Word-initial Letters Research Articles

Parafoveal processing and transposed-letter effects in dyslexic reading.

During parafoveal processing, skilled readers encode letter identity independently of letter position (Johnson et al., 2007). In the current experiment, we examined orthographic parafoveal processing in readers with dyslexia. Specifically, the eye movements of skilled readers and adult readers with dyslexia were recorded during a boundary paradigm experiment (Rayner, 1975). Parafoveal previews were either identical to the target word (e.g., nearly), a transposed‐letter preview (e.g., enarly), or a substituted‐letter preview (e.g., acarly). Dyslexic and non‐dyslexic readers demonstrated orthographic parafoveal preview benefits during silent sentence reading and both reading groups encoded letter identity and letter position information parafoveally. However, dyslexic adults showed, that very early in lexical processing, during parafoveal preview, the positional information of a word's initial letters were encoded less flexibly compared to during skilled adult reading. We suggest that dyslexic readers are less able to benefit from correct letter identity information (i.e., in the letter transposition previews) due to the lack of direct mapping of orthography to phonology. The current findings demonstrate that dyslexic readers show consistent and dyslexic‐specific reading difficulties in foveal and parafoveal processing during silent sentence reading.

The English phonological awareness skills of 5;0–6;0-year-old Polish–English, Portuguese–English bilingual speakers and English monolingual children

Previous research on bilingual children's phonological awareness (PA) abilities is contradictory. Some studies suggest that bilinguals are advantaged compared to monolinguals, benefiting literacy acquisition. Other research indicates that any advantage in PA skills is transient, influenced by language learning context, proficiency in both languages, and the language pair being acquired. This study compared the English PA skills of two groups of bilingual children and a monolingual English-speaking group matched for age, gender, and social class. The 54 participants were 5 to 6 years old, in their first or second year of school. There were 18 children speaking Polish–English, 18 children speaking Portuguese–English and 18 English-speaking monolingual children. Their letter knowledge, syllable, onset–rime, and phoneme awareness were assessed using subtests from standardized assessments plus one task specifically designed for this study. Parents of bilingual children completed a questionnaire about their child's language background and language use. The three groups did not differ on tasks assessing syllable awareness, identification of word initial sounds or letter knowledge. The results of tasks assessing alliteration, rhyme, and phoneme awareness indicated that typically developing English-speaking monolingual children performed better than matched typically developing bilingual children. The monolinguals and the Polish-English bilinguals performed equally well on the rhyme detection task. The language use questionnaire responses provided insight into factors affecting the results. It was concluded that no bilingual advantage for PA was apparent in the bilingual populations studied. These results suggest that bilingual children are likely to initially find English literacy difficult.

The wide-open doors to lexical access

The wide-open doors to lexical access

Abstract graphemic representations support preparation of handwritten responses

Some evidence suggests that the written production of single words involves not only the ordered retrieval of individual letters, but that abstract, higher-level linguistic properties of the words also influence responses. We report five experiments using the “implicit priming” task adopted from the spoken domain to investigate response preparation of written responses. The first three experiments demonstrate a priming effect due to shared graphemes which is independent of phonological overlap. Two further experiments show that the priming effect is largely immune to allographic variation, but that it disappears when overlapping word-initial letters are embedded within different graphemes. In combination, the results suggest that preparation of handwritten word production involves an abstract graphemic level of representation, mediating between the retrieval of orthographic word forms and individual letters.

The importance of the first and last letter in words during sentence reading

Previous research suggests that the first and last letters of words are more important than the interior letters during reading. A question that has yet to be fully studied is why this is so. The current study reports four experiments in which participants read sentences containing words with transposed letters occurring at the beginning of the word, near the middle of the word, or at the end of the word. Experiments 1 and 2 also included some sentences where the spaces were removed and replaced with hash marks (#) to equate all letters on their degree of lateral interference from adjacent letter positions. In Experiment 3, equating was done by adding an additional space between all of the letters, so that no letter position received lateral interference from any letter. In Experiment 4, readers read sentences from right to left so that word-initial letters were presented furthest into the parafovea. The results indicate that although the first letter of a word has a privileged role over interior letters regardless of the degree of lateral interference it receives or its location in the parafovea (suggesting that it is intrinsically related to how we process, store, or access lexical information), the last letter of a word is more important than interior letters only when it receives less lateral interference or when its parafoveal location was close to the fovea (suggesting that it is privileged only due to low-level visual factors). These findings have important implications for current theories and computational models regarding the roles of various letter positions in reading.

Word-Initial Letters Influence Fixation Durations during Fluent Reading

The present study examined how word-initial letters influence lexical access during reading. Eye movements were monitored as participants read sentences containing target words. Three factors were independently manipulated. First, target words had either high or low constraining word-initial letter sequences (e.g., dwarf or clown, respectively). Second, targets were either high or low in frequency of occurrence (e.g., train or stain, respectively). Third, targets were embedded in either biasing or neutral contexts (i.e., targets were high or low in their predictability). This 2 (constraint) × 2 (frequency) × 2 (context) design allowed us to examine the conditions under which a word’s initial letter sequence could facilitate processing. Analyses of fixation duration data revealed significant main effects of constraint, frequency, and context. Moreover, in measures taken to reflect “early” lexical processing (i.e., first and single fixation duration), there was a significant interaction between constraint and context. The overall pattern of findings suggests lexical access is facilitated by highly constraining word-initial letters. Results are discussed in comparison to recent studies of lexical features involved in word recognition during reading.

