Word List Reading Research Articles

The effects of conflicting schemas on recall

The present experiment hypothesized that: a) the conflict of schemas would be greater (means that recall would be decreased) as the participant activated together (through reading and listening) word lists from two different schemas, than when they activated word lists from only one schema, and b) that participant would show greater reconstruction phenomenon in the recall face when activated together (through reading and listening) word lists from two different schemas than when they activated word lists from one schema. In the present experiment 36 undergraduate students from the American College of Greece were randomly selected to participate. Their participation was voluntary. One third (n=12) read and listened school schema simultaneously, one third (n=12) read and listened super market schema simultaneously and one third (n=12) read school schema and listened super market schema simultaneously. Results showed that the conflict of schemas would be greater as the participant activated together word lists from two different schemas. In addition, opposing to the second part of original hypothesis, the participants wouldn’t show greater reconstruction phenomenon in the recall face when activated together word lists from two different schemas.

The Diphthongs: The Obstacles for Indonesian Speakers of English

Article investigated the difficulties of Indonesian speaker of English in producing diphthongs /eɪ/ and /oʊ/. Five postgraduate students and five spouses of students at University of Canberra participated in this study. The participants were recorded in pronouncing /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ by reading lists of words and a story. The data were analysed by two Australian native speakers. Interrater reliability was calculated by using Cohen’s Kappa. The percentage was used to see the accurate diphthong realisations. The results showed that diphthong /oʊ/ was relatively more problematic than diphthong/eɪ/ and the students produced more diphthongs accurately than the spouses. The results also revealed that the ability to produce the diphthongs accurately was influenced by English proficiency and the type of tasks where diphthongs were pronounced.

Interspersal Technique and Behavioral Momentum for Reading Word Lists

.Academic tasks that include easy responses increase the probability that less preferred and/or more challenging tasks will be performed. The current study applied the process of arranging easier stimuli within reading word lists with behavioral momentum and an interspersal technique. We hypothesized that the behavioral momentum condition, which placed a series of easier words at the beginning of a reading word list task, would result in greater reading fluency for word lists, and that the interspersal condition, which interspersed easier words into a word list, would result in higher fluency for the target words. Fourth-grade students (n = 97) were randomly assigned to the behavior momentum, interspersal, or control condition. The results indicated that the participants assigned to the behavioral momentum condition read significantly more words correctly per minute than the participants assigned to the control condition (d = .70). No statistically significant differences were observed between the remaining conditions.

The aerodynamics of nasalization in French

Nasalization in French involves a complex interplay between several phonetic and phonological factors that have been, for the most part, investigated separately over the last 40 years. The present study provides a detailed account of the aerodynamics of French nasalization from eight Belgian French speakers reading word lists. Patterns of tautosyllabic nasal coarticulation are investigated in CV˜, NV˜, CV˜C, CV˜.CV, CV, NV, (C)VN, and NVN items, comparing different vowel and consonant types. Dependent variables involve temporal measures of both the extent of nasalization and its starting point relative to the oral–nasal boundary, and average flow rates across the acoustically defined segments. Results confirm previous findings that carryover nasalization is more extensive than anticipatory nasalization in French for both vowels and consonants. We further show that the temporal extent of intra-syllabic nasal coarticulatory airflow varies across vowel height and consonant manner of articulation and voicing. Various factors are considered in accounting for this variation.

Semantic priming in deep-phonological dyslexia: Contrasting effects of association and similarity upon abstract and concrete word reading

We report a series of experiments investigating the reading abilities of a patient R.O.M. who exhibited the syndrome of deep-phonological dyslexia. In a series of semantic priming tasks, R.O.M. was requested to read word lists containing either abstract or concrete words, which were related by semantic similarity or semantic association, or which shared no clear semantic relationship. R.O.M. read semantically similar concrete words significantly more accurately than unrelated items, but showed no such advantage for semantically associated concrete words. By contrast, semantically associated abstract words were read significantly more accurately than unrelated items, but there was no evidence of priming for semantically similar abstract words. Thus, we describe an attempt to harness semantic priming to find converging evidence for a distinction between the representational frameworks underpinning abstract and concrete concepts. The findings are considered in the context of competing theories of the abstract/concrete distinction.

