Orthographic Learning in French-Speaking Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children.

PURPOSE: Children are assumed to acquire orthographic representations during autonomous reading by decoding new written words. The present study investigates how deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children build new orthographic representations compared to typically hearing (TH) children. METHOD: Twenty-nine DHH children, from 7.8 to 13.5 years old, with moderate-to-profound hearing loss, matched for reading level and chronological age to TH controls, were exposed to 10 pseudowords (novel words) in written stories. Then, they performed a spelling task and an orthographic recognition task on these new words. RESULTS: In the spelling task, we found no difference in accuracy, but a difference in errors emerged between the two groups: Phonologically plausible errors were less common in DHH children than in TH children. In the recognition task, DHH children were better than TH children at recognizing target pseudowords. Phonological strategies seemed to be used less by DHH than by TH children who very often chose phonological distractors. CONCLUSIONS: Both groups created sufficiently detailed orthographic representations to complete the tasks, which support the self-teaching hypothesis. DHH children used phonological information in both tasks but could use more orthographic cues than TH children to build up orthographic representations. Using the combination of a spelling task and a recognition task, as well as analyzing the nature of errors, in this study, provides a methodological implication for further understanding of underlying cognitive processes.

Learning Spelling From Meaning.

According to the instance-based approach, each novel word encounter is encoded as an episodic trace, including different aspects of word knowledge (orthography, semantics, phonology) and context. Experiencing the novel word again leads to reactivating the previous instances to support word identification. Accordingly, once a link between orthography and meaning is established through several instances of co-occurrence, presenting the novel word form enhances semantic learning even if the contexts are uninformative about the meaning (Eskenazi et al., 2018). Here, we investigated whether informative contexts enhance orthographic learning in the absence of the novel word form. Participants read pseudowords in three definition-like sentences, followed by three unrelated filler sentences (baseline condition), three uninformative sentences (orthographic condition), or three informative sentences with synonyms replacing the pseudoword (semantic condition). After reading, participants were better at spelling pseudowords exposed in the semantic than in the baseline condition and recalled more definitions of the pseudowords exposed in the orthographic than in the baseline condition. Such results indicate that both semantic and orthographic learning benefit from the contexts where the target information is absent. Overall, this supports the instance-based approach and contributes to the understanding of the interplay between orthography and semantics in contextual word learning.

Learning new words by reading books: Does semantic information help?

Encountering new words during reading is a common experience of any adult reader and it constitutes an important source of word knowledge. Despite the ubiquity of this phenomenon, studies remain scarce in adults. Here, we addressed new word acquisition in adults using a natural contextual exposure, and we focused on the influence of context informativeness on orthographic learning. Indeed, previous studies suggest that the availability of semantic information plays an important role in orthographic learning in adults, but no such advantage was found in children. We hypothesised that this discrepancy comes from the fact that new word learning was examined almost only through artificial settings in adults. On the contrary, in the present study, adult participants were exposed to new words by reading a book. Half of the new words were embedded in informative contexts (easy to infer new word meaning) and the other half in less informative contexts. Both recall and recognition tasks were used to assess orthographic and semantic learning. The results showed efficient learning of the orthographic form and no reliable effect of the context informativeness. Regarding semantic learning, we found that if a word was correctly spelled, its definition was more likely to be retrieved. This shows that the orthographic and semantic dimensions of a word co-occurring in context are likely to influence each other during lexical acquisition. More generally, the present experiment showed that using an ecological learning design is essential to understand the mechanism of new word learning.

The nature of perceptual units in Chinese character recognition.

Chinese character recognition is based on a limited set of recurrent stroke patterns. Most Chinese characters are a combination of two or more of these components. To test whether readers are sensitive to combinations of components (or multi-component units [MCUs]) within a character, we conducted two probe detection tasks where participants had to detect the presence of a component in a target character. Critically, some targets contained an MCU that can stand as a character on its own, with its own meaning and sound, while other targets contained an MCU that only exists embedded within other characters (no associated meaning and sound). Participants had more difficulty detecting component probes that were a part of an existing MCU, compared to component probes that belonged to a non-existing MCU. These findings suggest that existing MCUs are a perceptual unit in Chinese character recognition.

The extraction of orthographic and phonological structure of printed words in adults with dyslexia.

The current study investigated the extraction of orthographic and phonological structure of written words in adults with dyslexia. In adults without learning difficulties, Chetail and Content showed that orthographic structure, as determined by the number of vowel letter clusters, influences visual word length estimation. The authors also found a phonological effect determined by the number of syllables of words. In the present study, 22 French-speaking students diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood and 22 students without learning disabilities were compared. All participants performed the task of estimating word length. The pattern of results obtained by Chetail and Content was replicated: length estimates were biased by both the number of syllables and the number of vowel letter clusters. The study showed a significant interaction between phonological bias and group. The phonological effect was less important in students with dyslexia, suggesting reduced sensitivity to phonological parsing in reading. In contrast, the orthographic effect did not differ significantly between groups, suggesting that the sensitivity to the orthographic structure of written words is preserved in students with dyslexia despite their low-quality orthographic representations. We conclude that there is no systematic association between sensitivity to the structure of representations and quality of their content.

