Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T23:31:58.897Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Minding the gaps: literacy enhances lexical segmentation in children learning to read*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2017

NAOMI HAVRON  and
INBAL ARNON
NAOMI HAVRON*
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
INBAL ARNON
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
*
Address for correspondence: Naomi Havron, Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Can emergent literacy impact the size of the linguistic units children attend to? We examined children's ability to segment multiword sequences before and after they learned to read, in order to disentangle the effect of literacy and age on segmentation. We found that early readers were better at segmenting multiword units (after controlling for age, cognitive, and linguistic variables), and that improvement in literacy skills between the two sessions predicted improvement in segmentation abilities. Together, these findings suggest that literacy acquisition, rather than age, enhanced segmentation. We discuss implications for models of language learning.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 6 , November 2017 , pp. 1516 - 1538
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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.)

Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by ISF Grant 52712 (to IA). The authors thank the schools, teachers, parents, and children for their cooperation. We also thank our two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Finally, we thank the research assistants who administered the tasks: Tamar Johnson, Ruth Goldberg, and Yaron Shapira.

References

REFERENCES

Abbot-Smith, K. & Tomasello, M. (2006). Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition. Linguistic Review 23(3), 275–290.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. (2010). Starting big: the role of multiword phrases in language learning and use. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. (2015). What can frequency effects tell us about the building blocks and mechanisms of language learning? Journal of Child Language 42, 274–277.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. & Christiansen, M. H. (2014). Chunk-based language acquisition. In Brooks, P. J. & Kempe, V. (eds), Encyclopedia of language development, 88–90. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. & Clark, E. V. (2011). Why brush your teeth is better than teeth – children's word production is facilitated in familiar sentence-frames. Language Learning and Development 7, 107–129.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. & Cohen Priva, U. (2013). More than words: the effect of multi-word frequency and constituency on phonetic duration. Language and Speech 56(3), 349–371.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. & Ramscar, M. (2012). Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: how order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned. Cognition 122(3), 292–305.Google Scholar
Arnon, I. & Snider, N. (2010). More than words: frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language 62(1), 67–82.Google Scholar
Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J. R. & Newport, E. L. (1998). Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological Science 9(4), 321–324.Google 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, 390–412.Google Scholar
Bannard, C. & Lieven, E. (2009). Repetition and reuse in child language learning. Formulaic Language 2, 299–321.Google Scholar
Bannard, C., Lieven, E. & Tomasello, M. (2009). Modeling children's early grammatical knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106(41), 17284–17289.Google Scholar
Bannard, C. & Matthews, D. (2008). Stored word sequences in language learning: the effect of familiarity on children's repetition of four-word combinations. Psychological Science 19, 241–248.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bar-On, A. & Ravid, D. (2011). Morphological analysis in learning to read pseudowords in Hebrew. Applied Psycholinguistics 32(3), 553–581.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C. & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language 68(3), 255–278.Google Scholar
Bassetti, B. (2007). Bilingualism, biliteracy and metalinguistic awareness: word awareness in English and Japanese users of Chinese as a second language. Birkbeck Studies in Applied Linguistics 2, 1–21.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A. & Ravid, D. (2000). Acquisition of Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic: a review of current research. Hebrew Studies 41, 83–98.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1986). Children's concept of word. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 15(1), 13–32.Google Scholar
Biber, D. (2009). A corpus-driven approach to formulaic language in English: multi-word patterns in speech and writing. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14, 275–311.Google Scholar
Bod, R. (2006). Exemplar-based syntax: how to get productivity from examples. Linguistic Review 23(3), 291–320.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B. & Walker, S. (2015). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1-8. <http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4>..>Google Scholar
Bybee, J. (2002). Phonological evidence for exemplar storage of multiword sequences. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24(2), 215–221.Google Scholar
Christophe, A., Dupoux, E., Bertonici, J. & Mehler, J. (1994). Do infants perceive word boundaries? An empirical study of the bootstrapping of lexical acquisition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 95(3), 1570–1580.Google Scholar
Daniels, P. T. & Bright, W. (eds.) (1996). The world's writing systems. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
de Jong, P. F. & van der Leij, A. (1999). Specific contributions of phonological abilities to early reading acquisition: results from a Dutch latent variable longitudinal study. Journal of Educational Psychology 91(3), 450–476.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elman, J. L. (2009). On the meaning of words and dinosaur bones: lexical knowledge without a lexicon. Cognitive Science 33(4), 547–582.Google Scholar
Evans, M. A. N. N., Shaw, D. & Bell, M. (2000). Home literacy activities and their influence on early literacy skills. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale 54(2), 65–75.Google Scholar
Gathercole, S. E., Tiffany, C., Briscoe, J. & Thorn, A. (2005). Developmental consequences of poor phonological short-term memory function in childhood: a longitudinal study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 46(6), 598–611.Google Scholar
