Content area
This investigation examined word-learning performance in beginning readers. The children learned to read words with regular spelling-sound mappings (e.g., snake) more easily than words with irregular spelling-sound mappings (e.g., sword). In addition, there was an effect of semantics: Children learned to read concrete words (e.g., elbow) more successfully than abstract words (e.g., temper). Trial-by-trial learning indicated that children made greater use of the regularity and semantic properties at later trials as compared with early trials. The influence of cognitive skills (paired associate learning and phonological awareness) on word-learning performance was also examined. Regression analyses revealed that whereas paired associate learning skills accounted for unique variance in the children's learning of both regular and irregular words, phonological awareness accounted for unique variance only in the acquisition of regular words. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
This investigation examined word-learning performance in beginning readers. The children learned to read words with regular spelling-sound mappings (e.g., snake) more easily than words with irregular spelling-sound mappings (e.g., sword). In addition, there was an effect of semantics: Children learned to read concrete words (e.g., elbow) more successfully than abstract words (e.g., temper). Trial-by-trial learning indicated that children made greater use of the regularity and semantic properties at later trials as compared with early trials. The influence of cognitive skills (paired associate learning and phonological awareness) on word-learning performance was also examined. Regression analyses revealed that whereas paired associate learning skills accounted for unique variance in the children's learning of both regular and irregular words, phonological awareness accounted for unique variance only in the acquisition of regular words.
Keywords: word recognition, phonology, semantics, phonological awareness, paired associate learning, reading acquisition
The reading process is a fascinating accomplishment that involves the mastery and coordinated action of several cognitive skills. For decades, researchers have examined the mechanisms underlying reading performance. For a beginning reader, learning to identify a word in print involves linking the word's orthographic characteristics to preexisting representations in the child's spoken vocabulary. The ease with which the representations are accessed depends, in part, on the particular characteristics of the word. A good deal of research has focused on the child's ability to deal with the spelling-sound mappings and semantic characteristics of words.
Spelling-sound mappings refer to the relationship between the visual form of the word and the phonological properties of the word. A word that possesses a letter sequence that follows typical spelling-sound mappings would be considered to be regular (e.g., steam). An irregular word consists of a letter sequence that does not follow typical spelling-sound mappings (e.g., thread; Seidenberg, Waters, Barnes, & Tannenhaus, 1984). If children make use of the spelling-sound mappings of a word in the process of word identification, it follows that regular words would be easier to process than irregular words. Research has repeatedly demonstrated such a regularity effect, whereby regular words are processed and learned more effectively than irregular words (Backman, Bruck, Hebert, & Seidenberg, 1984; Coltheart, Laxon, Keating, & Pool, 1986; Manis, 1985; Rack, Hulme, Snowling, & Wightman, 1994; Schlapp & Underwood, 1988).
Words also differ in terms of the amount of semantic richness they possess (Di Vesta & Walls, 1970; Paivio, 1968; Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968). Concrete words (e.g., dog, foot), considered to be high in terms of their semantic richness, have "direct sensory referents and, typically, easily accessible images" (Schwanenflugel & Akin, 1994, p. 251). In contrast, abstract words (e.g., feeling, greed) do not have the same depth of sensory reference and corresponding imagery. Research has demonstrated that reading material tends to become more abstract as children become more advanced in their reading level (Chall, 1983). Beginning readers appear to rely heavily on the semantic aspects of a word, as evidenced by particular difficulty in reading words that are abstract (Coltheart, Laxon, & Keating, 1988; McFaIIs, Schwanenflugel, & Stahl, 1996).
Research involving word-learning paradigms has tended to focus on the role of regularity. However, the role of semantics has not been neglected completely. Kiraly and Furlong (1974) found that young prereaders learned concrete words more readily than abstract words, whereas Richmond and McNinch (1977) found that there was no difference in first graders' ability to read abstract versus concrete words. Unfortunately, differential findings and some methodological issues (e.g., use of small word lists, failure to match words with respect to grammatical class) of the previous studies prevent strong conclusions (Laing & Huhne, 1999).