Diversity matters: The sensitivity to sublexical orthographic regularities increases with contextual diversity.

Readers capture statistics about letter co-occurrences very rapidly. This has been demonstrated with artificial lexicons and/or with restricted sets of orthographic regularities. The aim of the study was twofold: To examine the learning of new orthographic regularities in a more incidental exposure paradigm, and to investigate the impact of the diversity of letter contexts in which new orthographic regularities appear. For 2 months, participants played detection games for 20 min per day and were exposed to a large set of pseudowords, some of which included new bigrams (e.g., GK). Half of the new bigrams occurred in eight different items (high contextual diversity) and the other half were presented in only two items (low context diversity). At six time points, the participants performed a "wordlikeness" task in which they chose between two new pseudowords the one that was more similar to the items previously exposed (e.g., PUGKALE vs. PUGZALE). The results showed that the participants very rapidly developed a preference for items with a frequent new bigram and that this sensitivity increased steadily over the 2 months. Furthermore, the sensitivity to these new orthographic regularities was higher in cases of high letter contextual diversity. The latter result parallels what is observed at a lexical level with semantic contextual diversity.

Shared or separated representations for letters with diacritics?

Understanding the front end of visual word recognition requires us to identify the processes by which letters are identified. Since most of the work on letter recognition has been conducted in English, letter perception modeling has been limited to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. However, many writing systems include letters with diacritic marks. In the present study, we examined whether diacritic letters are a mere variant of their base letter, and thus share the same abstract representation, or whether they function as separate elements from any other letters, and thus have separate representations. In Experiments 1A and 1B, participants performed an alphabetical decision task combined with masked priming. Target letters were preceded by the same letter (e.g., a-A), by a diacritic letter (e.g., â-A), or by an unrelated letter (e.g., z-A). The results showed that the primes sharing nominal identity (e.g., a) facilitated target processing as compared to unrelated primes (e.g., z), but that primes that included a diacritic mark (e.g., â) did not, with reaction times being similar to those in the unrelated priming condition. In Experiment 2 we replicated these results in a lexical decision task. Overall, this demonstrates that as long as diacritics are used in scripts to distinguish between lexical entries, the diacritic letters are not mere variants of their base letters but constitute unitary elements of the script in their own right, with diacritics contributing to the overall visual shape of a letter.

The consonant/vowel pattern determines the structure of orthographic representations in the left fusiform gyrus.

Recent findings demonstrated readers' sensitivity to the distinction between consonant and vowel letters. Especially, the way consonants and vowels are organised within written words determines their perceptual structure. The present work attempted to overcome two limitations of previous studies by examining the neurophysiological correlates of this perceptual structure through magnetoencephalography (MEG). One aim was to establish that the extraction of vowel-centred units takes place during early stages of processing. The second objective was to confirm that the vowel-centred structure pertains to the word recognition system and may constitute one level in a hierarchy of neural detectors coding orthographic strings. Participants performed a cross-case matching task in which they had to judge pairs of stimuli as identical or different. The critical manipulation concerned pairs obtained by transposing two letters, so that the vowel-centred structure was either preserved (FOUVERT-fovuert, two vowel letter clusters) or modified (BOUVRET-bovuret). Mismatches were detected faster when the structure was modified. This effect was associated with a significant difference in evoked neuromagnetic fields extending from 129 to 239 msec after the stimulation. Source localization indicated a significant effect in the visual word form area around 200 msec. The results confirm the hypothesis that the vowel-centred structure is extracted during the early phases of letter string processing and that it is encoded in left fusiform regions devoted to visual word recognition.

Coding of serial order in verbal, visual and spatial working memory.

In the domain of working memory, recent theories postulate that the maintenance of serial order is driven by position marking. According to this idea, serial order is maintained though associations of each item with an independent representation of the position that the item constitutes in the sequence. Recent studies suggest that those position markers are spatial in nature, with the beginning items associated with left side and the end elements with the right side of space (i.e., the ordinal position effect). So far however, it is unclear whether serial order is coded along the same principles in the verbal and the visuospatial domain. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether serial order is coded in a domain general fashion or not. To unravel this question, 6 experiments were conducted. The first 3 experiments revealed that the ordinal position effect is found with verbal but not with spatial information. In the subsequent experiments, the authors isolated the origin of this dissociation and conclude that to obtain spatial coding of serial order, it is not the nature of the encoded information (verbal, visual, or spatial) that is crucial, but whether the memoranda are semantically processed or not. This work supports the idea that serial order is coded in a domain general fashion, but suggests that position markers are only spatially coded when the to-be-remembered information is processed at the semantic level. (PsycINFO Database Record

What do we do with what we learn? Statistical learning of orthographic regularities impacts written word processing.

