Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T16:16:55.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Grain size effects in rime judgment across literacy development in German

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2019

Alexandra M. A. Schmitterer
Affiliation:
Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt am Main
Sascha Schroeder*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Phonological similarity effects are biases to judge words as phonologically similar (i.e., rhyming), even if they are not. First found in rime awareness tasks in preliterates, these biases have recently also been found in proficient adult readers. In this study, we evaluated underlying phonological processing in rime judgment longitudinally, across literacy development. To this end, we created a new rime judgment task (rime; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯l/ - /z∙aɪ̯l/) with two distractor conditions that varied in size of phonological overlap (body; i.e., /taɪ̯∙l/ - /taɪ̯ ç/; nucleus; i.e., /t∙aɪ̯∙l/ - /r∙aɪ̯∙s/). The task was administered to a group of 61 German-speaking children at four time points across school entry and to 21 adults. Accuracy and latency responses were recorded. Results indicated that children and adults showed phonological similarity effects but the effect decreased gradually over time. However, preliterate children were more sensitive to large compared to small phonological overlap, while the same effect was significantly smaller in literate children and adults. Results suggest that preliterate children are more sensitive to larger grain sizes and become more sensitive to fine-grained units across literacy development. The findings are in line with the assumptions of the psycholinguistic grain size theory.