In addition to the individual effects of regularity and semantics on reading performance, it is important to consider the joint effects of these factors on performance. Connectionist models have provided a useful framework to examine this question. Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson (1996) have described a model that allows for an examination of the influence of semantics on the generation of phonological representations. The interaction between semantics and phonology is described as a "division of labor" between a phonological pathway (orthography-phonology, or O-P) and a semantic pathway (orthography-semantics-phonology, or O-S-P). Thus, when a written word is encountered, the generation of a phonological representation (i.e., the generation of the sound of the word) could take place through the O-P route in which meaning is not accessed or through the O-S-P route in which meaning is accessed. Although semantics has the potential to affect the naming of all words, the model predicts that the extent to which semantics plays a role in word naming will depend on the properties of the words themselves. Because the O-P mappings of high-frequency words tend to be well established, there will be little aid from semantics when they are encountered by a reader. However, when the O-P mappings are less efficient, as with low-frequency words, the semantic content will have a greater opportunity to influence the naming process via the O-S-P route. Furthermore, the influence of the word's semantic properties will vary as a function of the consistency of the O-P mappings. Semantics is thought to play a strong role in the naming of words with inconsistent O-P mappings (e.g., irregular words), whereas semantics is predicted to play a minimal role in the naming of words with consistent O-P mappings (e.g., regular words). Findings from studies of skilled adult readers support these predictions. That is, using both a naming paradigm (Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995) and a priming paradigm (Cortese, Simpson, & Woolsey, 1997), semantics has been found to exert a greater influence on the reading of irregular words as compared with regular words.
The Plaut et al. (1996) model, in particular the division of labour hypothesis, appears to be appropriate for skilled readers; however, its usefulness in explaining the processes involved in reading acquisition has yet to be established. Laing and Hulme (1999, Experiment 2) investigated the joint effects of spelling-sound consistency and semantics by examining the ability of beginning readers to learn four different letter cues: high-imageability phonetic cues (e.g., bzkt for basket), high-imageability control cues (e.g., bfkt for basket), low-imageability phonetic cues (nzi for noisy), and low-imageability control cues (nfi for noisy). On the basis of Plaut et al.'s model, Laing and Huhne (1999) predicted that phonology and imageability would interact, such that the effect of imageability would be greater for the control cues (with comparatively weaker O-P mappings) than for the phonetic cues. However, Laing and Hulme found that the influence of imageability was similar for both phonetic and control cues. Thus, the division of labour hypothesis was not supported in this particular learning study.
Another important consideration in reading acquisition involves the individual skills of the learner. According to most theories of reading development, phonological skills (i.e., the sensitivity to and awareness of the sounds associated with letters and words) are essential to reading development (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Mann, 1993; Siegel, 1993; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987). It has been well established that children who exhibit good phonological skills tend to become good readers, whereas children with poorly developed phonological skills tend to have difficulty reading and show poor reading progress (Blachman, 1994; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Juel, 1988; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Taylor, 1997; Snowling, 1980). Phonological awareness, the metalinguistic awareness of the phonological forms of spoken words (e.g., understanding that the spoken words bin and bat begin with the same sound), has been described as the foundational skill from which an efficient reading system can be based. That is, children are thought to have "cracked the alphabetic code" once they are sensitive to the phonemic structure of words (Byrne, 1996).
Although a strong case has been made for a central role for phonological awareness in reading acquisition, the acquisition process can be viewed as a type of visual-verbal paired associate learning skill; that is, performance depends on one's ability to form associations between the written and spoken forms of words. Indeed, research (e.g., Manis, 1985; Vellutino, Scanlon, & Spearing, 1995; Vellutino, Steger, Harding, & Phillips, 1975) has demonstrated that reading performance is correlated with the ability to associate pictorial stimuli with novel words-that is, a paired associate learning task.
