Reading

Question 1

Levels of conscious phonological awareness

Answer 1

Syllable - this is developed spontaneously
Rhyme - this is developed spontaneously, nursery rhymes are used with preliterate children
Phoneme - the smallest unit of sound that changes the meaning of a word, this needs tuition to develop, this tuition is often simply learning to read, children lose their ability to distinguish between phonemes in other languages as they grow up

Question 2

Orthography

Answer 2

The way of writing a language. Letter-phoneme mappings, punctuation, etc. Graphemes, letters, writing signs.

Question 3

Graphemes

Answer 3

Letters representing a single phoneme.

Question 4

Rhyme awareness and reading in English

Answer 4

Sensitivity to rhyme measured at 3,4 and 5 years of aged is a strong predictor of later reading development in English. This relationship is still strong even after controls for many other variables.

Question 5

Oddity task in normal developing children

Answer 5

Bradley and Bryant (1983) How psychologists measure rhyme skills. They did the oddity task in 400 normally developing 4 and 5 years olds. Compared sets of either rhyming words (rime) or words matched on alliteration (onset) and there was one odd word out. Children are better at identifying the odd one out when the words are matched with rhymes than with alliteration.
They followed up the 400 children when they were 7 and 8. They found that rhyme skills predicted reading skills even after statistical controls for many other variables (age, IQ, memory, mothers education levels). Rhyme sensitivity predicted reading and spelling but not mathematics. This shows how important rhyming skills are for later reading development.

Question 6

Oddity task in dyslexic children

Answer 6

Bradley and Bryant (1978) Children who have difficulties in learning to read that would not be expected on the basis of their intellectual abilities show relatively poor rhyming skills. The most stringent research design compares dyslexic children to younger reading level control children reading at the same level as the dyslexic children (reading level controls). Compared sets of either rhyming words or words matched on alliteration and there was one odd word out. Children with dyslexia were worse at finding the odd one out in both rhyming and alliteration trials. Children with dyslexia were slightly better at choosing the odd one out in the rhyming trials than the alliteration trials. This shows children with reading problems also have problems with phonological skills.

Question 7

Training phonological awareness

Answer 7

Bradley and Bryant (1978) In their study of 400 children, they gave training in rhyme to the 60 children with the poorest rhyming skills at the beginning of the study. The total training time was 40 hours spread over 2 years. They had 4 different conditions:
- phonological training in being taught that words have the same first, middle and end sounds
- taught what letter correspond to the common sounds in the words, above and letter representations
- conceptual categorisation, seen control, they were shown pictures and had to categorise the pictures
- unseen control, you get to see their spontaneous development on their own
They found gains in reading after the 2 years in the phonological training. These gains were also seen after adjusting for age and IQ. This shows that if the children received some sort of phonological training, this would improve their reading ability. There was no significant difference between the seen and unseen control.

Question 8

Phoneme awareness and reading in English

Answer 8

Sensitivity to phonemes is a stronger predictor of reading development in English.

Question 9

Illiterate adults and phonemes

Answer 9

Morais et al (1979) shows illiterate adults have difficulty with phoneme awareness.

Question 10

A strong research design for assessing development

Answer 10

1) show a longitudinal connection
2) test their conclusion with a training study
3) show gains in comparison to a seen control group

Question 11

Development of onset rime and phoneme awareness

Answer 11

In all languages (so far studied), children develop syllable and onset rhyme awareness prior to literacy. Phoneme awareness develops as literacy is taught. In some languages, phonetic development is very rapid.

Question 12

Why is English a deep orthographical language

Answer 12

Homophones - same sounding, words with the same pronunciation but different spelling
Heteronyms - words with different pronunciations but the same spelling

Question 13

Orthographic transparency

Answer 13

Alphabetic languages vary in the degree to which letters have a 1:1 mapping.
Shallow/transparent - Greek, Finnish, German, Italian, Spanish
Deep/opaque - French, Portuguese, Danish, English

Question 14

Cross language studies of oddity task

Answer 14

Comparing English, German and Chinese children on the oddity task. Asked to pick the odd one out from matching onset (initial sounds) or matching rime (either medial or final sound). All children are better at identifying the odd one in the rime conditions than the onset condition. English children are best in the onset conditions and Chinese are worst in the rime conditions.

Question 15

Cross language studies of tapping tasks

Answer 15

The tapping task involves syllable and phoneme conditions and children have to tap for how many are in a word read to them e.g. book would be 3 taps in the phoneme condition and 1 tap in the syllable condition. Comparing English and Italian children from before and after they learned to read. Overall children were much better at both conditions after they had learnt to read. Italian children were overall better than English children at both time points for both conditions. Italian has a shallower orthography so this may be why they are better at phoneme recognition just after starting to learn to read.

