current study examined the developmental changes in brain regions associated with phonological and orthographic processes during reading pointed and un-pointed words. Our results highlight some changes that are universal in reading development, such as a developmental increase in frontal involvement (in bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) pars opercularis), and increase in left asymmetry (in IFG pars opercularis and superior temporal gyrus, STG) of the reading network. Our results also showed a developmental increase in activation in STG, which stands in contrast to previous studies in other orthographies. We further found an interaction of word length and diacritics in bilateral STG and VWFA across both groups. These findings suggest that children slightly adjust their reading depending on orthographic transparency, relying on smaller units when reading a transparent script and on larger units when reading an opaque script. Our results also showed that phonological abilities across groups correlated with activation in the VWFA, regardless of transparency, supporting the continued role of phonology at all levels of orthographic transparency. Our findings are consistent with multiple route reading models, in which both phonological and orthographic processing of multiple size units continue to play a role in children's reading of transparent and opaque scripts during reading development. The results further demonstrate the importance of taking into account differences between orthographies when constructing neural models of reading acquisition.

Phonological parafoveal pre-processing in children reading English sentences

Although previous research has shown that, in English, both adult and teenage readers parafoveally pre-process phonological information during silent reading, to date, no research has been conducted to investigate such processing in children. Here we used the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, to ascertain whether typically developing English children, like adults, parafoveally process words phonologically. Participants' eye movements (adults: n = 48; children: n = 48) were recorded as they read sentences which contained, in preview, correctly spelled words (e.g., cheese), pseudohomophones (e.g., cheeze), or spelling controls (e.g., cheene). The orthographic similarity of the target words available in preview was also manipulated to be similar (e.g., cheese/cheeze/cheene) or dissimilar (e.g., queen/kween/treen). The results indicate that orthographic similarity facilitated both adults' and children's pre-processing. Moreover, children parafoveally pre-processed words phonologically very early in processing. The children demonstrated a pseudohomophone advantage from preview that was broadly similar to the effect displayed by the adults, although the orthographic similarity of the pseudohomophone previews was more important for the children than the adults. Overall, these results provide strong evidence for phonological recoding during silent English sentence reading in 8-9-year-old children.

Do Readers Integrate Phonological Codes Across Saccades? A Bayesian Meta-Analysis and a Survey of the Unpublished Literature

It is commonly accepted that phonological codes can be activated parafoveally during reading and later used to aid foveal word recognition- a finding known as the phonological preview benefit. However, a closer look at the literature shows that this effect may be less consistent than what is sometimes believed. To determine the extent to which phonology is processed parafoveally, a Bayesian meta-analysis of 27 experiments and a survey of the unpublished literature were conducted. While the results were generally consistent with the phonological preview benefit (>90% probability of a true effect in gaze durations), the size of the effect was small. Readers of alphabetical orthographies obtained a modest benefit of only 4 ms in gaze durations. Interestingly, Chinese readers showed a larger effect (6-14 ms in size). There was no difference in the magnitude of the phonological preview benefit between homophone and pseudo-homophone previews, thus suggesting that the modest processing advantage is indeed related to the activation of phonological codes from the parafoveal word. Simulations revealed that the results are relatively robust to missing studies, although the effects may be 19-22% smaller if all missing studies found a null effect. The results suggest that while phonology can be processed parafoveally, this happens only to a limited extent. Because phonological priming effects in single-word recognition are small (10-13 ms; Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006) and there is a loss of visual acuity in the parafovea, it is argued that large phonological preview benefit effects may be unlikely.