Low-frequency Exception Words Research Articles

The word recognition skills of profoundly, prelingually deaf children

How do the word recognition skills of deaf children compare with those of their hearing counterparts? Four groups of 20 subjects (deaf readers, hearing good readers, poor readers and young readers) matched on sex, intelligence and chronological or reading age participated in two experiments. Experiment 1 examined orthographic regularity effects and non‐word pronounceability effects and revealed that deaf readers, like good hearing readers, access the meanings of words through visual mechanisms but that those mechanisms are slower and less accurate than those of their hearing counterparts. Further, the results suggested that, unlike young readers, deaf readers do not appear to use the facility of the phonological route to the lexicon for reading low frequency exception words. Nevertheless, the deaf were observed to activate phonological information for decoding pronounceable non‐words, but more slowly than their matched good readers. Experiment 2 varied the reliance upon visual features of words by examining regularity effects for words presented in upper‐case and lower‐case letters. Results indicated that deaf readers spontaneously used visual mechanisms for the recognition of low frequency exception words to provide fast but inaccurate responses. In contrast the good readers, poor readers and young readers accessed the meanings of those words through phonological processes.

Lexical and sublexical translation of spelling to sound: Strategic anticipation of lexical status.

Two experiments on oral reading of single words compared naming performance in pure blocks of nonwords or exception words with performance in blocks of randomly mixed nonwords and exception words. Ss named exception words faster and made fewer regularization errors when they were not also prepared for nonwords. These data suggest Ss inhibit or ignore the computation of assembled phonology when only exception words are expected. Ss named nonwords faster, but no more accurately, when low-frequency exception words were not also anticipated. Thus, Ss' readiness to execute assembled phonology appears to be adjusted in relation to the likely time course of retrieval of learned pronunciations, when the latter must be attended to

The role of assembled phonology in reading comprehension

The contribution of assembled phonology to phonological effects in reading comprehension was assessed. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the acceptability of sentences with regular, exception, and nonword homophone substitutions and orthographic controls. Significantly more errors occurred to sentences with regular-word homophones than to exception words, and error rates for nonword homophones were low and not significant. Experiment 2 showed that this was not due to differences in the sentence frames. In Experiment 3, the subjects judged as unacceptable those sentences containing an exception word that sounded correct when read according to spelling-to-sound rules. Significantly higher error rates occurred only for low-frequency exception words. Experiment 4 showed that task conditions affect semantic-categorization error rates for nonword homophones. These results indicate that both assembled and addressed phonology contribute to sentence and word comprehension, but the low error rate for nonwords suggests that an early lexical check may be applied.