Factors affecting children's reading of rimes: Reading ability, word frequency, and rime-neighborhood size.

Beginning readers were studied in 2 experiments to examine the influence of reading ability, word frequency, and rime-neighborhood size (the number of single syllable words with the same rime) on word and nonword recognition. Forty 1st and 2nd graders read 53 words and 27 nonwords containing rimes from different-size neighborhoods. Children reading at or below a 2nd-grade level were less affected by rime-neighborhoods than children reading at or above a 3rd-grade level. Rimes from large neighborhoods were read correctly more often in lists and stories than rimes from moderate or small neighborhoods, particularly in low-frequency words. As children learn to read, they become increasingly sensitive to rime-neighborhood size. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Errors in short-term memory for speech: A developmental study.

In a previous study (R. Treiman & C. Danis, 1988), adults who were presented with lists of spoken consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense syllables for immediate recall produced many errors that combined the initial consonant onset of one to-be-remembered syllable with the vowel-consonant rime of another to-be-remembered syllable. These onset-rime recombination errors were more common than other types of recombination errors and also more common than serial position errors. These findings suggest that nonwords are remembered in terms of smaller phonological units. To replicate the previous results and to determine whether they generalize to children, the author tested kindergartners, 3rd graders, 6th graders, and adults on lists of nonsense CVCs. Onset-rime conjunction errors were the most frequent type of recombination error, even among kindergartners, suggesting that children code spoken syllables in terms of onset and rime units from a young age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's interpretations of homonyms: a developmental study

The effect of homonymity on children's use of semantic context to derive word meaning was examined in two studies. Participants were presented with stories that included three types of key words: nonsense words, familiar words used accurately, and homonymous words. Thirty-two preschoolers aged 3;7 to 5;4, 32 second graders aged 7;1 to 8;8, and 16 college students in Study 1 indicated the keys words' meaning by selecting one of six possible illustrations per key word. In Study 2, 16 toddlers aged 2;9 to 3;3, 32 preschoolers aged 4;0 to 4;11, 32 second graders aged 7;0 to 8;11, and 32 fifth graders aged 10;1 to 11;8 indicated key word meanings either by enacting each story with paper dolls or by selecting one of six possible illustrations. Word type and age, but not response mode, affected children's interpretations. Children from all four age groups made fewer contextually based interpretations of homonymous words than of nonsense words. Fifth graders and adults made more contextually based (rather than literal) interpretations of homonymous words than did younger children. The results suggest that homonymity is a powerful inhibitor of children's tendency to derive a meaning for a new word from context.     

Attribute dominance in memory development.

72 children, 36 each from the 1st and 6th grades, were given a 70-item study list followed by a recognition test list of equal length. Items were line drawings of common objects accompanied by orally presented verbal labels. To provide an indication of the relative dominance of features encoded at the 2 ages, labels, pictures, and referents were manipulated in various combinations to form visual, semantic, and acoustic distractors, which were included in the test list. Significant numbers of false recognitions (as measured against false-recognition rates for control words) were elicited by visual distractors for both age groups, by acoustic distractors for 1st graders and by semantic distractors for 6th graders and 1st grade females. Implications for hypotheses concerning the role of visual representation and the developmental onset of semantic encoding are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading achievement gaps, correlates, and moderators of early reading achievement: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) kindergarten to first grade sample.

This study estimated reading achievement gaps in different ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic groups of 1st graders in the U.S. compared with specific reference groups and identified statistically significant correlates and moderators of early reading achievement. A subset of 2,296 students nested in 184 schools from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) kindergarten to 1st-grade cohort were analyzed with hierarchical linear models. With child-level background differences controlled, significant 1st-grade reading differentials were found in African American children (-0.51 SD units below Whites), boys (-0.31 SD units below girls), and children from high-poverty households (-0.61 to -1.0 SD units below well-to-do children). In all 3 comparisons, the size of the reading gaps increased from kindergarten entry to 1st grade. Reading level at kindergarten entry was a significant child-level correlate, related to poverty status. At the school level, class size and elementary teacher certification rate were significant reading correlates in 1st grade. Cross-level interactions indicated reading achievement in African American children was moderated by the schools students attended, with attendance rates and reading time at home explaining the variance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teaching rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategies to prereaders: Effects on prereading skills and word reading.

Two experiments and a longitudinal study examined teaching rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategies to prereaders. Grade 1 children with weak prereading skills were assigned to rime analogy, letter recoding, or control groups. Treatment groups had equal word reading except for with words like sight, where the rime analogy group excelled. Experience with rime analogy increased letter recoding ability, but teaching in letter recoding did not enhance rime analogy. Treatment groups read as many nonwords as did children with high prereading skills, and this was maintained 4 months later. Treatment effects on prereading skills with kindergartners paralleled the Grade 1 results, but reading effects were weaker. Children changed reading strategies when a clue word was present that shared a rime spelling with the test word. Children learned to read with a rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategy, and many developed new reading strategies independently. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of trait and state anxiety on the performance of elementary school children in traditional and individualized multiage classrooms.

