ABSTRACT
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.
Subject(s)
Association Learning , Child Development/physiology , Psycholinguistics/methods , Reading , Child , Cues , Female , Humans , Male , Phonetics , Research Design , Verbal LearningABSTRACT
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.
Subject(s)
Child Development/physiology , Language , Reading , Age Factors , Child, Preschool , Cognition/physiology , Humans , Phonetics , Time FactorsABSTRACT
Previous work examining context effects in children has been limited to semantic context. The current research examined the effects of grammatical priming of word-naming in fourth-grade children. In Experiment 1, children named both inflected and uninflected noun and verb target words faster when they were preceded by grammatically constraining primes than when they were preceded by neutral primes. Experiment 1 used a long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) interval of 750 msec. Experiment 2 replicated the grammatical priming effect at two SOA intervals (400 msec and 700 msec), suggesting that the grammatical priming effect does not reflect the operation of any gross strategic effects directly attributable to the long SOA interval employed in Experiment 1. Grammatical context appears to facilitate target word naming by constraining target word class. Further work is required to elucidate the loci of this effect.
Subject(s)
Attention , Language Development , Reaction Time , Reading , Semantics , Child , Female , Humans , Male , Verbal Learning , VocabularyABSTRACT
When children aged from 1;6 to 3;6 made errors in relation to targeted morphemes within grammatically obligatory contexts, a prompt of "Pardon?" was given. Morpheme repair rates increased with linguistic proficiency, and with target morpheme mastery. The selective use of prompted repairs appears to be a useful technique for assessing rudimentary abilities to monitor grammatical form within very young children.
Subject(s)
Child Language , Speech , Age Factors , Child Development , Child, Preschool , Humans , Infant , Language Development , LinguisticsABSTRACT
A 3-group reading-level design was used to investigate phonological analysis, verbal working memory, and pseudoword reading performance in less skilled fourth-grade readers. Children were given phonological oddity tasks assessing their sensitivity to subsyllabic and phonemic units, together with standardized tests of verbal working memory and pseudoword reading. Less skilled fourth-grade readers performed lower than both chronological age and reading-level controls on the phonological oddity and pseudoword reading tests. Less skilled fourth-grade readers performed at the same level as skilled second-grade readers on a test of verbal working memory. Skilled fourth-grade readers scored higher than both other groups on this test. Correlational analyses were consistent with the view that phonological analysis skills contribute more strongly than verbal working memory skills to children's decoding abilities.
Subject(s)
Dyslexia/diagnosis , Phonetics , Reading , Child , Dyslexia/psychology , Female , Humans , Intelligence Tests , Male , Mental Recall , Verbal Learning , VocabularyABSTRACT
Three experiments are described in which a partial identity priming procedure was used to investigate the hypothesis that orthographic onsets and rimes serve as units of visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, partial identity priming using word-final trigrams was observed only when the bigram corresponded to the orthographic rime unit. Nonrime primes were again ineffective primes. In Experiment 3, partial identity priming using word-initial bigrams was observed only when the bigram corresponded to the orthographic onset unit. Non-onset bigrams were ineffective primes. These differential priming outcomes cannot be explained by graphemic priming, prime frequency, or practice effects. They are consistent with the hypothesis that syllable onset and rime units serve as functional units of reading.
Subject(s)
Attention , Memory , Mental Recall , Reading , Semantics , Verbal Learning , Humans , Paired-Associate Learning , Psycholinguistics , Reaction TimeSubject(s)
Child Language , Language Development , Linguistics , Age Factors , Child , Child, Preschool , Female , Humans , MaleABSTRACT
Three experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that the structural processing of truncated passives is dependent upon the degree to which the past participle syntactically resembles an adjective. Two types of truncated passive were distinguished, one predicted to be processed according to the standard transformational account, and the other analogously to the predicate adjective construction. In sentence-completion tasks, both children and adults showed differential rates of agentive phrase recovery to the two types of truncated passive. A third experiment showed that the linguistic intuitions of adult subjects differed for the two types of truncated passive.