Question 16

Syllable and phoneme counting across languages

Answer 16

Norwegian - Hoien et al (1995)
German - Wimmer et al (1991)
French - Demont and Gombert (1996)
Turkish - Durgunoglu and Oney (1999)
Greek - Harris and Giannoulis (1999)
Children in either kindergarten or early grade one. Children are asked to count the number of syllables or the number of phonemes in a word. Across languages, we see clearly that children are better at identifying syllables than phonemes. Supports the idea that phoneme understanding is not developing as spontaneously as syllable understanding.

Question 17

Phoneme counting across languages

Answer 17

Comparing studies done on children’s ability to count phonemes. Porpodas found that Greek children are nearly 100% correct when asked to count phonemes in words at the end of grade one whereas Perfetti et al found that English children were only around 65% correct when asked to count phonemes in words at the end of grade 2. English has a much deeper orthography than Greek so this may be why Greek children find it much easier to identify the phonemes in words.

Question 18

Letter sound recording abilities in the first year of schooling across the EU

Answer 18

COST A8 was a collaboration of EU countries to assess general language abilities and dyslexia. They assessed letter sound recording abilities in the first year of schooling. To do this, they compared children reading either simple familiar words or simple nonsense words. The participating scientists in the EU countries gave approximately matched lists of simple familiar words and nonwords to children during the first year at school. For nonsense words, children can only rely on their best guess of the sound of the word based on the letters in it. Children overall were usually better at reading words than nonwords. The worse children were at both conditions, the deeper the orthography of their language.

Question 19

Simple syllables and consistent alphabetic orthographies

Answer 19

Languages like Italian and Spanish have many simple or open syllables. A consonant vowel structure. Children with vocabularies segmented at the onset-rime level can easily solve the mapping problem. For many words, onsets and rimes = phonemes. Couples with consistent spelling systems in which the same letters always map to the same phonemes, this reduces the mapping problem considerably.

Question 20

Complex syllables and consistent alphabetic orthographies

Answer 20

For languages with more complex syllable structures like German, onset rime segmentation does not map onto phonemes. However, letter sound consistency still eases the mapping problem. Letters consistently predict phonemes.

Question 21

Complex syllables and inconsistent alphabetic orthographies

Answer 21

Inconsistent spelling systems increase the mapping problem, particularly for languages with complex syllables. Onset rime segmentation does not map to phonemes. Letters map to different phonemes.

Question 22

Consistency of letter sound correspondences in English

Answer 22

Treiman et al (1995) came up with a list of consonant vowel words so they could map letter consistency of the letters and sounds in English. Mean proportion of orthographic neighbours in which the pronunciation of the orthographic unit is the same as in another one. Looked at the percentages of different types of letters or phonemes that were pronounced consistently across the list:
Initial letter - 96%
Medial letter - 51%
Final letter - 91%
Onset-vowel - 52%
Rime - 77%
As rimes is higher then this can maybe tell us something about how it may be easier to predict the sounds of middle riming words than the onset of words.

Question 23

Why does letter sound recoding develop relatively slowly in English

Answer 23

On its own, it is insufficient for the development of reading efficiently. As well, some words are unique and must be learned as whole patterns.

Question 24

English as an outlier of world languages

Answer 24

English poses a particularly difficult acquisition and teaching problem. They have the same spellings and different phonemes and the same phonemes with different spellings. So we need multiple reading strategies for English.

Question 25

Psycholinguistic grain size theory

Answer 25

Ziegler and Goswami (2005) 1) Different reading strategies will develop in response to differences in orthographic structure. 2) In consistent orthographies, children will rely heavily on grapheme phoneme recoding strategies. 3) In inconsistent languages, children will rely on a mix of strategies.

Question 26

Three words of learning written words

Answer 26

Whole word: Global/holistic recognition - Sometimes you just need to learn the whole word and how the whole word is said. Letter sound correspondence - Sometimes using the prediction from the letter to the phoneme might work to learn. Rhyme analogy - Sometimes we can use the fact that if they are written similarly, they might rhyme in a similar way.

Question 27

Consistent vs inconsistent spelling systems

Answer 27

Consistent spelling systems - children can focus exclusively on single letters from beginning of reading and thus learn about phonemes very quickly. Inconsistent spelling systems - children need to develop multiple strategies e.g. decoding whole words, rhymes, phonemes. This takes longer and is more difficult.