Evaluated anxiety and performance on concrete and abstract criterion-referenced mathematics tests for 267 1st and 2nd graders assigned to either individualized multiage programs (IMP) or traditional learning environments (TRAD). The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC) was used to measure anxiety. Lower trait and state anxiety was associated with the IMP program, and anxiety-reducing effects were greater for 2nd graders. High A-Trait 1st graders performed more poorly than low A-Trait 1st graders. Although IMP 1st graders were lower in A-Trait than TRAD children, they did not differ in performance. For 2nd graders, the IMP environment facilitated the performance of high A-Trait children, but resulted in poorer performance for low A-Trait children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rhyming ability, phoneme identity, letter–sound knowledge, and the use of orthographic analogy by prereaders.

Two current models of the use of orthographic analogy claim that (a) beginning readers can make orthographic analogies based on rhyming and (b) considerable experience recoding individual letter sequences involving phonemes is a prerequisite. The study tested the first model and had implications for the second model. Rhyming, phoneme identity, letter–sound knowledge, and vocabulary were measured in 66 prereaders with a mean age of 5 years 8 months. Children then received teaching that varied experience with onset and rime and with words with the spelling intact or segmented. The study produced evidence that children with high-prereading skills can make orthographic analogies when beginning to read. However, final phoneme identity, not rhyming, was the best discriminatory between children who read analogy test words and those who did not. The evidence supports a synthesis of the two models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gastrointestinal manifestations in pediatric AIDS

Current debate over the influence of phonological awareness on early reading development is polarised around small-unit (phoneme) processing and large-unit (onset-rime) processing. These opposing theories were contrasted by assessing the impact of pre-school phonological skills on reading amongst children experiencing their first year of formal instruction by a mixed method. Those beginning readers who could decode nonwords were found to have accomplished this by employing their letter-sound knowledge rather than by making analogies based on familiar rime units. Children displayed this pattern of performance regardless of their pre-school rhyming skills. Further investigations revealed that explicit awareness of onset and rime units was poor, even amongst children whose implicit rhyming skills were excellent. This evidence, together with the children's knowledge of orthographic units, was consistent with the view that letter-sound correspondences rather than onset or rime units formed the basis of their first attempts to utilise phonology in reading. The findings are discussed with reference to instructional influences on early reading and phonological awareness.     

Semantic, repetition and rime priming between spoken words: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Semantic, phonological and repetition priming for auditorily presented words were examined, using both behavioral reaction times (RTs) and electrophysiological event-related potentials (ERPs) measures. On critical trials, a word prime was followed by a word target that was semantically or phonologically related (rime) or not related (control) to the prime. Pairs of word-pseudoword items served as fillers. Participants were asked to respond to word targets in the RT experiment and to pseudowords in the ERP experiment. In each experiment stimuli were presented once and then repeated in the very same way. RTs were found to be fastest for semantic, intermediate for rime and slowest for control targets; large repetition effects occurred for all targets. ERPs results showed that both semantic and phonological priming influenced the same component, namely the N400, whose amplitude was smallest to semantic, intermediate to rime and largest to control targets; repetition effects were only found for semantic trials.     

The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography.

The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant–vowel–consonant phonological structure were examined. Orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency of pronunciation of the orthographic rime accounted for variance in latencies and errors beyond that contributed by the consistency of pronunciation of the individual graphemes and by other factors. In 3 experiments, as well, children and adults made more errors on words with less consistently pronounced orthographic rimes than on words with more consistently pronounced orthographic rimes. Relations between spellings and sounds in the simple monomorphemic words of English are more predictable when the level of onsets and rimes is taken into account than when only graphemes and phonemes are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological Awareness of Bilingual and Monolingual Chinese Children.

The effect of bilingualism on the development of phonological awareness of Chinese children was investigated in 2 studies comparing bilingual speakers of both Cantonese and Mandarin with monolingual speakers of Mandarin. Cantonese-speaking children had developed more advanced onset and rime awareness by 2nd grade as they learned Mandarin in school and became bilingual. Bilingualism seemed to accelerate the development of phonological awareness. But the advantage had mostly disappeared by 4th grade. On the other hand, in the 1st grade, Cantonese-speaking children had more advanced tone awareness than Mandarin-speaking children. This was likely because Cantonese has a more complicated tone system than Mandarin. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of a two-stage procedure for the automatic recognition of dysfluencies in the speech of children who stutter: II. ANN recognition of repetitions and prolongations with supplied word segment markers

This program of work is intended to develop automatic recognition procedures to locate and assess stuttered dysfluencies. This and the following article together, develop and test recognizers for repetitions and prolongations. The automatic recognizers classify the speech in two stages: In the first, the speech is segmented, and, in the second, the segments are categorized. The units that are segmented are words. Here assessments by human judges on the speech of 12 children who stutter are described using a corresponding procedure. The accuracy of word boundary placement across judges, categorization of the words as fluent, repetition or prolongation, and duration of the different fluency categories are reported. These measures allow reliable instances of repetitions and prolongations to be selected for training and assessing the recognizers in the subsequent paper.     