Reduction of flaps: Speech style, phonological environment, and variability

Normal connected speech contains a tremendous amount of variability in how a given sound is realized. The current work examines American English /t/ and /d/ in flapping environments. Flaps can be reduced to an approximant or even deleted in connected speech, and this study compares reduction of flaps to reduction of other stops (/p, b, k, g/) in the same environments. The effects of segmental environment (target followed by /l/, syllabic /r/, /∂/, word boundary, etc.), stress (target following stressed syllable versus between two unstressed syllables), and speech style (casual conversation, reading connected text, and word list reading) are analyzed. Target segments are analyzed for presence/absence of a burst and of formants during closure, for duration of the segment and of closure voicing, and for amplitude during the closure or constriction. This project documents the degree of variability in reduction both within and across speakers. Preliminary results show that flaps are reduced to approximants surprisingly often, even in the most careful speech style. The results also suggest that flaps are far more likely to reduce than /p/ or /k/, suggesting that there is a categorical, phonological process at work as well as gradient variability.

Rhythmic organization of read word lists

Rhythmic constraints have been notoriously hard to identify in speech timing. Appropriate experimental tasks may help in identifying grouping principles and timing constraints. In a baseline experiment, subjects read wordlists which contained eight trochees. They were instructed to read the words with regular timing. The inter–onset intervals obtained show evidence of a binary grouping into ‘‘feet’’ containing two words each, and of two-word feet grouping into 4-word super-feet. Results were consistent with a hierarchical rhythm grouping of units into pairs, with the second element of each such group exhibiting some degree of deceleration or final lengthening. In a second condition, each word list contained 7 trochees and one (list medial) iamb. Inter–onset intervals suggest that a similar grouping takes place, with the stressed syllable of the iamb, rather than the first syllable, marking the onset of a unit. In a third condition, the iamb was preceded by a dactyl, giving a 4-syllable foot. Again, results suggest that the stressed syllables, rather than word onsets, delimit production units. Together the results suggest that the stress foot is a unit which serves to structure speech in time.

Politics and Sociolinguistic Reflexes: Palestinian Border Villages (review)

Reviewed by: Politics and sociolinguistic reflexes: Palestinian border villages by Muhammad Hasan Amara Stuart Davis Politics and sociolinguistic reflexes: Palestinian border villages. By Muhammad Hasan Amara. (Studies in bilingualism 19.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. xix, 261. Palestinian society in Israel and in the West Bank has faced social upheavals during the past half century that have included migration, forced divisions, modernization, a growing urbanization, and increased contact of various sorts with both the larger Arab world and Israeli culture. Political upheavals have included the split of the Palestinian population after 1948 into the West Bank (under Jordanian control), Israel, and the Gaza Strip (largely under Egyptian control), the Israeli hegemony over these groups of Palestinians since 1967, and the Palestinian uprising (the Intifada) against Israeli rule in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The work under review investigates the sociolinguistic manifestations of the political and social changes that have affected the Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. In particular, the author focuses his study on two (Muslim) Palestinian border villages—Zalafa and Barta’a. Both are in the Ara Valley on the border between Israel and the West Bank. Zalafa is an Israeli Palestinian village while Barta’a is a divided village. Western Barta’a is in Israel (within the ‘Green Line’, i.e. the Israeli border that emerged out of the 1948 war), but Eastern Barta’a is in the West Bank. Physical barriers were erected after 1948 separating Western Barta’a under Israeli control from Eastern Barta’a under Jordanian control. How have the different social and political realities of the past half century affected the sociolinguistic [End Page 387] patterns of these Palestinian border villages? In the first chapter the author lays out the background and scope of his study, previewing for us some of his major findings. The author’s work is a product of ten years of fieldwork (from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s) that he along with some colleagues undertook in the villages. The book brings together findings from his own previous work (including his dissertation from Bar-Ilan University) as well as his collaborative work with Bernard Spolsky and others regarding the sociolinguistic situation of contemporary Palestinian society. Chs. 2–6 lay out the political, historical, social, economic, and educational differences between Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. An important difference is the orientation toward Israel of the Israeli Palestinians as opposed to the orientation toward Jordan among the West Bank Palestinians. This is seen for example in the different educational systems and is manifested by a knowledge of fluent Hebrew among most Israeli Palestinians. Politically, West Bank Palestinians were active in the Intifada, risking arrest by the Israeli authorities for their action, while Israeli Palestinians did not directly participate in the Intifada although many offered moral and financial support. The author suggests that the reactions of the Israeli Palestinians to the Intifada reflect a growing double identity (a ‘double consciousness’, we might say): Israeli with respect to politics, economy, and certain sociocultural aspects, but Palestinian with respect to identity and cultural uniqueness. Chs. 7–13 are the sociolinguistic heart of the book. Language information in the border villages was gathered through recorded observations, structured interviews, tasks involving reading passages, word lists and picture naming, questionnaires about language identity and attitudes, and language diaries kept by secondary students in the border villages under the author’s guidance. (Details of these are provided in the appendices.) Given the number of people recorded and interviewed, the author amassed a large database on which to establish his findings. For example, structured interviews were carried out with 81 people from the village of Zalafa, 40 from Eastern Barta’a and 41 from Western Barta’a. The interviewees from each sector were matched for gender, education level, occupation, religious observance, and amount of contact with Israeli Jews. The specific linguistic variables that the author looked at were various features of the rural Palestinian dialect shared by the villages and the use of Hebrew lexical items in their Arabic speech. The variables of the rural vernacular dialect that the author examined involved features of pronunciation—the use of [č] for standard Arabic /k...

