Form–meaning links in the development of visual word recognition

Learning to read takes time and it requires explicit instruction. Three decades of research has taught us a good deal about how children learn about the links between orthography and phonology during word reading development. However, we have learned less about the links that children build between orthographic form and meaning. This is surprising given that the goal of reading development must be for children to develop an orthographic system that allows meanings to be accessed quickly, reliably and efficiently from orthography. This review considers whether meaning-related information is used when children read words aloud, and asks what we know about how and when children make connections between form and meaning during the course of reading development.     

Genetic and environmental influences on Chinese language and reading abilities

This study investigated the etiology of individual differences in Chinese language and reading skills in 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years (228 pairs of monozygotic twins and 84 pairs of dizygotic twins; 166 male pairs and 146 female pairs). Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme awareness, rapid automatized naming, morphological awareness and orthographic skills, and Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices. All analyses controlled for the effects of age. There were moderate to substantial genetic influences on word reading, tone awareness, phonological memory, morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming (estimates ranged from .42 to .73), while shared environment exerted moderate to strong effects on receptive vocabulary, syllable and rhyme awareness and orthographic skills (estimates ranged from .35 to .63). Results were largely unchanged when scores were adjusted for nonverbal reasoning as well as age. Findings of this study are mostly similar to those found for English, a language with very different characteristics, and suggest the universality of genetic and environmental influences across languages.     

Inner speech during silent reading reflects the reader's regional accent

While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech. However, there is currently little evidence regarding whether this inner voice resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. To investigate this issue, we compared reading behaviour of Northern and Southern English participants who have differing pronunciations for words like 'glass', in which the vowel duration is short in a Northern accent and long in a Southern accent. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they silently read limericks in which the end words of the first two lines (e.g., glass/class) would be pronounced differently by Northern and Southern participants. The final word of the limerick (e.g., mass/sparse) then either did or did not rhyme, depending on the reader's accent. Results showed disruption to eye movement behaviour when the final word did not rhyme, determined by the reader's accent, suggesting that inner speech resembles our own voice.     

Germanized or etymologic spelling of scientific nomenclature?

Some remarks are passed on the spelling of medical and scientific technical terms in German. In the present writer's opinion, the orthography according to Duden disfigures words from Latin origin for the most part since Latin c is written as a k before a, o, u and as a z before e and i. Also words of Greek origin are murdered if borrowed via Latin: x becomes c in Latin and than z in German if before e and i. An alternative recommendation given by Eschenbach could be acceptable for the most terms of Latin source but not for such borrowed from Greek. Especially Eschenbach is up to mischief if he proposes his alternative orthography also for words which are borrowed from Latin 1,000 years ago and are used by everybody in the colloquial German language. The better system of orthographic handling the Latin- and Greek-derived terms in German is published by Jansen (1907).     

Phonological Recoding in Error Detection: A Cross-sectional Study in Beginning Readers of Dutch

The present cross-sectional study investigated the development of phonological recoding in beginning readers of Dutch, using a proofreading task with pseudohomophones and control misspellings. In Experiment 1, children in grades 1 to 3 rejected fewer pseudohomophones (e.g., wein, sounding like wijn ‘wine’) as spelling errors than control misspellings (e.g., wijg). The size of this pseudohomophone effect was larger in grade 1 than in grade 2 and did not differ between grades 2 and 3. In Experiment 2, we replicated the pseudohomophone effect in beginning readers and we tested how orthographic knowledge may modulate this effect. Children in grades 2 to 4 again detected fewer pseudohomophones than control misspellings and this effect decreased between grades 2 and 3 and between grades 3 and 4. The magnitude of the pseudohomophone effect was modulated by the development of orthographic knowledge: its magnitude decreased much more between grades 2 and 3 for more advanced spellers, than for less advanced spellers. The persistence of the pseudohomophone effect across all grades illustrates the importance of phonological recoding in Dutch readers. At the same time, the decreasing pseudohomophone effect across grades indicates the increasing influence of orthographic knowledge as reading develops.     