Type
Original Article
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019. 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anthony, J. L., & Francis, D. J. (2005). Development of phonological awareness. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 255259. doi: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00376.x CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anthony, J. L., & Lonigan, C. J. (2004). The nature of phonological awareness: Converging evidence from four studies of preschool and early grade school children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 4355. doi: 10.1037/0022-0663.96.1.43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390412. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradley, L., & Bryant, P. (1978). Difficulties in auditory organization as a possible cause of reading backwardness. Nature, 271, 746748. doi: 10.1038/271746a0 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Caravolas, M., Lervåg, A., Defior, S., Málková, G. S., & Hulme, C. (2013). Different patterns, but equivalent predictors, of growth in reading in consistent and inconsistent orthographies. Psychological Science, 24, 13981407. doi: 10.1177/0956797612473122 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cardoso-Martins, C. (1994). Rime perception: Global or analytical? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 57, 2641.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, J. M., & Myers, J. M. (2011). Spoken word classification in children and adults. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 54, 127147. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2010/08-0148 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carroll, J. M., & Snowling, M. J. (2001). The effects of global similarity between stimuli on children’s judgment of rime and alliteration. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 327342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castles, A., & Coltheart, M. (2004). Is there a causal link from phonological awareness to success in learning to read? Cognition, 91, 77111. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00164-1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cara, B., & Goswami, U. (2003). Phonological neighbourhood density: Effects in a rime awareness task in five-year-old children. Journal of Child Language, 30, 695710. doi: 10.1017/S0305000903005725 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ennemoser, M., Marx, P., Weber, J., & Schneider, W. (2012). Spezifische Vorläuferfertigkeiten der Lesegeschwindigkeit, des Leseverständnisses und des Rechtschreibens. Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie, 44, 5367. doi: 10.1026/0049-8637/a000057 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esser, G., & Wyschkon, A. (2002). Basisdiagnostik für Umschriebene Entwicklungsstörungen im Vorschulalter: BUEVA. Göttingen: Beltz.Google Scholar
Esser, G., & Wyschkon, A. (2016). Basisdiagnostik Umschriebener Entwicklungsstörungen im Vorschulalter—Version III (BUEVA-III). Göttingen: Hogrefe.Google Scholar
Faust, M. E., Balota, D. A., Spieler, D. H., & Ferraro, F. R. (1999). Individual differences in information-processing rate and amount: implications for group differences in response latency. Psychological bulletin, 125, 777799.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, J., & Weisberg, S. (2011). An {R} companion to applied regression (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Ganzeboom, H. B. G. (2010). A new International Socio-Economic Index (ISEI) of occupational status for the International Standard Classification of Occupation 2008 (ISCO-08) constructed with data from the ISSP 2002–2007. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of International Social Survey Programme, Lisbon.Google Scholar
Ganzeboom, H. B.G., De Graaf, P. M., & Treiman, D. J. (1992). A Standard International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status. Social Science Research, 21, 156. doi: 10.1016/0049-089X(92)90017-B CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geudens, A., & Sandra, D. (2003). Beyond implicit phonological knowledge: No support for an onset–rime structure in children’s explicit phonological awareness. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 157182. doi: 10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00036-6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goswami, U. (1999). Causal connections in beginning reading: The importance of rime. Journal of Research in Reading, 22, 217240. doi: 10.1111/1467-9817.00087 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goswami, U., & Bryant, P. (1990). Phonological skills and learning to read. London: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Goswami, U., & de Cara, B. (2000). Lexical representations and development: The emergence of rime processing. Paper presented at the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Spoken Word Access Processes, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.Google Scholar
Goswami, U., Ziegler, J. C., Dalton, L., & Schneider, W. (2001). Pseudohomophone effects and phonological recoding procedures in reading development in English and German. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 648664.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goswami, U., Ziegler, J. C., & Richardson, U. (2005). The effects of spelling consistency on phonological awareness: A comparison of English and German. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 92, 345365. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2005.06.002 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heather Fritzley, V., & Lee, K. (2003). Do young children always say yes to yes-no questions? A metadevelopmental study of the affirmation bias. Child Development, 74, 12971313. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00608 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hogan, T. P., Bowles, R. P., Catts, H. W., & Storkel, H. L. (2011). The influence of neighborhood density and word frequency on phoneme awareness in 2nd and 4th grades. Journal of Communication Disorders, 44, 4958. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2010.07.002 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Inquisit (Version 3.1.0.6.) [Computer Software]. Seattle, WA: Millisecond Software.Google Scholar
Kauschke, C., & Siegmüller, J. (2010). Patholinguistische Diagnostik bei Sprachentwicklungsstörungen (PDSS) (Vol. 4). München: Elsevier, Urban & Fischer Verlag.Google Scholar
Kirtley, C., Bryant, P., MacLean, M., & Bradley, L. (1989). Rhyme, rime, and the onset of reading. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 48, 224245.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuger, S., Rossbach, H.-G., & Weinert, S. (2013). Early literacy support in institutional settings—A comparison of quality of support at the classroom level and the individual child level. In Pfost, M., Artelt, C., and Weinert, S. (Eds.), Schriften aus der Fakultät Humanwissenschaften der Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg: Vol. 14. The Development of Reading Literacy from Early Childhood to Adolescence: Empirical findings from the Bamberg BiKS longitudinal studies (pp. 6393). Bamberg: Universty of Bamberg Press.Google Scholar
Lonigan, C. J., Burgess, S. R., Anthony, J. L., & Barker, T. A. (1998). Development of phonological sensitivity in 2- to 5-year-old children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 294311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luce, P. A., & Pisoni, D. B. (1998). Recognizing spoken words: The neighborhood activation model. Ear and Hearing, 19, 136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Macmillan, B. (2002). Rime and reading: A critical review of the research methodology. Journal of Research in Reading, 25, 442. doi: 10.1111/1467-9817.00156 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, V., & Wimmer, H. (2002). Phoneme awareness and pathways into literacy: A comparison of German and American children. Reading and Writing, 15, 653682. doi: 10.1023/A:1020984704781 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marian, V., Bartolotti, J., Chabal, S., & Shook, A. (2012). CLEARPOND: Cross-linguistic easy access resource for phonological and orthographic neighborhood densities. PLOS ONE, 7, e43230. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043230 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McBride-Chang, C., & Kail, R. V. (2002). Cross-cultural similarities in the predictors of reading acquisition. Child Development, 73, 13921407. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00479 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McBride-Chang, C., & Suk-Han Ho, C. (2005). Predictors of beginning reading in Chinese and English: A 2-year longitudinal study of Chinese kindergartners. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9, 117144. doi: 10.1207/s1532799xssr0902_2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: Precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. In Metsala, J. L., and Ehri, L. C. (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 83112). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Moll, K., & Landerl, K. (2010). Lese-und Rechtschreibtest (SLRT-II). In Weiterentwicklung des Salzburger Lese-und Rechtschreibtests (SLRT). (Reading and Spelling Test SLRT-II). Bern: Hans Huber.Google Scholar
Näslund, J. C., & Schneider, W. (1996). Kindergarten letter knowledge, phonological skills, and memory processes: Relative effects on early literacy. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 62, 3059. doi: 10.1006/jecp.1996.0021 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmalz, X., Marinus, E., Coltheart, M., & Castles, A. (2015). Getting to the bottom of orthographic depth. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22, 16141629. doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0835-2 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schneider, W., Blanke, I., Faust, V., & Küspert, P. (2011). Würzburger Leise Leseprobe-Revision (WLLP-R). Ein Gruppentest für die Grundschule (Revidierte Version). Göttingen: Hogrefe Verlag.Google Scholar
Schroeder, S., Würzner, K. M., Heister, J., Geyken, A., & Kliegl, R. (2015). childLex: A lexical database of German read by children. Behavioral Research, 47, 10851094. doi: 10.3758/s13428-014-0528-1 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seymour, P. H. K., Aro, M., & Erskine, J. M. (2003). Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 143174. doi: 10.1348/000712603321661859 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagensveld, B., Segers, E., van Alphen, P., & Verhoeven, L. (2013). The role of lexical representations and phonological overlap in rime judgments of beginning, intermediate and advanced readers. Learning and Individual Differences, 23, 6471. doi: 10.1016/j.lindif.2012.09.007 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagensveld, B., van Alphen, P., Segers, E., & Verhoeven, L. (2012). The nature of rime processing in preliterate children. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 672689. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8279.2011.02055.x CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walley, A. (1993). The role of vocabulary development in children’s spoken word recognition and segmentation ability. Developmental Review, 13, 286350. doi: 10.1006/drev.1993.1015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wimmer, H., Landerl, K., & Schneider, W. (1994). The role of rhyme awareness in learning to read a regular orthography. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 12, 469484. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00648.x CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ziegler, J. C., Bertrand, D., Tóth, D., Csépe, V., Reis, A., Faísca, L., & Blomert, L. (2010). Orthographic depth and its impact on universal predictors of reading: A cross-language investigation. Psychological Science, 21, 551559. doi: 10.1177/0956797610363406 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 329. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.131.1.3 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed