Children's and adults' parafoveal processes in German: Phonological and orthographic effects

Simon P Tiffin-Richards,Sascha Schroeder

doi:10.1080/20445911.2014.999076

Simon P Tiffin-Richards, Sascha Schroeder

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2014.999076

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Abstract

Phonological and orthographic information has been shown to play an important role in parafoveal processing in skilled adult reading in English. In the present study, we investigated whether similar parafoveal effects can be found in children using the boundary eye tracking method. Children and adults read sentences in German with embedded target nouns which were presented in original, pseudohomophone (PsH), transposed-letter (TL), lower-case and control conditions to assess phonological and orthographic preview effects. We found evidence of PsH preview benefit effects for children. We also found TL preview benefit effects for adults, while children only showed these effects under specific conditions. Results are consistent with the developmental view that reading initially depends on phonological processes and that orthographic processes become increasingly important.

Highlights

Phonological and orthographic information has been shown to play an important role in parafoveal processing in skilled adult reading in English
Skilled readers derive the orthographic codes of printed words, decode their corresponding phonological codes, and use these to retrieve lexical and semantic information stored in the mental lexicon
The embedded target words were presented as previews with PsH, capitalisation or TL manipulations compared to CTLs to assess the readers’ sensitivity to phonological and orthographic information in the parafovea

Summary

Introduction

There is good reason to believe, based on current models of visual word recognition and empirical evidence in transparent orthographies, that children may initially be more dependent on phonological codes than adults while orthographic codes become increasingly important for efficient word identification (Ziegler, Bertrand, Lété, & Grainger, 2013) The evidence of this developmental pattern in parafoveal processes is as yet lacking. There is substantial evidence for English that skilled readers can detect abstract orthographic codes as well as phonological codes and use these to activate lexical representations, facilitating later foveal word recognition processes (Hyönä, 2011; Rayner, 1975; Schotter et al, 2012), there is still some debate about whether semantic and morphological information can be derived from the parafovea (Dimigen, Kliegl, & Sommer, 2012; Häikiö, Bertram, & Hyönä, 2010; Hohenstein & Kliegl, 2013a; Schotter, 2013)

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