An Event-Related Potential Study of Older Children With an Early History of Failure to Thrive

Elementary and junior high school children (n = 13), who were diagnosed with nonorganic failure to thrive (FTT) as infants and toddlers, were compared with a normal control group (n = 14) on visual event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited during a primed lexical decision task. Positive stimuli were real words that were identical to the priming stimuli; negative stimuli were nonpronounceable letter strings. Although the groups did not differ in word-list reading level, the former FTT group had slower reaction (decision) times and did not show ERP evidence of priming in the N400 epoch. Anterior sites yielded better separation of the real words and letter strings than posterior sites. A late anterior component between 500 msec to 650 msec poststimulus onset showed the largest condition effect for both groups. The control group had a larger negative going late anterior component to words than the FTT group. The combined reaction time and ERP findings point to less automatized word recognition in the FTT group.

Absolute pitch is demonstrated in speakers of tone languages

In two experiments, Vietnamese and Mandarin speakers manifested a precise form of absolute pitch in reading lists of words. In one experiment, seven Vietnamese speakers read out a list of ten words twice, on two separate days. The average pitch of each word was determined by computer analysis, and for each speaker comparisons were made between the average pitches produced by the same word on different days. Remarkable correspondences were obtained: For most speakers, the signed pitch difference, averaged across words, was well within a semitone. In another experiment, 15 Mandarin speakers read out a list of 12 words twice within a session, with the 2 readings separated by roughly 20 s; and in 2 sessions which were held on different days. Again, comparing across sessions, for most speakers the signed pitch difference, averaged across words, was well within a semitone. Furthermore, the differences were no greater when the pitches were compared across sessions than within sessions. These findings demonstrate that tone language speakers are able to refer to a remarkably precise and stable absolute pitch template in producing words. Relationships to other work on absolute pitch are discussed, and the findings are illustrated by sound recordings.

Vergence eye movements during fixations in reading

The purpose of this explorative study was to examine vergence eye movements during fixations in reading. Eye movements of twelve normal adults were assessed during reading of different materials, that is, words within context (prose passages) and words without context (word lists), as well as during different tasks, that is, reading while attending to the meaning and reading while attending to the sound (words had to be pronounced subvocally). Results indicated that vergence velocity was higher during the reading of prose than during the reading of word lists as well as higher during reading for meaning than during reading while subvocalizing. These findings were also true if only the initial 80 ms of each fixation were measured. Post-hoc analyses indicated that the effects of text type and reading objective were partially, but not entirely, attributable to differences in saccade sizes. Findings are taken to suggest that the increase in vergence velocity results from readers attending to larger units of the text.

Onset/rime sensitivity and orthographic analogies in normal and poor readers

ABSTRACTThis study was designed to determine whether there was a relationship between the ease with which children make use of orthographic analogies and their progress in learning to read. The results of an experiment using a reading age match design showed that poor readers performed as well as normal readers on orally presented measures of onset/rime sensitivity, but less well on visually/orally presented rhyme tasks. The poor readers also performed less well than the normal readers on a task that measured the children's ability to take advantage of analogical units when reading lists of words: these reading lists contained groups of words that differed according to (1) whether the words containing the common unit were presented contiguously or noncontiguously, and (2) whether the unit constituted the rime portion of the words or was embedded within the rime portion of the words. A follow-up intervention study demonstrated that poor readers who received instruction in the use of orthographic analogies achieved higher reading accuracy scores on subsequent readings than did a matched group of poor readers who received standard remedial instruction in context cue usage.

