Abstract
Two experiments studied attention in beginning and skilled readers of Dutch to letter information in function words and content words. Early and late acquired nouns and function words were presented to third-grade students and skilled adolescent readers. Target words were presented in short story contexts, as in the study of Greenberg, Koriat, and Vellutino (1998). Target nouns were matched on word frequency. Predictions of the structural account hypothesis of letter detection (Koriat, Greenberg, & Goldshmid, 1991) were confirmed. No age-of-acquisition effect was found. In contrast, a separately conducted lexical decision experiment using the same content word stimulus sets showed shorter decision latencies for early acquired words. The combined results suggest that during silent reading, when attention is focused on meaning, phonological processes may play a less prominent role than in lexical decision tasks that demand explicit control of phonological codes. The letter detection results confirmed predictions of the structural account hypothesis for both beginning and skilled readers. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that phonological processes in silent reading may play a less prominent role and that the structural account of letter processing is valid for languages other than Hebrew and English but probably is not the unique mechanism involved in letter detection.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.