Spatial coding of word-initial letters: Evidence from a Simon-like task

In this study, we investigated whether the processing of written words leads to a preferential coding of word beginnings and whether this coding occurs in the context of word representations that are spatial in nature and depend on the orientation of the actual stimuli. Two experiments were carried out wherein participants were asked to press a left or right key, in accordance with a nonspatial feature of standard-oriented or mirror-reversed wordlike stimuli (words and pronounceable nonwords). Both experiments showed an effect of correspondence between position of the beginning part of the stimuli and position of the required response (i.e., a Simon-like effect): Responses to standard-oriented stimuli were faster with the left key, whereas responses to mirror-reversed stimuli were faster with the right key. The present findings indicate for the first time that, in reading, the direction of script is automatically processed and the position of the word beginning is coded before the orthographic lexicon is accessed.

Onset Entropy Matters – Letter-to-phoneme Mappings in Seven Languages

Alphabetic orthographies vary in the (in)consistency of the relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling, in contrast to opaque orthographies such as English, where spelling–sound correspondences are often inconsistent. The pronunciation of English vowel letters is in particular very ambiguous. In this paper, we provide a cross-linguistic investigation of orthographic transparency at the word-initial letter–phoneme level, resulting in ranked metrics for the seven languages investigated- Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Portuguese, expressed as entropy values. We focus on the contributions of vowels and consonants towards the overall orthographic transparency and provide evidence that deviations from consistent word-initial 1:1 mappings between letters and phonemes influence reaction times in naming tasks. Implications for theories of visual word recognition and speech production will be discussed.

The case of case: Children's knowledge and use of upper- and lowercase letters

Research on children's spelling has focused on its phonological bases. In the present study, we examined a type of nonphonological knowledge that even young children may possess—knowledge about the distinction between upper- and lowercase letters. In Study 1, we analyzed the capitalization patterns used by children in kindergarten through second grade on words that did not contain a capital letter in their conventional spellings. The younger children, especially, often wrote with capital letters. They did so in a nonrandom way, being more likely to capitalize word-initial letters than later letters. When children inserted an uppercase letter in a noninitial position of a spelling, it tended to be a letter whose uppercase form was especially familiar to the child, the initial letter of the child's first name. In Study 2, which examined kindergartners' knowledge of the names of upper- and lowercase letters, we found further evidence that children's names influence their knowledge about letters and that some of this knowledge is case specific. Together, the results show that early spelling involves more than phonology.

Orthographic familiarity influences initial eye fixation positions in reading

An important issue in the understanding of eye movements in reading is what kind of nonfoveal information can influence where we move our eyes. In Experiment 1, first fixation landing positions were nearer the beginning of misspelled words. Experiment 2 showed that the informativeness of word beginnings does not influence where words are first fixated. In both experiments, refixations were more likely to be to the left of the initial fixation position if the words were misspelled. Also, there was no influence of spelling on prior fixation durations or refixation probabilities, that is, there was no evidence for parafoveal‐on‐foveal effects. The results show that the orthographic familiarity, but not informativeness, of word initial letter sequences influences where words are first fixated.

Latency dependence of word-initial letter integration by the saccadic system.

Two experiments are reported in which saccadic eye movements were examined when the eyes moved to words in which the properties of the word-initial letters differed. It was found that the effect of saccade latency on landing position depended on the properties of the word-initial letters. Under short saccade latencies, landing positions deviated toward the word beginning in the presence of orthographically irregular/informative beginning (OI/IB) letters. This result is interpreted as an influence of the orthographic encoding process that has detected an unusual letter grouping. With longer saccade latencies, an increase of the saccade size was observed for OI/IB words, whereas orthographically regular/uninformative beginning words did not show the effect. It is suggested that this may be a consequence of the dynamics of parafoveal word information processing.

The ‘center of gravity’ of words: Evidence for an effect of the word-initial letters

When the eye saccades to eccentric word targets, it tends to land in a position which can be described as the center of gravity of the configuration. By manipulating the relative intensity of the word-initial and -ending letters, it was shown that the ‘global effect’ of luminance distribution within words is strongly attenuated when the word-initial letters are informative and orthographically irregular. Results show that the orthographic structure of the word-initial letters exerts an influence on the saccadic computation that may cancel the luminance distribution effect.

Word-Initial Letter Sequences and Reading

Word-Initial Letter Sequences and Reading

Lexical access during eye fixations in reading: Effects of word-initial letter sequence.

Lexical access during eye fixations in reading: Effects of word-initial letter sequence.

Lexical access during eye fixations in reading: effects of word-initial letter sequence.

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that lexical access in reading is initiated on the basis of word-initial letter information obtainable in the parafoveal region. Eye movements were monitored while college students read sentences containing target words whose initial trigram (Experiment 1) or bigram (Experiment 2) imposed either a high or a low degree of constraint in the lexicon. In contradiction to our hypothesis, high-constraint words (e.g., DWARF) received longer fixations than did low-constraint words (e.g., CLOWN), despite the fact that high-constraint words have an initial letter sequence shared by few other words in the lexicon. Moreover, a comparison of fixation times in viewing conditions with and without parafoveal letter information showed that the amount of decrease in target fixation time due to prior parafoveal availability was the same for high-constraint and low-constraint targets. We concluded that increased familiarity of word-initial letter sequence is beneficial to lexical access and that familiarity affects the efficiency of foveal but not parafoveal processing.

Word—Initial and Word—Final Ngram Frequencies

Every word-initial and word-final letter cluster, or ngram, that occurred in 30 or more different words in one million words of running text is listed along with the number of different words and the total number of words it appeared in. The relation of this list to other counts is discussed.