The Influence of Rate of Presentation During Taped-Words Interventions on Reading Performance

An adapted alternating treatments design was used to investigate the effects of two taped-words interventions on word list reading in three elementary students with behavioral and learning problems. Three equivalent sets of 15 unknown words were constructed and assigned to three different conditions: fast taped-words (FTW), slow taped-words (STW), and one of two assessment-only control conditions. During FTW, students were instructed to read aloud with an audiotape that delivered 15 words in 15 seconds (one word each second). During STW, 15 words were delivered in 75 seconds (one word every 5 seconds). Both taped-words interventions resulted in greater increases in accuracy and rates of accurate reading than did control conditions. One student performed slightly better under FTW. The other two students performed better under STW. Results are discussed in terms of modeling accurate reading, modeling reading rates, pacing, and opportunities to respond.

Phonological Processes, Confrontational Naming, and Immediate Memory in Dyslexia

A group of poor readers classified as dyslexic by age/IQ discrepancy criteria (n = 42) were contrasted with two clinic control groups: 56 adequate-for-age readers with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and 21 poor-for-age readers not meeting the IQ discrepancy criterion (slow/borderline group). The children (33 girls, 86 boys) ranged in age from 7.5 years to 12 years. Variables chosen for study included simple and complex phonological processing, speech rate, continuous naming speed, running memory span, serial memory span, and mental addition. Evidence is presented that the two poor reader groups are distinguishable. Unlike the dyslexic group, the slow/borderline group did not differ from the ADD group on three key measures: simple auditory phonological sensitivity, continuous naming speed, and running memory span. Stepwise regression to predict word list reading level showed that once age and verbal IQ were removed (51% of variance), these three key measures accounted for an additional 22% of the variance (R = 0.86, R2 = 0.73). The single best predictor of word list reading level was nonsense word list reading level, which was explained by the same set of five variables that explained real word reading (R = 0.77, R2 = .60). Severity of attentional problems was not linearly related to reading skill in this clinic sample.

Word perception and misperception in context.

When reading lists of words and nonwords at 100 ms/word, Ss reported words accurately but frequently converted nonwords such as dack into similarly spelled words such as duck or deck. In sentences, both nonwords and anomalous words were misread as appropriate words, but the bias was greater for nonwords. Word associations in lists (e.g., sailor-dack-vessel) produced a similar bias, but when sentence meaning was pitted against such associations the lexical effect was largely overridden. Sentences in which biasing context appeared only after the critical item reduced but did not eliminate the context effect, suggesting that multiple word candidates remained active while at least the next 3 words were processed. These results support a 2-stage modular interactive model: The first stage is stimulus driven and emits multiple weighted candidates that are combined interactively with contextual information in a second stage. In reading or listening to discourse, up to five or six words may be perceived and understood per second: a remarkable cognitive feat. Although one might think that processing language simultaneously at several levels—discriminating letters or phonemes, identifying words, parsing and interpreting sentences, and constructing a representation of the discourse—would be more difficult than focusing attention on just the lowest one or two levels, the opposite has been shown to be the case. In general, letter perception is more accurate when the letters are embedded in words (the word superiority effect, Reicher, 1969; Wheeler, 1970; see Estes & Brunn, 1987, for a recent reconsideration), and word perception is more accurate when the words are embedded in sentences (e.g., for speech; Miller, Heise, & Lichten, 1951). Yet the detailed mechanisms underlying the positive effects of higher level context on word perception have been a matter of theoretical and experimental debate since the earliest days of experimental psychology. The debate centers on the way in which sensory-driven, bottom-up processing is combined with background knowledge. Everyone agrees that by the time a listener or reader has reached a final interpretation of a word, sentence, or text, both lower level and higher level knowledge will have been taken into account. The issue is when, during processing, various sorts of knowledge become available. In the present study, the question is how sentence context influ

Effects of short-term auditory deprivation on speech production in adult cochlear implant users.

