Effects of phonological features on reading-aloud latencies: A cross-linguistic comparison.

Most psycholinguistic models of reading aloud and of speech production do not include linguistic representations more fine-grained than the phoneme, despite the fact that the available empirical evidence suggests that feature-level representations are activated during reading aloud and speech production. In a series of masked-priming experiments that employed the reading aloud task, we investigated effects of phonological features, such as voicing, place of articulation, and constriction location, on response latencies in English and Russian. We propose a hypothesis that predicts greater likelihood of obtaining feature-priming effects when the onsets of the prime and the target share more feature values than when they share fewer. We found that prime-target pairs whose onsets differed only in voicing (e.g., /p/-/b/) primed each other consistently in Russian, as has already been found in English. Response latencies for prime-target pairs whose onsets differed in place of articulation (e.g., /b/-/d/) patterned differently in English and Russian. Prime-target pairs whose onsets differed in constriction location only (e.g., /s/ and /ʂ/) did not yield a priming effect in Russian. We conclude that feature-priming effects are modulated not only by the phonological similarity between the onsets of primes and targets but also by the dynamics of feature activation and by the language-specific relationship between orthography and phonology. Our findings suggest that feature-level representations need to be included in models of reading aloud and of speech production if we are to move forward with theorizing in these research domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Are people consistent when reading nonwords aloud on different occasions?

Tests of nonword reading have been instrumental in adjudicating between theories of reading and in assessing individuals' reading skill in educational and clinical practice. It is generally assumed that the way in which readers pronounce nonwords reflects their long-term knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences that exist in the writing system. The present study found considerable variability in how the same adults read the same 50 nonwords across five sessions. This variability was not all random: Nonwords that consisted of graphemes that had multiple possible pronunciations in English elicited more intraparticipant variation. Furthermore, over time, shifts in participants' responses occurred such that some pronunciations became used more frequently, while others were pruned. We discuss possible mechanisms by which session-to-session variability arises and implications that our findings have for interpreting snapshot-based studies of nonword reading. We argue that it is essential to understand mechanisms underpinning this session-to-session variability in order to interpret differences across individuals in how they read nonwords aloud on a single occasion.

Skilled readers' sensitivity to meaningful regularities in English writing.

Substantial research has been undertaken to understand the relationship between spelling and sound, but we know little about the relationship between spelling and meaning in alphabetic writing systems. We present a computational analysis of English writing in which we develop new constructs to describe this relationship. Diagnosticity captures the amount of meaningful information in a given spelling, whereas specificity estimates the degree of dispersion of this meaning across different spellings for a particular sound sequence. Using these two constructs, we demonstrate that particular suffix spellings tend to be reserved for particular meaningful functions. We then show across three paradigms (nonword classification, spelling, and eye tracking during sentence reading) that this form of regularity between spelling and meaning influences the behaviour of skilled readers, and that the degree of this behavioural sensitivity mirrors the strength of spelling-to-meaning regularities in the writing system. We close by arguing that English spelling may have become fractionated such that the high degree of spelling-sound inconsistency maximises the transmission of meaningful information.

Why is nonword reading so variable in adult skilled readers?

When the task is reading nonwords aloud, skilled adult readers are very variable in the responses they produce: a nonword can evoke as many as 24 different responses in a group of such readers. Why is nonword reading so variable? We analysed a large database of reading responses to nonwords, which documented that two factors contribute to this variability. The first factor is variability in graphemic parsing (the parsing of a letter string into its constituent graphemes): the same nonword can be graphemically parsed in different ways by different readers. The second factor is phoneme assignment: even when all subjects produce the same graphemic parsing of a nonword, they vary in what phonemes they assign to the resulting set of graphemes. We consider the implications of these results for the computational modelling of reading, for the assessment of impairments of nonword reading, and for the study of reading aloud in other alphabetically written languages and in nonalphabetic writing systems.

Bilingualism and Biliteracy in Down Syndrome: Insights From a Case Study.

We present the case study of MB-a bilingual child with Down syndrome (DS) who speaks Russian (first language [L1]) and English (second language [L2]) and has learned to read in two different alphabets with different symbol systems. We demonstrate that, in terms of oral language, MB is as proficient in Russian as English, with a mild advantage for reading in English, her language of formal instruction. MB's L1 abilities were compared with those of 11 Russian-speaking typically developing monolinguals and her L2 abilities to those of 15 English-speaking typically developing monolinguals and six monolingual English-speaking children with DS; each group achieving the same level of word reading ability as MB. We conclude that learning two languages in the presence of a learning difficulty need have no detrimental effect on either a child's language or literacy development.

Phonotactic constraints: Implications for models of oral reading in Russian.

The present article investigates how phonotactic rules constrain oral reading in the Russian language. The pronunciation of letters in Russian is regular and consistent, but it is subject to substantial phonotactic influence: the position of a phoneme and its phonological context within a word can alter its pronunciation. In Part 1 of the article, we analyze the orthography-to-phonology and phonology-to-phonology (i.e., phonotactic) relationships in Russian monosyllabic words. In Part 2 of the article, we report empirical data from an oral word reading task that show an effect of phonotactic dependencies on skilled reading in Russian: humans are slower when reading words where letter-phoneme correspondences are highly constrained by phonotactic rules compared with those where there are few or no such constraints present. A further question of interest in this article is how computational models of oral reading deal with the phonotactics of the Russian language. To answer this question, in Part 3, we report simulations from the Russian dual-route cascaded model (DRC) and the Russian connectionist dual-process model (CDP++) and assess the performance of the 2 models by testing them against human data.

How word-beginnings constrain the pronunciations of word-ends in the reading aloud of English: the phenomena of head- and onset-conditioning.

Background. A word whose body is pronounced in different ways in different words is body-inconsistent. When we take the unit that precedes the vowel into account for the calculation of body-consistency, the proportion of English words that are body-inconsistent is considerably reduced at the level of corpus analysis, prompting the question of whether humans actually use such head/onset-conditioning when they read. Methods. Four metrics for head/onset-constrained body-consistency were calculated: by the last grapheme of the head, by the last phoneme of the onset, by place and manner of articulation of the last phoneme of the onset, and by manner of articulation of the last phoneme of the onset. Since these were highly correlated, principal component analysis was performed on them. Results. Two out of four resulting principal components explained significant variance in the reading-aloud reaction times, beyond regularity and body-consistency. Discussion. Humans read head/onset-conditioned words faster than would be predicted based on their body-consistency and regularity only. We conclude that humans are sensitive to the dependency between word-beginnings and word-ends when they read aloud, and that this dependency is phonological in nature, rather than orthographic.

Cognitive structure of writing disorders in Russian: what would Luria say?

Acquired disorders of writing in the Russian language have been reported for more than a century. The study of these disorders reflects the history of Russian neuropsychology and is dominated by the syndrome approach most notably by the writings of Luria. Indeed, our understanding of acquired dysgraphia in Russian speakers is conceptualized according to the classical approach in Modern Russia. In this review, we describe the classical approach and compare it to the cognitive neuropsychological models of writing disorders that are developed to explain dysgraphia in English and in other Western European languages. We argue that the basic theoretical assumptions of the two approaches - cognitive and classical or syndrome approach - share similarities. It is therefore proposed that identification of acquired cases of dysgraphia in Russian could potentially benefit from taking the cognitive neuropsychological perspective. We also conclude that adopting elements of the syndrome approach would substantially enrich the understanding of acquired dysgraphia since these offer an insight into processes not described in the cognitive neuropsychological approach.