Gombert, J. E. (1994). How do illiterate adults react to metalinguistic training? Annals of Dyslexia 44, 250–269.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Havron, N. & Arnon, I. (2016). Reading between the words: the effect of literacy on second language lexical segmentation. Applied Psycholinguistics. Online: <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0142716416000138>.Google Scholar
Holden, M. H. & MacGinitie, W. H. (1972). Children's conceptions of word boundaries in speech and print. Journal of Educational Psychology 63(6), 551–557.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huttenlocher, J. (1964). Children's language: word–phrase relationship, 143(3603), 264–265.Google Scholar
Itai, A. & Wintner, S. (2008). Language resources for Hebrew. Language Resources and Evaluation 42(1), 75–98.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. F. (2008). Categorical data analysis: away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 434–446.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., Sims, K., Jones, M. C. & Cuckle, P. (1996). Rethinking metalinguistic awareness: representing and accessing knowledge about what counts as a word. Cognition 58(2), 197–219.Google Scholar
Kaufman, A. S. (1994). Wiley series on personality processes: intelligent testing with the WISC-III. Oxford: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Kavé, G. (2006). The development of naming and word fluency: evidence from Hebrew-speaking children between ages 8 and 17. Developmental Neuropsychology 29(3), 493–508.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kurvers, J. & Uri, H. (2006). Metalexical awareness: development, methodology or written language? A cross-linguistic comparison. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 35(4), 353–367.Google Scholar
Kurvers, J., Vallen, T. & Hout, R. V. (2006). Discovering features of language: metalinguistic awareness of adult illiterates. LOT Occasional Series 6, 69–88.Google Scholar
Kurvers, J., van Hout, R. & Vallen, T. (2009). Print awareness of adult illiterates: a comparison with young pre-readers and low-educated adult readers. Reading and Writing 22, 863–887.Google Scholar
Levin, I., Ravid, D., Rapaport, S. & Nunes, T. (1999). Developing morphological awareness and learning to write: a two-way street. Neuropsychology and Cognition 17, 77–104.Google Scholar
Lieven, E. (2014). First language development: a usage-based perspective on past and current research. Journal of Child Language 41(1), 48–63.Google Scholar
Lieven, E., Behrens, H., Speares, J. & Tomasello, M. (2003). Early syntactic creativity: a usage-based approach. Journal of Child Language 30(2), 333–370.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lieven, E., Salomo, D. & Tomasello, M. (2009). Two-year-old children's production of multiword utterances: a usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3), 481–507.Google Scholar
Matthews, D. & Bannard, C. (2010). Children's production of unfamiliar word sequences is predicted by positional variability and latent classes in a large sample of child-directed speech. Cognitive Science 34(3), 465–488.Google Scholar
McCauley, S. M. & Christiansen, M. H. (2011). Learning simple statistics for language comprehension and production: the CAPPUCCINO model. In Carlson, L., Hölscher, C. & Shipley, T. (eds), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1619–1624). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
McCauley, S. M. & Christiansen, M. H. (2014). Acquiring formulaic language: a computational model. Mental Lexicon 9(3), 419–436.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClelland, J. L. (2010). Emergence in cognitive science. Topics in Cognitive Science 2(4), 751–770.Google Scholar
Meunier, F. (2012). Formulaic language and language teaching. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 32, 111–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morais, J., Bertelson, P., Cary, L. & Alegrıa, J. (1986). Literacy training and speech segmentation. Cognition 24, 45–64.Google Scholar
Olson, D. R. (1996). Towards a psychology of literacy: on the relations between speech and writing. Cognition 60(1), 83–104.Google Scholar
Onderdelinden, L., Craats, I. V. D. & Kurvers, J. (2009). Word concept of illiterates and low-literates: worlds apart? LOT Occasional Series 15, 35–48.Google Scholar
Peters, A. M. (1983). The units of language acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ravid, D. (2005). Hebrew orthography and literacy. In Joshi, R. Malatesha & Aaron, P. G. (eds), Handbook of orthography and literacy, 339–363. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Ravid, D. (2012). Spelling morphology: the psycholinguistics of Hebrew spelling. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Ravid, D. & Malenky, A. (2001). Awareness of linear and nonlinear morphology in Hebrew: a developmental study. First Language 21(61), 25–56.Google Scholar
Reali, F. & Christiansen, M. H. (2007). Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence. Journal of Memory and Language 57, 1–23.Google Scholar
Roberts, B. (1992). The evolution of the young child's concept of ‘word’ as a unit of spoken and written language. Reading Research Quarterly 27(2), 125–138.Google Scholar
Siegelman, N. & Arnon, I. (2015). The advantage of starting big: learning from unsegmented input facilitates mastery of grammatical gender in an artificial language. Journal of Memory and Language 85, 60–75.Google Scholar
Siyanova-Chanturia, A., Conklin, K. & van Heuven, W. J. B. (2011). Seeing a phrase ‘time and again’ matters: the role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword sequences. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition 37(3), 776–784.Google Scholar
Tarone, E., Bigelow, M. & Hansen, K. (2007). The impact of alphabetic print literacy level on oral second language acquisition. In Faux, N. (ed.), Low-educated second language and literacy acquisition: research, policy, and practice. Proceedings of the second annual forum of the Literacy Institute, 99–122. Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, Literacy Institute.Google Scholar
Tremblay, A. & Baayen, R. H. (2010). Holistic processing of regular four-word sequences: a behavioral and ERP study of the effects of structure, frequency, and probability on immediate free recall. In Wood, D. (ed.), Perspectives on formulaic language: acquisition and communication, 151–173. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Valian, V. & Levitt, A. (1996). Prosody and adults’ learning of syntactic structure. Journal of Memory and Language 35(4), 497–516.Google Scholar
Veldhuis, D. & Kurvers, J. (2012). Offline segmentation and online language processing units: the influence of literacy. Written Language & Literacy 15, 165–184.Google Scholar
Wray, A. (2000). Formulaic sequences in second language teaching: principle and practice. Applied Linguistics 21, 463–489.Google Scholar