Fast and Slow Readers of the Hebrew Language Show Divergence in Brain Response ～200 ms Post Stimulus: An ERP Study

Higher N170 amplitudes to words and to faces were recently reported for faster readers of German. Since the shallow German orthography allows phonological recoding of single letters, the reported speed advantages might have their origin in especially well-developed visual processing skills of faster readers. In contrast to German, adult readers of Hebrew are forced to process letter chunks up to whole words. This dependence on more complex visual processing might have created ceiling effects for this skill. Therefore, the current study examined whether also in the deep Hebrew orthography visual processing skills as reflected by N170 amplitudes explain reading speed differences. Forty university students, native speakers of Hebrew without reading impairments, accomplished a lexical decision task (i.e., deciding whether a visually presented stimulus represents a real or a pseudo word) and a face decision task (i.e., deciding whether a face was presented complete or with missing facial features) while their electroencephalogram was recorded from 64 scalp positions. In both tasks stronger event related potentials (ERPs) were observed for faster readers in time windows at about 200 ms. Unlike in previous studies, ERP waveforms in relevant time windows did not correspond to N170 scalp topographies. The results support the notion of visual processing ability as an orthography independent marker of reading proficiency, which advances our understanding about regular and impaired reading development.     

Fingerspelling as a Novel Gateway into Reading Fluency in Deaf Bilinguals

Studies have shown that American Sign Language (ASL) fluency has a positive impact on deaf individuals’ English reading, but the cognitive and cross-linguistic mechanisms permitting the mapping of a visual-manual language onto a sound-based language have yet to be elucidated. Fingerspelling, which represents English orthography with 26 distinct hand configurations, is an integral part of ASL and has been suggested to provide deaf bilinguals with important cross-linguistic links between sign language and orthography. Using a hierarchical multiple regression analysis, this study examined the relationship of age of ASL exposure, ASL fluency, and fingerspelling skill on reading fluency in deaf college-age bilinguals. After controlling for ASL fluency, fingerspelling skill significantly predicted reading fluency, revealing for the first-time that fingerspelling, above and beyond ASL skills, contributes to reading fluency in deaf bilinguals. We suggest that both fingerspelling—in the visual-manual modality—and reading—in the visual-orthographic modality—are mutually facilitating because they share common underlying cognitive capacities of word decoding accuracy and automaticity of word recognition. The findings provide support for the hypothesis that the development of English reading proficiency may be facilitated through strengthening of the relationship among fingerspelling, sign language, and orthographic decoding en route to reading mastery, and may also reveal optimal approaches for reading instruction for deaf and hard of hearing children.     

Word learning and the cerebral hemispheres: from serial to parallel processing of written words

Reading familiar words differs from reading unfamiliar non-words in two ways. First, word reading is faster and more accurate than reading of unfamiliar non-words. Second, effects of letter length are reduced for words, particularly when they are presented in the right visual field in familiar formats. Two experiments are reported in which right-handed participants read aloud non-words presented briefly in their left and right visual fields before and after training on those items. The non-words were interleaved with familiar words in the naming tests. Before training, naming was slow and error prone, with marked effects of length in both visual fields. After training, fewer errors were made, naming was faster, and the effect of length was much reduced in the right visual field compared with the left. We propose that word learning creates orthographic word forms in the mid-fusiform gyrus of the left cerebral hemisphere. Those word forms allow words to access their phonological and semantic representations on a lexical basis. But orthographic word forms also interact with more posterior letter recognition systems in the middle/inferior occipital gyri, inducing more parallel processing of right visual field words than is possible for any left visual field stimulus, or for unfamiliar non-words presented in the right visual field.     

Strategy Choice Mediates the Link between Auditory Processing and Spelling

Relations among linguistic auditory processing, nonlinguistic auditory processing, spelling ability, and spelling strategy choice were examined. Sixty-three undergraduate students completed measures of auditory processing (one involving distinguishing similar tones, one involving distinguishing similar phonemes, and one involving selecting appropriate spellings for individual phonemes). Participants also completed a modified version of a standardized spelling test, and a secondary spelling test with retrospective strategy reports. Once testing was completed, participants were divided into phonological versus nonphonological spellers on the basis of the number of words they spelled using phonological strategies only. Results indicated a) moderate to strong positive correlations among the different auditory processing tasks in terms of reaction time, but not accuracy levels, and b) weak to moderate positive correlations between measures of linguistic auditory processing (phoneme distinction and phoneme spelling choice in the presence of foils) and spelling ability for phonological spellers, but not for nonphonological spellers. These results suggest a possible explanation for past contradictory research on auditory processing and spelling, which has been divided in terms of whether or not disabled spellers seemed to have poorer auditory processing than did typically developing spellers, and suggest implications for teaching spelling to children with good versus poor auditory processing abilities.     