Individuals rapidly become sensitive to recurrent patterns present in the environment and this occurs in many situations. However, evidence of a role for statistical learning of orthographic regularities in reading is mixed, and its role has peripheral status in current theories of visual word recognition. Additionally, exactly which regularities readers learn to be sensitive to is still unclear. To address these two issues, three experiments were conducted with artificial scripts. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants were exposed to a flow of artificial words (five characters) for a few minutes, with either two or four bigrams occurring very frequently. In Experiment 2, exposure took place over several days while participants had to learn the orthographic and phonological forms of new words entailing or not frequent bigrams. Sensitivity to these regularities was then tested in a wordlikeness task. Finally, participants performed a letter detection task, with letters being either of high frequency or not in the exposure phase. The results of the wordlikeness task showed that after only a few minutes, readers become sensitive to the positional frequency of letter clusters and to bigram frequency beyond single letter frequency. Moreover, this new knowledge influenced the performance in the letter detection task, with high-frequency letters being detected more rapidly than low-frequency ones. We discuss the implications of such results for models of orthographic encoding and reading.

BACS: The Brussels Artificial Character Sets for studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Written symbols such as letters have been used extensively in cognitive psychology, whether to understand their contributions to written word recognition or to examine the processes involved in other mental functions. Sometimes, however, researchers want to manipulate letters while removing their associated characteristics. A powerful solution to do so is to use new characters, devised to be highly similar to letters, but without the associated sound or name. Given the growing use of artificial characters in experimental paradigms, the aim of the present study was to make available the Brussels Artificial Character Sets (BACS): two full, strictly controlled, and portable sets of artificial characters for a broad range of experimental situations.

Reconsidering the role of orthographic redundancy in visual word recognition.

Humans are known to continuously extract regularities from the flow of stimulation. This occurs in many facets of behavior, including reading. In spite of the ubiquitous evidence that readers become sensitive to orthographic regularities after very little exposure to print, the role of orthographic regularities receives at best a peripheral status in current theories of orthographic processing. In the present article, after the presentation of previous evidence on orthographic redundancy, the hypothesis that orthographic regularities may play a prominent role in word perception is developed.

What can megastudies tell us about the orthographic structure of English words?

Although the majority of research in visual word recognition has targeted single-syllable words, most words are polysyllabic. These words engender special challenges, one of which concerns their analysis into smaller units. According to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants (C) and vowels (V) constrains the orthographic structure of printed words. So far, evidence has been reported only in French with factorial studies of relatively small sets of items. In the present study, we performed regression analyses on corpora of megastudies (English and British Lexicon Project databases) to examine the influence of the CV pattern in English. We compared hiatus words, which present a mismatch between the number of syllables and the number of groups of adjacent vowel letters (e.g., client), to other words, controlling for standard lexical variables. In speeded pronunciation, hiatus words were processed more slowly than control words, and the effect was stronger in low-frequency words. In the lexical decision task, the interference effect of hiatus in low-frequency words was balanced by a facilitatory effect in high-frequency words. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that the configuration of consonant and vowel letters influences the processing of polysyllabic words in English.

Orthographic and morphemic effects in the written syllable counting task.

According to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants and vowels (i.e., CV pattern) constrains the orthographic structure of words. Here, we examined to what extent the morphological structure of words modifies the influence of the CV pattern in a syllable counting task. Participants were presented with written words matched for the number of syllables and comprising either one vowel cluster less than the number of syllables (hiatus words, e.g., création) or the same number of vowel clusters (control words, e.g., crépiter). Participants were slower and less accurate for hiatus than control stimuli, be it words (Experiments 1, 3) or pseudowords (Experiment 2). More importantly, this hiatus effect was present even when the stimuli had a morphemic boundary falling within the hiatus (e.g., ré-agir). The results suggest that the CV pattern of items more strongly influences performance in the syllable counting task than the morphological structure.

The role of consonant/vowel organization in perceptual discrimination.

