How does orthographic knowledge influence performance on phonological awareness tasks?

Three experiments explored the nature of orthographic influences on performance on phonological awareness tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated that adults find it easier to perform phoneme deletions on items where there is a direct correspondence between letters and target sounds (e.g., take the /r[se text]/ from struggle) than where there is not (e.g., take the /w[see text]/ from squabble). Analogous results were found in a phoneme reversal task. Spelling production ability tended to correlate more strongly with performance on the former type of item than on the latter, suggesting that elevated performance on phonological awareness tasks is associated with the use of orthographic information. Experiment 2 produced similar results in Grade 5 children. Experiment 3 suggested that adults cannot inhibit orthographic activation when it is disadvantageous to them, as they performed no better on items such as squabble when they were presented in pure blocks than when they were presented in mixed blocks. It is concluded that there are substantial automatic orthographic influences on phonological awareness task performance that need to be taken into account in interpreting data concerning the relationship between phonological awareness and reading.

The relationship between auditory temporal processing, phonemic awareness, and reading disability.

Recent research suggests an auditory temporal deficit as a possible contributing factor to poor phonemic awareness skills. This study investigated the relationship between auditory temporal processing of nonspeech sounds and phonological awareness ability in children with a reading disability, aged 8-12 years, using Tallal's tone-order judgement task. Normal performance on the tone-order task was established for 36 normal readers. Forty-two children with developmental reading disability were then subdivided by their performance on the tone-order task. Average and poor tone-order subgroups were then compared on their ability to process speech sounds and visual symbols, and on phonological awareness and reading. The presence of a tone-order deficit did not relate to performance on the order processing of speech sounds, to poorer phonological awareness or to more severe reading difficulties. In particular, there was no evidence of a group by interstimulus interval interaction, as previously described in the literature, and thus little support for a general auditory temporal processing difficulty as an underlying problem in poor readers. In this study, deficient order judgement on a nonverbal auditory temporal order task (tone task) did not underlie phonological awareness or reading difficulties.

A crosslinguistic comparison of the production of utterances in discourse.

Functionalist theorists have proposed a number of decisions that a speaker has to make regarding the packaging of messages in response to the knowledge shared by the speaker and the listener in a discourse situation. The present study examined some procedures used by French and English speakers to implement message packaging during sentence formulation. The speech of French and English students talking informally about topics of interest to them was recorded, and hesitations were identified and located in the speech. According to the hesitation data, like English speakers, French speakers organised their thoughts into successive units having a variety of structural characterisations. Sentences, surface clauses, basic clauses and phrases were all found to be output units. In addition, French as well as English speakers output clauses containing new information more independently than clauses either containing presupposed information or satisfying an essential argument of the verb. French speakers also differed from English speakers in several ways. During articulation, phrases acted as more tightly integrated output units for French than for English speakers. French speakers also used different syntactic devices from English speakers for introducing and focussing on topics in the discourse. They did this by means other than the use of lexical subjects, such as left-detached topics and cleft sentences, supporting the hypothesis that spoken French has topic-comment structure, while English has subject-verb-object organisation. The crosslinguistic differences were argued to result largely from the distinct prosodic characteristics of the languages. The results were seen as providing new evidence for the similar and contrasting ways in which speakers of different languages respond to decisions about message packaging.

Evidence for a difference in syntactic knowledge between skilled and less skilled adult readers.

In two experiments, we investigated the relationship between reading ability and linguistic knowledge in adults. The results from Experiment 1 showed that good comprehenders performed more accurately than average comprehenders in a syntactic-judgment task that required them to decide whether pairs of words served the same grammatical function in sentences. By contrast, the reader groups performed similarly when required to make semantic judgments about whether pairs of words were related in meaning. In Experiment 2, individuals were classified according to comprehension level and reading speed. Good comprehenders again performed more accurately than average comprehenders in the syntactic task but not the semantic task. We argued that differences in form-class knowledge could be associated with corresponding differences in syntactic-processing efficiency, and thus with variation in reading-comprehension skill generally.

Prior context and the perception of lexically ambiguous sentences.

The perceptual complexity of lexically ambiguous and unambiguous sentences was compared in three experiments. In Experiment 1, the report of ambiguous words from rapidly presented ambiguous sentences was worse than the report of corresponding unambiguous words from unambiguous sentences. Results of Experiment 2 showed that the effect was not reduced by the presence of prior biasing context within the sentence. Experiment 3 repeated the finding with a sentence meaning classification task. It was concluded that both meanings of a lexically ambiguous sentence must be computed, even when prior context makes one meaning more plausible than the other.