The Relation between Reading Skills and Eye Movement Patterns in Adolescent Readers: Evidence from a Regular Orthography

Over the past decades, the relation between reading skills and eye movement behavior has been well documented in English-speaking cohorts. As English and German differ substantially with regard to orthographic complexity (i.e. grapheme-phoneme correspondence), we aimed to delineate specific characteristics of how reading speed and reading comprehension interact with eye movements in typically developing German-speaking (Austrian) adolescents. Eye movements of 22 participants (14 females; mean age = 13;6 years;months) were tracked while they were performing three tasks, namely silently reading words, texts, and pseudowords. Their reading skills were determined by means of a standardized German reading speed and reading comprehension assessment (Lesegeschwindigkeits- und -verständnistest für Klassen 6−12). We found that (a) reading skills were associated with various eye movement parameters in each of the three reading tasks; (b) better reading skills were associated with an increased efficiency of eye movements, but were primarily linked to spatial reading parameters, such as the number of fixations per word, the total number of saccades and saccadic amplitudes; (c) reading speed was a more reliable predictor for eye movement parameters than reading comprehension; (d) eye movements were highly correlated across reading tasks, which indicates consistent reading performances. Contrary to findings in English-speaking cohorts, the reading skills neither consistently correlated with temporal eye movement parameters nor with the number or percentage of regressions made while performing any of the three reading tasks. These results indicate that, although reading skills are associated with eye movement patterns irrespective of language, the temporal and spatial characteristics of this association may vary with orthographic consistency.     

What We Can Learn about Reading Development from the Analysis of Eye Movements

The paper presents the results of the study on reading mechanisms in children of primary school age performed using eye tracking. The participants were 36 second-grade pupils. Eye movements were registered when reading a specially developed set of sentences containing words with controlled length and frequency. Neuropsychological assessment and reading of words with regular and irregular spelling were also performed. The results confirm the data of reading analysis obtained in other languages and show that characteristics of eye movements during reading depend on the length and frequency of the word. The results indicate a close relationship between the characteristics of the oculomotor activity and the level of the development of reading skills. Analysis of the relationship of eye movements and neuropsychological assessments of the cognitive abilities of children shows that the executive functions and functions for visuospatial information processing are the most important in the second year of reading aquisition. The role of auditory information processing functions requires further investigation.     

Language Differences in the Brain Network for Reading in Naturalistic Story Reading and Lexical Decision

Differences in how writing systems represent language raise important questions about whether there could be a universal functional architecture for reading across languages. In order to study potential language differences in the neural networks that support reading skill, we collected fMRI data from readers of alphabetic (English) and morpho-syllabic (Chinese) writing systems during two reading tasks. In one, participants read short stories under conditions that approximate natural reading, and in the other, participants decided whether individual stimuli were real words or not. Prior work comparing these two writing systems has overwhelmingly used meta-linguistic tasks, generally supporting the conclusion that the reading system is organized differently for skilled readers of Chinese and English. We observed that language differences in the reading network were greatly dependent on task. In lexical decision, a pattern consistent with prior research was observed in which the Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG) and right Fusiform Gyrus (rFFG) were more active for Chinese than for English, whereas the posterior temporal sulcus was more active for English than for Chinese. We found a very different pattern of language effects in a naturalistic reading paradigm, during which significant differences were only observed in visual regions not typically considered specific to the reading network, and the middle temporal gyrus, which is thought to be important for direct mapping of orthography to semantics. Indeed, in areas that are often discussed as supporting distinct cognitive or linguistic functions between the two languages, we observed interaction. Specifically, language differences were most pronounced in MFG and rFFG during the lexical decision task, whereas no language differences were observed in these areas during silent reading of text for comprehension.     

Are Individual Differences in Reading Speed Related to Extrafoveal Visual Acuity and Crowding?