Given that visual-verbal paired associate learning tasks tend to draw heavily on phonological skills, more recent work has focused on the question of whether performance in these learning tasks accounts for variability in reading performance over and above that accounted for by phonological awareness. Windfuhr and Snowling (2001) found that paired associate learning and phonological awareness each accounted for unique variance in reading ability in a sample of children ranging from 6 to 11 years of age. Mayringer and Wimmer (2000) found that German children with weak reading skills but normal performance on phonological awareness tasks had more difficulty on a task that involved associating pictures of fantasy animals with nonsense names than did normal readers. These findings underscore the importance of examining the role of basic learning skills in reading development. According to Windfuhr and Snowling, "Mechanisms which account for the ability to link or 'hook-up' stimulus-response pairs in the paired associate learning task may impose an independent constraint on learning to read" (p. 170).
The Present Investigation
The primary goal of the present study was to examine regular and irregular word-learning performance of children who are at a very early point in their reading development-namely, before the development of any systematic spelling-sound decoding skills. Rack et al. (1994) found that beginning readers who exhibited no pretraining decoding skills were able to learn regular words better than irregular words. This finding is inconsistent with stage models (e.g., Frith, 1985) of reading development that suggest children are completely insensitive to spelling-sound forms of words until they have developed formal decoding skills. Rack et al. have argued that children without decoding skills are capable of learning mappings between words and their pronunciations by the "activation of (possibly partial) information about words' pronunciations from cues present in the printed words' letter sounds or letter names" (p. 44; see also Ehri, 1992). According to Rack et al., regular words are learned more readily because they have more transparent cues than do irregular words.
However, important issues remain. First, there have been no systematic analyses of the joint effects of regularity and semantics in a word (as opposed to abbreviated cue word; see Laing & Hulme, 1999) learning paradigm. second, previous studies of children's word learning have failed to examine the learning functions for different word types. The present research seeks to fill this void through an investigation of the influence of regularity and semantics on trial-by-trial word-learning performance of children who have yet to develop decoding skills.
Another important objective of the present investigation builds on the work of Windfuhr and Snowling (2001), which has provided evidence that both phonological awareness and paired associate learning make unique contributions to the reading performance of elementary schoolchildren. The paradigm we use here allows us to explore the role these cognitive skills play in the beginning reader's acquisition of new words. Moreover, our investigation examines the impact of these skills as they relate to the learning of words that vary with respect to linguistic complexitythat is, regular versus irregular words.
Method
Participants
Parental permission to participate was granted for 63 kindergarten and first-grade children who attended one of four schools in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. To ensure that our final sample consisted of nondecoders, we excluded children (n = 15) who read more than one nonword on the Word Attack subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (Woodcock, 1988). Two children were further excluded from analyses because they were able to read at least one of the experimental words before training. Thus, the final sample consisted of 46 participants, with 24 girls and 22 boys (mean age = 75.87 months, SD - 7.0 months). Twenty-seven children were in kindergarten, and 19 children were in first grade.1
Materials and Design
The measures of individual skills examined were phonological awareness and paired associate learning. Phonological awareness was assessed using the Beginning-Sound Same and End-Sound Same subtests of the Test of Phonological Awareness (Torgeson & Bryant, 1994). The two subtest scores were added together to provide one total phonological awareness score (maximum = 20). The average score was 14.74 (SD = 3.43). The paired associate learning task consisted of four two-dimensional black-and-white designs (Vanderplas & Garvin, 1959) that were paired with a spoken nonsense word. The pictures were shown to the children twice each with the experimenter saying the word aloud. Following this training, the pictures were shuffled and displayed. The children were required to say aloud the associated name (i.e., fampa, meferal, stosp, balio) for each pattern (procedure adapted from Windfuhr & Snowling, 2001). There were 10 trials during which the experimenter provided corrective feedback. Correct pairings were scored as 1, and incorrect pairings were scored as O. Testing was discontinued following the 10th trial, which made the total possible correct responses 40 for each child (i.e., 10 trials X 4 pairings). The average score was 9.80 (SD = 7.49).
