Units In Word Recognition Research Articles

Morphological effects in word identification: tracking the developmental trajectory of derivational suffixes in Spanish

The role of morphological processing has been shown to be highly relevant in learning to read. However, there is little evidence on the processing of derivational suffixes from a developmental perspective. The aim of this study is to assess the developmental emergence of suffixes as meaningful processing units in word recognition. To that aim, 96 children from fourth, fifth and sixth grade, as well as adults, took part in a masked priming lexical decision task (go/no-go version). Complex and simple words were primed by other words sharing the suffix (as in lechero/milkman/-> jornalero/laborer/) and word ending (as in arana/spider/->Espana/Spain/) or by words not sharing an ending (surfista/surfer/->jornalero/laborer/; carpeta/folder/->Espana/Spain/). Results in adults replicate previous studies by showing that only the related condition of complex words elicits a significant facilitation (see Dunabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2008). With respect to children, only sixth graders generated a similar pattern to adults. Children in fourth and fifth grade showed no morphological effect. Our data reveal a progressive sensitivity to derivational suffixes in visual word processing. Results are interpreted from a developmental perspective of current findings on morphological processing.

Units of word recognition

Units of word recognition

An investigation of the role of grapheme units in word recognition.

In most current models of word recognition, the word recognition process is assumed to be driven by the activation of letter units (i.e., that letters are the perceptual units in reading). An alternative possibility is that the word recognition process is driven by the activation of grapheme units, that is, that graphemes, rather than letters, are the perceptual units in reading. If so, there must be representational units for multiletter graphemes like CH and PH, which play a key role in this process. We examined this idea in four masked priming experiments. Primes were created by transposing, replacing entirely, or removing one component of either multiletter graphemes or two adjacent letters that each represented a grapheme, using both English and Spanish stimuli. In none of the experiments was there any evidence of differential priming effects depending on whether the two letters being manipulated formed a single grapheme or formed two separate graphemes. These data are most consistent with the idea that multiletter graphemes have no special status at the earliest stages of word processing and, therefore, that word recognition is, indeed, driven by the activation of units for individual letters.

Rhythmic Categories in Spoken-Word Recognition

Rhythmic categories such as morae in Japanese or stress units in English play a role in the perception of spoken language. We examined this role in Japanese, since recent evidence suggests that morae may intervene as structural units in word recognition. First, we found that traditional puns more often substituted part of a mora than a whole mora. Second, when listeners reconstructed distorted words, e.g. panorama from panozema, responses were faster and more accurate when only a phoneme was distorted (panozama, panorema) than when a whole CV mora was distorted (panozema). Third, lexical decisions on the same nonwords were better predicted by duration and number of phonemes from nonword uniqueness point to word end than by number of morae. Our results indicate no role for morae in early spoken-word processing; we propose that rhythmic categories constrain not initial lexical activation but subsequent processes of speech segmentation and selection among word candidates.

The Development of Orthographic Rimes as Units of Word Recognition

The current study used the orthographic rime frequency effect as a means of investigating the development of, and individual differences in, children′s ability to use orthographic rimes as functional units of reading. Sets of pseudowords were constructed, varying in the frequency of their constituent orthographic rimes. Experiment 1 investigated the orthographic rime frequency effect in a large sample of first-grade children. As expected, the orthographic rime frequency effect was significant only in relatively advanced first-grade readers. Experiment 2 used a reading-level design to further investigate the orthographic rime frequency effect as a function of both age and word identification ability. Pseudoword reading accuracy was examined in poor fourth-grade readers, a younger reading-level-matched group, and a chronological age control group. Strong main effects were observed for reader group and orthographic rime frequency but these factors did not interact. Overall, these two experiments suggest that the size of the orthographic rime frequency effect reflects the operation of two factors that increase with reading ability, the size of children′s sight vocabulary (contributing primarily to the availability of orthographic rime correspondences to read pseudowords constructed from relatively common orthographic rimes), and grapheme-phoneme conversion skill (contributing primarily to the decoding of pseudowords constructed from uncommon orthographic rimes for which orthographic rime correspondences are less likely to be derived from the sight word vocabulary). In addition, Experiment 2 implicated a general phonological recoding deficit as an underlying problem in children′s word reading difficulties.

Orthographic rimes as functional units of reading in fourth-grade children

Two experiments are described, both using substitution priming to investigate the hypothesis that orthographic rime units serve as functional units of word recognition for fourth-grade children. In Experiment 1, prime-target pairs were presented in blocks of similar prime type. As predicted, substitution priming was observed only when the prime word shared the final trigram (rime unit) with the target word (weed-seed). Words which shared the initial trigram with the target, and either the same (lean-leap) or different (pine-pink) grapheme-phoneme correspondences, were ineffective primes. In Experiment 2, word pairs with differing prime-target relationships were randomly distributed within the stimulus set. No facilitative effects of substitution priming were observed. Taken together, these experiments indicate that children at this level of reading development can use orthographic rime units in word recognition, but mat the use of orthographic rime units is not yet automatised.

On the automatic training of phonetic units for word recognition

In this correspondence, we present some preliminary results on using phonetic subword units in word recognition as compared to whole word templates. The phonetic subword units are specified as either phonelike units with and without temporal structure or as diphonelike units. The determination of these subword units requires segmentation, labeling, and parameter estimation at the same time, and is performed by an iterative two-stage algorithm consisting of nonlinear time alignment and parameter estimation. Experiments were carried out, using a connected digit recognition task, to study the usefulness of the subword unit representation and the effect on recognition performance of some versions of the subword specification. The best error rates for subword units are still, by a factor of 2 or more, larger than those for whole word templates.

Perceptual units in word recognition

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Units of word recognition: Evidence for developmental changes

A recent study in word recognition with college students indicated that holistic processing occurs with regular orthography while component processing occurs with-mirror-image text. In this study, which investigated the unit of word recognition as a function of grade level, subjects from grades two, four, six, and college judged single words to be in animal or nonanimal categories. Words were in regular orthography and varied in length from three to six letters. The latency analysis indicated significant effects for grade level and word length. The critical interaction effect was also significant, indicating a developmental trend from component to holistic processing with advancing grade level.

Units of word recognition: Evidence for the use of multiple units

The present experiments were concerned with subsyllabic units in word recognition. The studies employed a same-different RT task. A one-syllable word and a probe were presented simultaneously, and subjects responded “same” if the probe was an integral subset of the word (BLAST:BL), and “different” otherwise (BLAST:BC). Probes included single letters (BLAST:L), doublets (BLAST:LA), triplets (BLAST:LAS), and the whole word (BLAST: BLAST). The first experiment suggested that a variety of spelling patterns, as well as the whole word, served as units of processing. In particular, initial consonant clusters were processed as quickly as single letters, and only slightly faster than the whole words. Consonant strings were used in the second experiment, which demonstrated spelling pattern effects with permissible strings (BLGST:BL) as compared to nonpermissable strings (BXJPK:BX). A third experiment demonstrated that the particular effective units depend on task demands.