Readers differ considerably in their speed of self-paced reading. One factor known to influence fixation durations in reading is the preprocessing of words in parafoveal vision. Here we investigated whether individual differences in reading speed or the amount of information extracted from upcoming words (the preview benefit) can be explained by basic differences in extrafoveal vision—i.e., the ability to recognize peripheral letters with or without the presence of flanking letters. Forty participants were given an adaptive test to determine their eccentricity thresholds for the identification of letters presented either in isolation (extrafoveal acuity) or flanked by other letters (crowded letter recognition). In a separate eye-tracking experiment, the same participants read lists of words from left to right, while the preview of the upcoming words was manipulated with the gaze-contingent moving window technique. Relationships between dependent measures were analyzed on the observational level and with linear mixed models. We obtained highly reliable estimates both for extrafoveal letter identification (acuity and crowding) and measures of reading speed (overall reading speed, size of preview benefit). Reading speed was higher in participants with larger uncrowded windows. However, the strength of this relationship was moderate and it was only observed if other sources of variance in reading speed (e.g., the occurrence of regressive saccades) were eliminated. Moreover, the size of the preview benefit—an important factor in normal reading—was larger in participants with better extrafoveal acuity. Together, these results indicate a significant albeit moderate contribution of extrafoveal vision to individual differences in reading speed.     

Modelling reading development through phonological decoding and self-teaching: implications for dyslexia

The most influential theory of learning to read is based on the idea that children rely on phonological decoding skills to learn novel words. According to the self-teaching hypothesis, each successful decoding encounter with an unfamiliar word provides an opportunity to acquire word-specific orthographic information that is the foundation of skilled word recognition. Therefore, phonological decoding acts as a self-teaching mechanism or ‘built-in teacher’. However, all previous connectionist models have learned the task of reading aloud through exposure to a very large corpus of spelling–sound pairs, where an ‘external’ teacher supplies the pronunciation of all words that should be learnt. Such a supervised training regimen is highly implausible. Here, we implement and test the developmentally plausible phonological decoding self-teaching hypothesis in the context of the connectionist dual process model. In a series of simulations, we provide a proof of concept that this mechanism works. The model was able to acquire word-specific orthographic representations for more than 25 000 words even though it started with only a small number of grapheme–phoneme correspondences. We then show how visual and phoneme deficits that are present at the outset of reading development can cause dyslexia in the course of reading development.     

Arbitrary symbolism in natural language revisited: when word forms carry meaning

Cognitive science has a rich history of interest in the ways that languages represent abstract and concrete concepts (e.g., idea vs. dog). Until recently, this focus has centered largely on aspects of word meaning and semantic representation. However, recent corpora analyses have demonstrated that abstract and concrete words are also marked by phonological, orthographic, and morphological differences. These regularities in sound-meaning correspondence potentially allow listeners to infer certain aspects of semantics directly from word form. We investigated this relationship between form and meaning in a series of four experiments. In Experiments 1-2 we examined the role of metalinguistic knowledge in semantic decision by asking participants to make semantic judgments for aurally presented nonwords selectively varied by specific acoustic and phonetic parameters. Participants consistently associated increased word length and diminished wordlikeness with abstract concepts. In Experiment 3, participants completed a semantic decision task (i.e., abstract or concrete) for real words varied by length and concreteness. Participants were more likely to misclassify longer, inflected words (e.g., "apartment") as abstract and shorter uninflected abstract words (e.g., "fate") as concrete. In Experiment 4, we used a multiple regression to predict trial level naming data from a large corpus of nouns which revealed significant interaction effects between concreteness and word form. Together these results provide converging evidence for the hypothesis that listeners map sound to meaning through a non-arbitrary process using prior knowledge about statistical regularities in the surface forms of words.     

Bow Your Head in Shame,or, Hold Your Head Up with Pride: Semantic Processing of Self-Esteem Concepts Orients Attention Vertically

Embodied cognition holds that abstract concepts are grounded in perceptual-motor simulations. If a given embodied metaphor maps onto a spatial representation, then thinking of that concept should bias the allocation of attention. In this study, we used positive and negative self-esteem words to examine two properties of conceptual cueing. First, we tested the orientation-specificity hypothesis, which predicts that conceptual cues should selectively activate certain spatial axes (in this case, valenced self-esteem concepts should activate vertical space), instead of any spatial continuum. Second, we tested whether conceptual cueing requires semantic processing, or if it can be achieved with shallow visual processing of the cue words. Participants viewed centrally presented words consisting of high or low self-esteem traits (e.g., brave, timid) before detecting a target above or below the cue in the vertical condition, or on the left or right of the word in the horizontal condition. Participants were faster to detect targets when their location was compatible with the valence of the word cues, but only in the vertical condition. Moreover, this effect was observed when participants processed the semantics of the word, but not when processing its orthography. The results show that conceptual cueing by spatial metaphors is orientation-specific, and that an explicit consideration of the word cues’ semantics is required for conceptual cueing to occur.     