Speech production parameters of three postlingually deafened adults who use cochlear implants were measured: after 24 h of auditory deprivation (which was achieved by turning the subject's speech processor off); after turning the speech processor back on; and after turning the speech processor off again. The measured parameters included vowel acoustics [F1, F2, F0, sound-pressure level (SPL), duration and H1-H2, the amplitude difference between the first two spectral harmonics, a correlate of breathiness] while reading word lists, and average airflow during the reading of passages. Changes in speech processor state (on-to-off or vice versa) were accompanied by numerous changes in speech production parameters. Many changes were in the direction of normalcy, and most were consistent with long-term speech production changes in the same subjects following activation of the processors of their cochlear implants [Perkell et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 91, 2961-2978 (1992)]. Changes in mean airflow were always accompanied by H1-H2 (breathiness) changes in the same direction, probably due to underlying changes in laryngeal posture. Some parameters (different combinations of SPL, F0, H1-H2 and formants for different subjects) showed very rapid changes when turning the speech processor on or off. Parameter changes were faster and more pronounced, however, when the speech processor was turned on than when it was turned off. The picture that emerges from the present study is consistent with a dual role for auditory feedback in speech production: long-term calibration of articulatory parameters as well as feedback mechanisms with relatively short time constants.

The level-of-focal-attention hypothesis in oral reading: Influence of strategies on the context specificity of lexical repetition effects.

Two experiments examined the influence of level of focal attention--text or lexical--on benefits from lexical repetition in speeded oral reading of coherent texts and random word lists. Experiment 1 showed that with coherent targets, direction of attention to the text level resulted in benefit only from a previous reading of the same coherent paragraph. However, when attention was directed to the lexical level, equal benefit resulted from a previous reading of either the same coherent paragraph or a scrambled version of the paragraph. Experiment 2 showed that level of focal attention did not influence benefit with scrambled targets. Thus, the linguistic structure of the target is important to repetition benefits and their modulation by attentional strategies.

Contextual facilitation in children's oral reading in relation to grade and decoding skill

This research investigated children's use of context to facilitate word recognition and comprehension-monitoring processes in the oral reading of connected prose as a function of grade level and decoding skill. Results indicated no overall contextual facilitation of word recognition accuracy, even in less skilled decoders, although there was evidence that less skilled decoders were assisted by context in decoding some content words. Children read word lists 50% more slowly than comparable selections of prose. The adoption of different and compensatory reading speed strategies in children's reading of prose and word lists renders the oral reading task an insensitive test of the contextual facilitation of word recognition accuracy. A qualitative analysis of the errors made in reading the prose passage showed that skilled decoders made (relative to less skilled decoders) a lower proportion of reading errors which, as first uttered, violated prior context, and a higher rate of contextually obligatory self-corrections, thus making a higher overall rate of contextually acceptable oral reading errors. These data were interpreted as suggesting that children's oral reading incorporates processing that occurs after lexical access, and that skilled decoders use context more effectively to monitor comprehension. In an oral reading task, this may counteract the tendency of less skilled decoders to rely more on context in the process of word recognition.

Vowel allophones and the vowel‐formant phonetic space

Through assimilation and other phonetic processes, a language may have more segments on the phonetic surface than in lexical representation. Consider English vowels: nasalized, long, front rounded, and central vowels are all introduced in derivations. Conceivably, then, languages could be much more similar phonetically than phonemically; possibly they could even fill the phonetic space equally. In that case, languages with fewer phonemes would have to show much more phonetic variation per phoneme, compared to languages with many phonemes. The alternative situation would be that languages with fewer phonemes would leave parts of the phonetic space unused. We are testing these possibilities by comparing the F1‐F2‐F3 space for vowel allophones in different languages. Here we report on two five‐vowel languages, Japanese and Russian. Seven speakers of each language read word lists and free text, and vowel formants are compared across conditions and languages. Preliminary results indicate that Japanese, the language expected to show the least variation, has widely separated vowels in word lists, but fills up the phonetic space in prose. [Work supported by USPHS grant NS 18163‐02 to Peter Ladefoged.]

Word and letter reading and the mechanism of the third alexia.

Four patients, two with global aphasia and two with Broca's aphasia, demonstrated the seemingly paradoxical ability to read words but not their component letters. Picture naming was only moderately impaired, and repetition of word and letter names was intact, excluding both a generalized dysnomia and an articulatory disturbance as the cause of the literal alexia. Matching tests revealed processing deficits in three of the patients, more severe for letters than for words. Oral reading of word lists showed that short, high-frequency, and picturable words were read best, whereas nonsense trigrams, which require phonetic processing, were the most difficult. The residual reading of patients with severe Broca's or global aphasia and the "third alexia" appears to involve purely visual, nonphonetic mechanisms for word recognition, using posterior left hemisphere or even minor hemisphere centers. Letter reading, by contrast, along with phonetic reading of syllables, appears to be a more specialized, anterior left hemisphere process.