The Word Learning task consisted of 40 English words. The experimental words were categorised in four groups of 10 words that differed in terms of their levels of concreteness and regularity (i.e., the four groups of words were concrete-regular, concreteirregular, abstract-regular, and abstract-irregular). To make meaningful comparisons between word groups, it was essential that the word groups be matched on other factors that have been shown to influence performance. Thus, the groups were all matched for their frequency (p > .89), age of acquisition (AOA; p > .54), word length (p > .98), and word types (e.g., nouns, verbs, etc.). The words and their ratings are provided in the Appendix. The concreteness and AOA ratings were taken from Gilhooly and Logic (1980) and the frequency ratings were taken from Kucera and Francis (1967). The concreteness rating used by Gilhooly and Logie (1980) was based on a 7-point scale on which a higher score indicates a more concrete concept. For this study, a word was considered to be concrete if its rating was more than 500 and abstract if its rating was less than 450. The concreteness levels for the concrete (M = 585) and abstract (M = 335) words were significantly different, t (38) = 16.15, p < .001. The classification of regular and irregular words was similar to Rack et al.'s (1994) transparent-opaque classification. Regular (transparent) words consisted of typical grapheme-phoneme correspondences, whereas irregular (opaque) words contained at least one letter that did not correspond to a sound in the word's pronunciation or contained a grapheme that was assigned an atypical pronunciation. The regular word stimuli, collapsed across concrete and abstract categories, matched the irregular word stimuli on all the measured word properties-that is, age of acquisition (p > .92), frequency (p > .68), concreteness (p > .75), and number of letters (p > .77).
Procedure
The study consisted of one initial screening session and four training sessions. Each session was held on a separate day. In the initial screening, the participants were tested on the individual skill/screening measures (i.e., letter-name and letter-sound identification, nonword reading, phonological awareness, paired associate learning, and pretraining knowledge of the experimental words). This initial session took approximately 40 min. The four subsequent word-learning sessions took approximately 15 min each. During each session, the children were introduced to one of the four word types (concrete-regular, concrete-irregular, abstract-regular, or abstract-irregular). The order in which the word types were presented to each participant was determined in a random fashion. The procedure for the word-learning task was the same during each session: The participant was initially shown 10 cue cards, each with a word printed on it. Each card was in view for 5 s. The experimenter read the word twice, and the participant repeated it once. Following this initial exposure to the words, the participant was asked to read each of the 10 words aloud, with corrective feedback provided. This process was completed five times, to create five learning trials (the words were randomly ordered for each learning trial). Correct responses were scored as 1, and incorrect responses were scored as 0. Thus, each learning trial allowed for a maximum score of 10.
Results
The results of the word-learning task are shown in Figure 1. The data were subjected to a 2 X 2 X 5 analysis of variance (ANOVA) in which the factors were regularity (irregular vs. regular), semantics (concrete vs. abstract), and trial (Trials 1-5). The ANOVA was conducted on the data by participant (i.e., in which semantics, regularity, and trial are all repeated measures-i.e., each participant read all word types over repeated trials) and by item (i.e., in which each word was analysed as to the number of participants who read it correctly; trial is a repeated measures variable, and semantics and regularity are between-item variables). The participant analyses were conducted to ensure that the results could generalise across participants, and the item analyses were conducted to ensure the generalisability of results across experimental items (Clark, 1973). Only findings that demonstrate significance by participants and items are discussed.
There was a main effect of trial by participants, F(4, 180) = 104.66, p < .001, and by items, F(4, 144) = 197.37, p < .001. Follow-up pairwise comparisons demonstrated that the children's performance significantly improved over every exposure (all ps < .001). There was a main effect of regularity by participants, F(1, 45) = 33.91, p < .001, and by items, F(1, 36) = 12.73, p < .01, whereby children learned regular words with more ease than they did irregular words. There was also a main effect of semantics by participants, F(1, 45) = 65.59, p < .001, and by items, F(1, 36) = 17.51, p < .001. This finding demonstrates that children learn words that are concrete (i.e., have a rich semantic representation) more efficiently than those that are abstract (i.e., do not have a rich semantic representation).