Longitudinal Stability in Reading Comprehension Is Largely Heritable from Grades 1 to 6

Reading comprehension is a foundational academic skill and significant attention has focused on reading development. This report is the first to examine the stability and change in genetic and environmental influences on reading comprehension across Grades 1 to 6. This developmental range is particularly important because it encompasses the timespan in which most children move from learning how to read to using reading for learning. Longitudinal simplex models were fitted separately for two independent twin samples (N = 706; N = 976). Results suggested that the shared environment contributed to variance in early but not later reading. Instead, stability in reading development was largely mediated by continuous genetic influences. Thus, although reading is clearly a learned skill and the environment remains important for reading development, individual differences in reading comprehension appear to be also influenced by a core of genetic stability that persists through the developmental course of reading.     

Als ‘A’ niet meer als ‘a’ wordt herkend. Een analyse van verworven woordblindheid

A right-handed patient, aged 72, manifested alexia without agraphia, a right homonymous hemianopia and an impaired ability to identify visually presented objects. He was completely unable to read words aloud and severely deficient in naming visually presented letters. He responded to orthographic familiarity in the lexical decision tasks of the Psycholinguistic Assessments of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA) rather than to the lexicality of the letter strings. He was impaired at deciding whether two letters of different case (e.g., A, a) are the same, though he could detect real letters from made-up ones or from their mirror image. Consequently, his core deficit in reading was posited at the level of the abstract letter identifiers. When asked to trace a letter with his right index finger, kinesthetic facilitation enabled him to read letters and words aloud. Though he could use intact motor representations of letters in order to facilitate recognition and reading, the slow, sequential and error-prone process of reading letter by letter made him abandon further training.     

Investigating unique environmental contributions to the neural representation of written words: a monozygotic twin study

The visual word form area (VWFA) is a region of left inferior occipitotemporal cortex that is critically involved in visual word recognition. Previous studies have investigated whether and how experience shapes the functional characteristics of VWFA by comparing neural response magnitude in response to words and nonwords. Conflicting results have been obtained, however, perhaps because response magnitude can be influenced by other factors such as attention. In this study, we measured neural activity in monozygotic twins, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This allowed us to quantify differences in unique environmental contributions to neural activation evoked by words, pseudowords, consonant strings, and false fonts in the VWFA and striate cortex. The results demonstrate significantly greater effects of unique environment in the word and pseudoword conditions compared to the consonant string and false font conditions both in VWFA and in left striate cortex. These findings provide direct evidence for environmental contributions to the neural architecture for reading, and suggest that learning phonology and/or orthographic patterns plays the biggest role in shaping that architecture.     

Rapid Extraction of Lexical Tone Phonology in Chinese Characters: A Visual Mismatch Negativity Study

Background

In alphabetic languages, emerging evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies shows the rapid and automatic activation of phonological information in visual word recognition. In the mapping from orthography to phonology, unlike most alphabetic languages in which there is a natural correspondence between the visual and phonological forms, in logographic Chinese, the mapping between visual and phonological forms is rather arbitrary and depends on learning and experience. The issue of whether the phonological information is rapidly and automatically extracted in Chinese characters by the brain has not yet been thoroughly addressed.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We continuously presented Chinese characters differing in orthography and meaning to adult native Mandarin Chinese speakers to construct a constant varying visual stream. In the stream, most stimuli were homophones of Chinese characters: The phonological features embedded in these visual characters were the same, including consonants, vowels and the lexical tone. Occasionally, the rule of phonology was randomly violated by characters whose phonological features differed in the lexical tone.

Conclusions/Significance

We showed that the violation of the lexical tone phonology evoked an early, robust visual response, as revealed by whole-head electrical recordings of the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), indicating the rapid extraction of phonological information embedded in Chinese characters. Source analysis revealed that the vMMN was involved in neural activations of the visual cortex, suggesting that the visual sensory memory is sensitive to phonological information embedded in visual words at an early processing stage.