Word learning in beginning readers and prereaders: Effects of form class and defining contexts.

Describes 3 experiments using a total of 141 kindergartners and 1st graders as Ss. In a paired associate task, readers and prereaders were taught 5 words as oral responses, each word paired with a distinctive nonsense figure. Context-dependent words (i.e., past tense verbs, prepositions, functors, which require verbal contexts to be meaningful) took longer to learn than context-free words (nouns, adjectives). Providing a sentence context, however, did not make it easier to learn either word class. In contrast to readers, prereaders had substantial difficulty learning the words, particularly context-dependent words. This is attributed to the prereaders' failure to recognize these words as units in their language. In view of the difficulty remembering the words, the results raise doubts about the effectiveness of teaching beginning readers sight vocabulary words printed on flash cards. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nature–nurture in the classroom: Entrance age, school readiness, and learning in children.

The impact of entrance age on reading and mathematics achievement in 1st grade was examined. Methodological problems with past research were identified, including small size of achievement differences, failure to take background variables into account, and confusion of achievement levels with degree of learning. Using a pre–post design, growth of reading and mathematics was examined in younger 1st graders, older 1st graders, and older kindergarteners. Comparisons of background information on these groups with children who were either held out prior to or retained an extra year in kindergarten, produced minimal background differences. Results revealed that younger 1st graders made as much progress over the school year as did older 1st graders and made far more progress than older kindergarteners. Overall, findings demonstrated that, in itself, entrance age was not a good predictor of learning or academic risk. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual perception of word chunks and beginning reading.

Asked 81 1st graders and 45 2nd graders to identify digraphs and trigraphs of high-frequency occurrence embedded in strings of 5 or 7 letters. Ss responded more frequently and more accurately to target items located at the beginning and end of the letter strings. Although success was unrelated to the frequency of occurrence of digraphs or trigraphs, the performance of 2nd graders was superior to that of 1st graders. Results suggest that since experience or instruction in reading does have an effect, frequency of occurrence in text may be an inadequate measure of the frequency with which students are exposed to the graphemic units studied. Skill in identifying word chunks was significantly related to measures of other elementary reading subskills and teacher ratings of oral reading proficiency. (French summary) (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nature-nurture in the classroom: entrance age, school readiness, and learning in children

The impact of entrance age on reading and mathematics achievement in 1st grade was examined. Methodological problems with past research were identified, including small size of achievement differences, failure to take background variables into account, and confusion of achievement levels with degree of learning. Using a pre-post design, growth of reading and mathematics was examined in younger 1st graders, older 1st graders, and older kindergarteners. Comparisons of background information on these groups with children who were either held out prior to or retained an extra year in kindergarten, produced minimal background differences. Results revealed that younger 1st graders made as much progress over the school year as did older 1st graders and made far more progress than older kindergarteners. Overall, findings demonstrated that, in itself, entrance age was not a good predictor of learning or academic risk.     

Children's use of phoneme-grapheme correspondences in spelling: Roles of position and stress.

Whether children's ability to use phoneme–grapheme correspondences in spelling is affected by the position of the phoneme in the word or syllable and by the stress of the syllable was examined. Exp 1, conducted with monosyllabic nonwords, was performed with kindergartners and 1st graders. Exps 2 and 3, conducted with bisyllabic nonwords, were carried out with 1st graders. Children spelled the first and last phonemes of nonwords more accurately than the middle phonemes. Also, children performed better on syllable-initial single consonants than on syllable-final single consonants. Errors tended to be more common for phonemes in unstressed syllables than for phonemes in stressed syllables. Together, the results suggest that the context in which a phoneme occurs influences children's ability to spell it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological recoding of nonword orthographic rime primes.

The effectiveness of nonword orthographic rime primes as a function of the regularity (as defined by grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules) of typical pronunciation was examined in this research. In Experiments 1 and 2, predictions from GPC and orthographic rime unit accounts converged, but in Experiments 3 and 4 they diverged. Experiment 1 showed that when nonword orthographic rimes were used to prime consistent regular words (e.g., mist) and atypically irregular words (e.g., pint), reliable priming was observed for regular words, but priming of atypically irregular words occurred only in the 2nd block of trials, after the orthographic rime prime itself had been primed by the Block 1 presentation of the target word. In subsequent experiments, only the 1st block of trials was examined. Experiment 2 replicated selective priming of consistent regular words observed in Block 1 of Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, nonword orthographic rimes were as effective at priming typically irregular target words (e.g., grind) as they were in priming inconsistent but typically regular target words (e.g., flint)… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)