A purpose of this study was to investigate the acquisition functions for the different word types, which provided the rationale for incorporating the trial variable in the analyses instead of collapsing across the trials as previous research has done. There was a significant Semantics X Trial interaction by participant, F(4, 180) = 7.51, p < .001, and by item, F(4, 144) = 4.55, p < .01, indicating that the influence of semantics (i.e., the advantage for concrete over abstract words) varied as a function of learning trial. That is, the impact of semantics was modest in Trial 1 and increased in subsequent trials. There was also a significant interaction between regularity and trial, whereby the advantage for regular words increased over the learning trials by participant, F(4, 180) = 7.171, p < .001, and by item, F(4, 144) = 4.47, p < .01. The two-way interaction between regularity and semantics and the three-way interaction between trial, regularity, and semantics were not significant.
Analysis of Individual Differences in Word Learning
Word learning was determined by calculating each participant's Trial 5 reading performance separately for regular and irregular words (collapsing over the semantic factor of concreteness). Table 1 contains the correlations between age, phonological awareness, paired associate learning, regular word learning, and irregular word learning.
Separate regression analyses were conducted for each of two criterion (dependent) variables: regular and irregular word learning. Given that age was significantly correlated with each of these criterion variables (see Table 1), a hierarchical approach was used in each analysis, whereby age was entered in the first step, followed by phonological awareness and paired associate learning together in the second step. This method assesses the unique contributions of phonological awareness and paired associate learning to word-learning performance (i.e., the contribution of phonological awareness after controlling for age and paired associate learning and the contribution of paired associate learning after controlling for age and phonological awareness).
Regular word learning. Age (Step 1) accounted for 20.8% of the variability in regular word learning, F(1,44) = 11.55, p < .01. Phonological awareness and paired associate learning (Step 2) together accounted for an additional 27% of the variability, F(2, 42) = 10.88, p < .001. Further tests of the semipartial correlations for phonological awareness and paired associate learning with regular word learning (see Table 2) indicated that both of these predictors accounted for unique variance: phonological awareness, 6.3%, f(45) = 2.21, p < .05, and paired associate learning, 14.4%, f(45) = 3.41, p < .01.
Irregular word learning. Age (Step 1) accounted for 25% of the variability in irregular word learning, F(1, 44) = 14.64, p < .001. Phonological awareness and paired associate learning (Step 2) together accounted for an additional 28.3% of the variability, F(2, 42) = 12.70, p < .001. Further tests of the semipartial correlations for phonological awareness and paired associate learning with irregular word learning (see Table 2) indicated that only paired associate learning accounted for unique variance, 25%, t(45) = 4.76, p < .001. Only 0.16% of the variability in irregular word learning was uniquely attributable to phonological awareness (p > .65).
Discussion
An important question addressed in this study is the extent to which beginning readers without decoding skills make use of orthographyto-phonology mappings that exist in words. The children in our study learned to read words with regular orthography-to-phonology mappings more easily than words with irregular orthography-tophonology mappings. This finding (see also Rack et al., 1994) suggests that contrary to the view of some stage models of reading development (e.g., Frith, 1985), children are able to set up rudimentary mappings from a word's letter sequences to its pronunciation early on in reading development. This notion is very much in accord with Ehri's (1992) theory, which posits that beginning readers are sensitive to the overlap between a word's letters and sounds before the onset of systematic decoding skills.
In addition to showing an effect of regularity on word learning, the present study demonstrates that semantics plays a substantial role in reading acquisition. This is particularly important as many models of reading development have focused mainly on phonological processing, with little focus on the role of semantic processing. There are a number of hypotheses regarding why concrete words are learned more easily than abstract words. For example, theorists have emphasised that concrete words are characterised by a greater number of semantic features (Jones, 1985), that concrete words allow for greater retrieval of information from previous knowledge (Schwanenflugel & Shoben, 1983), and that there are representational differences between concrete and abstract words within an image system (Paivio, 1968). The present study does not provide support for one particular theory but rather contributes to the empirical evidence that suggests that within the context of reading acquisition, the level of semantic representation influences the ease with which words are learned. More generally, the results indicate that theories of reading development must pay greater attention to the impact of semantics on word-learning performance.