According to a recent hypothesis, the CV pattern (i.e., the arrangement of consonant and vowel letters) constrains the mental representation of letter strings, with each vowel or vowel cluster being the core of a unit. Six experiments with the same/different task were conducted to test whether this structure is extracted prelexically. In the mismatching trials, the targets were pseudowords built by the transposition of 2 adjacent letters from base words. In one condition, the pseudowords had the same number of vowel clusters as the base word, whereas in another condition, the transposition modified the number of vowel clusters (e.g., poirver: 2 vowel clusters vs. povirer: 3 vowel clusters, from POIVRER: 2 vowel clusters). In Experiment 1, pseudowords with a different number of vowel clusters were more quickly processed than pseudowords preserving the CV structure of their base word. Experiment 2 further showed that this effect was not due to changes in syllabic structure. In Experiment 3, the pattern of results was also replicated when the category (consonant or vowel) of the transposed letters was strictly equated between conditions. Experiments 4 and 5 confirmed that the effects were not attributable to lexical processing, to differences in letter identity, or to the position of transpositions. The results suggest that the orthographic representation of letter strings is influenced by the CV pattern at an early, prelexical processing stage.

Effect of the consonant-vowel structure of written words in Italian.

Surprisingly little is known about the nature of intermediary sublexical units in visual word recognition in Italian, a language with a highly consistent print-to-sound mapping, which should enhance reliance on grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. In the present study, we examined whether Italian readers are sensitive to large orthographic units defined by the consonant-vowel (CV) pattern of words and that do not directly map onto linguistic constituents. Participants had to judge the number of syllables in written words matched for the number of spoken syllables but comprising either one orthographic vowel cluster less than the number of syllables (hiatus words, e.g., teatro) or as many vowel clusters as syllables (e.g., agosto). Relative to control words, readers were slower and less accurate for hiatus words, for which they underestimated the number of syllables. This underestimation bias demonstrates that Italian readers are sensitive to large orthographic units stemming from a parsing process based on the CV pattern-that is, the arrangement of consonant and vowel letters.

What is the difference between OASIS and OPERA? Roughly five pixels: orthographic structure biases the perceived length of letter strings.

A thorough understanding of monosyllabic-word-recognition processes, in contrast with multisyllabic-word processing, has accumulated over the past decades. One fundamental challenge regarding multisyllabic words concerns their parsing into smaller units and the nature of the cues determining the parsing. We propose that the organization of consonant and vowel letters provides powerful cues for parsing, and we present data from a new task showing that a word's orthographic structure, as determined by the number of vowel-letter clusters, influences estimations of its length. Words were briefly presented on a computer screen, and participants had to estimate word length by drawing a line on the screen with the mouse. In three experiments, participants estimated words comprising fewer orthographic units as shorter than words comprising more units even though the words matched for number of letters. Further results demonstrated that the length bias was driven by orthographic information and not by phonological structure.

Syllable priming with pseudowords in the lexical decision task.

This study investigated the processes underlying the effect of masked syllable priming in French with pseudoword primes and word targets. Two lexical-decision task (LDT) experiments examined whether the syllable priming effect depends on syllable frequency and might rely on a general abstract structure. The results of Experiment 1 revealed an inhibitory priming effect, with pseudoword primes and word targets sharing a high-frequency first syllable, which was not due to the abstract syllable structure. In contrast, no inhibition was observed with a low-frequency first syllable in Experiment 2. Syllable frequency appears to be an important factor determining the speed of target processing in masked priming. This is attributed to variations in the respective contributions of sublexical activation and lexical inhibition processes.

Segmentation of written words in French.

Syllabification of spoken words has been largely used to define syllabic properties of written words, such as the number of syllables or syllabic boundaries. By contrast, some authors proposed that the functional structure of written words stems from visuo-orthographic features rather than from the transposition of phonological structure into the written modality. Thus, the first aim of the study was to assess whether the explicit segmentation of written words in French was consistent with syllabification patterns for spoken words previously reported. Second, given that spelling does not map perfectly with phonology, we examined how readers segmented printed words with grapheme/phoneme misalignments. The examination of the whole patterns of written segmentation produced by participants showed that, though written segmentation followed spoken segmentation for words matched for phonological/orthographic forms, discrepancies were found in cases of mismatch, therefore suggesting that readers rely on orthographic cues to parse printed strings of letters. This conclusion was confirmed with an on-line letter detection task.

Interaction between phonemic abilities and syllable congruency effect in young readers.

This study investigated whether and to what extent phonemic abilities of young readers (Grade 5) influence syllabic effects in reading. More precisely, the syllable congruency effect was tested in the lexical decision task combined with masked priming in eleven-year-old children. Target words were preceded by a pseudo-word prime sharing the first three letters that either corresponded to the syllable (congruent condition) or not (incongruent condition). The data showed that the syllable priming effect interacted with the score of phonemic abilities. In children with good phonemic skills, word recognition was delayed in the congruent condition compared to the incongruent condition, while it was speeded up in children with weaker phonemic skills. These findings are discussed in a lexical access model including syllable units.