The effects of spelling consistency on phonological awareness: a comparison of English and German.

Within alphabetic languages, spelling-to-sound consistency can differ dramatically. For example, English and German are very similar in their phonological and orthographic structure but not in their consistency. In English the letter a is pronounced differently in the words bank, ball, and park, whereas in German the letter a always has the same pronunciation (e.g., Ball, Park, Bank). It is often argued that reading acquisition has a reciprocal effect on phonological awareness. As reading is acquired, therefore, spoken language representation may be affected differently for English and German children. Prior to literacy acquisition, however, phonological representation in English and German children should be similar due to the similar phonological structure of the two languages. We explored this hypothesis by comparing phonological awareness at the rime and phoneme levels in prereaders and beginning readers in English and German. Similar developmental effects were indeed observed in prereaders, but differential effects had emerged within the first year of reading instruction.

[1]  R. H. Baayen,et al.  The CELEX Lexical Database (CD-ROM) , 1996 .

[2]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Locus of orthographic effects in spoken word recognition: Novel insights from the neighbour generation task , 2004 .

[3]  Johannes C. Ziegler,et al.  Nonword reading across orthographies: How flexible is the choice of reading units? , 2003, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[4]  W. Tunmer,et al.  Phonemic segmentation skill and beginning reading. , 1985 .

[5]  Louisa M. Slowiaczek,et al.  An Investigation of Phonology and Orthography in Spoken-Word Recognition , 2003, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[6]  J. Ziegler,et al.  The Feedback Consistency Effect in Lexical Decision and Naming , 1997 .

[7]  R. Peereman,et al.  Is perception a two-way street ?: The case of feedback consistency in visual word recognition , 1998 .

[8]  U. Goswami,et al.  Phonological neighbourhood density: effects in a rhyme awareness task in five-year-old children , 2003, Journal of Child Language.

[9]  S. Goldinger,et al.  Priming Lexical Neighbors of Spoken Words: Effects of Competition and Inhibition. , 1989, Journal of memory and language.

[10]  P. Bryant,et al.  Difficulties in auditory organisation as a possible cause of reading backwardness , 1978, Nature.

[11]  David B. Pisoni,et al.  Similarity neighborhoods of spoken words , 1991 .

[12]  J. Morais,et al.  The locus of the orthographic consistency effect in auditory word recognition , 2004 .

[13]  Gerry Altmann,et al.  Cognitive Models of Speech Processing: Psycholinguistic and Computational Perspectives - Workshop Overview , 1989, AI Mag..

[14]  G. Stone,et al.  Perception Is a Two-Way Street: Feedforward and Feedback Phonology in Visual Word Recognition ☆ , 1997 .

[15]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory. , 2005, Psychological bulletin.

[16]  Charles A. Perfetti,et al.  Phonemic knowledge and learning to read are reciprocal: A longitudinal study of first grade children. , 1987 .

[17]  Linnea C. Ehri,et al.  The influence of orthography on readers' conceptualization of the phonemic structure of words , 1980, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[18]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Orthographic effects on rhyme monitoring. , 1979 .

[19]  Arthur M. Jacobs,et al.  Statistical analysis of the bidirectional inconsistency of spelling and sound in French , 1996 .

[20]  Arthur M. Jacobs,et al.  What is the pronunciation for -ough and the spelling for /u/? A database for computing feedforward and feedback consistency in English , 1997 .

[21]  U. Goswami,et al.  Children's orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish , 1998, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[22]  G. Altmann,et al.  Cognitive Models of Speech Processing: Psycholinguistic and Computational Perspectives - Workshop Overview , 1989, AI Mag..

[23]  Peter Bryant,et al.  Rhyme and Alliteration, Phoneme Detection, and Learning to Read. , 1990 .

[24]  W. Schneider,et al.  Short- and long-term effects of training phonological awareness in kindergarten: evidence from two German studies. , 1997, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[25]  U. Goswami.  Analogical reasoning in children , 1993 .

[26]  Stephen R. Burgess,et al.  Phonological sensitivity: A quasi‐parallel progression of word structure units and cognitive operations , 2003 .

[27]  Ludovic Ferrand,et al.  Visual phonology: The effects of orthographic consistency on different auditory word recognition tasks , 2004, Memory & cognition.

[28]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Pseudohomophone effects and phonological recoding procedures in reading development in English and German , 2001 .

[29]  G. C. Orden,et al.  Complex Dynamic Systems also Predict Dissociations, but They Do Not Reduce to Autonomous Components , 1997 .

[30]  M. Coltheart,et al.  Is there a causal link from phonological awareness to success in learning to read? , 2004, Cognition.

[31]  Margaret Harris,et al.  Learning to read and write : a cross-linguistic perspective , 1999 .

[32]  Conrad Perry,et al.  A phoneme-grapheme feedback consistency effect , 2003, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[33]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Identical Words are Read Differently in Different Languages , 2001, Psychological science.

[34]  Liva Nohre,et al.  Instance Frequency, Categorization, and the Modulating Effect of Experience , 1991 .

[35]  Usha Goswami,et al.  Similarity relations among spoken words: The special status of rimes in English , 2002, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[36]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[37]  Jason L. Anthony,et al.  The Nature of Phonological Awareness: Converging Evidence From Four Studies of Preschool and Early Grade School Children. , 2004 .

[38]  Carsten Elbro,et al.  Precursors of functional literacy , 2002 .

[39]  U. Goswami.  Children's use of analogy in learning to read: A developmental study , 1986 .

[40]  A. Durgunoğlu,et al.  A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition , 1999 .

[41]  Keith E. Stanovich,et al.  Components of phonological awareness , 1995 .

[42]  J. Metsala,et al.  Age-of-Acquisition, Word Frequency, and Neighborhood Density Effects on Spoken Word Recognition by Children and Adults , 2001 .

[43]  Pierre A. Hallé,et al.  Where Is the /b/ in “absurde” [apsyrd]? It Is in French Listeners' Minds , 2000 .

[44]  Ingvar Lundberg,et al.  Effects of an Extensive Program for Stimulating Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children. , 1988 .

[45]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST HOW PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE INFORMS THE TEACHING OF READING , 2022 .

[46]  M. Harris,et al.  Learning to read and spell in Greek: The importance of letter knowledge and morphological awareness. , 1999 .

[47]  P. Bryant,et al.  Categorizing sounds and learning to read—a causal connection , 1983, Nature.

[48]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory word recognition , 1998 .

[49]  V. Mann,et al.  Phoneme awareness and pathways into literacy: A comparison of German and American children , 2002 .

[50]  Jamie L. Metsala,et al.  An examination of word frequency and neighborhood density in the development of spoken-word recognition , 1997, Memory & cognition.

[51]  Régine Kolinsky,et al.  Mental representations of the syllable internal structure are influenced by orthography , 2001 .

[52]  P. H. Seymour,et al.  Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies. , 2003, British journal of psychology.

[53]  J. Metsala,et al.  Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to p , 1998 .

[54]  Isabelle Y. Liberman,et al.  Awareness of phonological segments and reading ability in Italian children , 1988, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[55]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Neighborhood effects in auditory word recognition: Phonological competition and orthographic facilitation. , 2003 .

[56]  J. Hanley,et al.  Phonological awareness and visual skills in learning to read Chinese and English , 1995, Cognition.