A developmental investigation of selective attention to graphic, phonetic, and semantic information in words

Abstract

Second and fifth-grade and college-age subjects made similarity judgments on sets of three words that required attention to orthographic, phonetic, or semantic information. Accuracy and speed increased with age. Even the youngest subjects were able to perform the task of selecting a given feature of a word reasonably well. Differences in difficulty among the three tasks decreased with age, suggesting a developmental change (primarily between second and fifth grade) toward facility in extracting phonetic and semantic information from words. The presence of confusable, potentially relevant information had detrimental effects overall which decreased with age and varied with the type of task and type of distractor. For all ages, performance was better when all trials of a particular task were blocked together than when trials of the three tasks were randomly ordered. 88Printed words offer several types of information: semantic and morphological, syntactic, graphic and orthographic, and phonetic. Gibson (1971) has called these types feature classes. When reading, one's purpose determines which class of information is most relevant. Although we generally read for meaning, we may focus on orthography when correcting papers or looking up a name in the phone book, and on sound when reading poetry. Performing any of these tasks requires the ability to extract and work with one class of information in preference to another.The present study is concerned with the development of selective attention to particular classes of information offered by printed words. It has been established that 7-year-olds can attend selectively to graphic distinctive features in a search task, using strategies similar to those of adults (Gibson & Yonas, 1966), and that they can perform some types of phonemic analysis (Golden, Note 1). The present study provides a more complete test of readers' abilities to work with specific classes of information. Children of two grade levels and college students

Children’s and adults’ use of spelling-sound information in three reading tasks

“…Edfeldt (1959), for example, suggested that children use phonological information when reading all words initially but that as words become more familiar they are identified on a visual basis. However, studies by Barron and Baron (1977), Condry, McMahon-Rideout, andLevy (1979), andRader (1975) failed to support this view because they provided evidence that even very young children were using visual, as opposed to phonological, codes in accessingmeaning.…”

The Prelingually Deaf Young Reader: A Case of Reliance on Direct Lexical Access?

“…Van Orden, Pennington and Stone (1990) have argued that phonological coding continues to be used in word identification. They report data from Condry, McMahon-Rideout and Levy (1979) that involved synonym judgment (glad-happy). Distractor items included word pairs with a high degree of phonological similarity ( plate-wait ).…”

An invited article: Phonological recoding and reading acquisition

“…Probability-Efficiency Theory appears to give a better account of the data than Stage Theory. It can readily account for the findings of Rader (1975), Barron and Baron (1977), and Condry et al (1979), by assuming that the highly frequent and concrete content words used in these studies have a near-zero probability of being read via the phonological route, even by beginning readers.…”

“…The final nail in the coffin of Stage Theory was a study reported by Condry, McMahon-Rideout, and Levy (1979), who used children from Grades 2 and 5 and adults. In this study, subjects were presented visually with a target word and had to decide which of two choice words were related to it in some particular way -either graphically, phonetically, or semantically.…”

“…As yet there have been no studies into the flexibility of children's use of lexical access strategies. If children can vary their w weights, this would explain the failure to find evidence of phonological recoding in beginning readers (Barron & Baron, 1977;Condry et al, 1979;Rader, 1975). All these studies used a restricted range of words -content words high in frequency and concreteness.…”