As outlined earlier, Flaut et al.'s (1996) connectionist model provides a useful framework with which to examine the joint effects of regularity and semantics. The model suggests that when words do not have consistent mappings between orthography and phonology (as with irregular words), there will be a relatively greater reliance on the O-S-P pathway, which will result in a larger semantic effect for irregular words than for regular words. Certainly, empirical support for this division of labour hypothesis has been found in studies examining word naming in skilled adult readers (e.g., Strain et al., 1995). However, we did not find support for this hypothesis in the context of word-learning performance in beginning readers. Rather, word regularity and semantics operated in an additive fashion. These results are consistent with those of Laing and Hulme (1999), who found additive effects of regularity and semantics in the learning of cue words. Following Laing and Hulme, we suggest that the interaction between a phonological (O-P) and semantic (O-S-P) pathway occurs later in development. For beginning readers, O-P connections are inefficient; thus, semantics always has the potential to support the learning of both regular and irregular words. Skilled readers, on the other hand, have established connections between orthography and phonology that are sufficiently efficient (particularly for frequently encountered words and regular words), such that the effect of semantics is limited to the case of low-frequency irregular words. Under these circumstances, an interaction emerges (see also Strain & Herdman, 1999, for a similar argument with respect to high- vs. low-functioning adult readers).
Although a Regularity X Semantics interaction was not observed in our study, analyses of trial-by-trial learning revealed that the effects of regularity and semantics increased with greater exposure to the word types. As children's exposure to words increases, there appears to be an improvement in both the O-P pathway (producing the interaction between regularity and trial) and the O-S-P pathway (giving rise to the interaction between semantics and trial).
Previous research by Windfuhr and Snowling (2001) demonstrated that both phonological awareness and paired associate learning make unique contributions to the reading performance of elementary schoolchildren. Our investigation examined the role that these skills play in the beginning reader's acquisition of words that vary in linguistic complexity. We found that paired associate learning skill accounted for unique variance in the children's learning of both regular and irregular words, whereas phonological awareness accounted for unique variance only in the acquisition of regular words. Thus, paired associate learning appears to tap a basic memory skill that poses an independent constraint on word learning, irrespective of the linguistic complexity of the items to be learned. It has been suggested that this skill is fundamental to the establishment of lexical connections between written words and their pronunciations (Windfuhr & Snowling, 2001). However, our results also point to the benefit of having good phonological awareness skills. Having sensitivity to the phonemic structure of words appears to provide additional support for learning words that have transparent O-P mappings.
To conclude, the results of the present investigation provide important insights into the processes involved in reading acquisition. First, they support the view that beginning readers are sensitive to mappings between orthography and phonology before the development of systematic decoding skills (e.g., Ehri, 1992; Rack et al., 1994). The finding of the semantic influence on early word learning (in addition to regularity) is supportive of the view that when children learn to read, they establish parallel connections between orthography and phonology and between orthography and semantics (Laing & Hulme, 1999). second, in the acquisition of both regular and irregular words, paired associate learning taps a learning constraint that is independent of phonological skills. Phonological awareness appears to provide extra support for the acquisition of regular words.
1 The children's letter-name and letter-sound knowledge was assessed by using a modified version (i.e., the original test only requires children to identify letternames) of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised Letter Identification subtest. The average number of letter names identified was 23.78 (SD = 1.75) out of a possible 25, and the average number of letter sounds identified was 21.02 (SD = 3.90) out of a possible 25. Thus, although our final sample of children demonstrated no appreciable decoding skills, they did demonstrate near-ceiling levels of letter knowledge.
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Elizabeth Nilsen
University of Waterloo
Derrick Bourassa
University of Winnipeg
Elizabeth Nilsen, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo; Derrick Bourassa, Department of Psychology, University of Winnipeg.
This research was supported by Grant 227563 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Derrick Bourassa. We thank Krista Doucette for research assistance and the children, parents, and teachers of the Annapolis Valley and Southwest Regional School Boards (Nova Scotia, Canada) for their cooperation.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Elizabeth Nilsen, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3Gl. E-mail: [email protected]
Copyright Canadian Psychological Association Jun 2008