Adaptive specialization in position encoding while learning to read

Tóth, Dénes; Csépe, Valéria

doi:10.1111/desc.12426

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…The strong hypothesis, that orthographic learning might involve the development of a more flexible representational scheme for letter-in-word order, has been put to test in several studies (Eddy, Grainger, Holcomb, & Gabrieli, 2016; Grainger et al, 2012b; Ziegler, Bertrand, Lété, & Grainger, 2014; see Toth & Csépe [2017] for complementary findings and an alternative interpretation). The key finding here is that TL effects have been found to increase as reading level increases in primary school children.…”

Section: Learning the Orthographic Codementioning

confidence: 99%

Orthographic processing: A ‘mid-level’ vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture

Grainger

2018

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

125

135

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I will describe how orthographic processing acts as a central interface between visual and linguistic processing during reading, and as such can be considered to be the 'mid-level vision' of reading research. In order to make this case, I first summarize the evidence in favour of letter-based word recognition before examining work investigating how orthographic similarities among words influence single word reading. I describe how evidence gradually accumulated against traditional measures of orthographic similarity and the associated theories of orthographic processing, forcing a reconsideration of how letter-position information is represented by skilled readers. Then, I present the theoretical framework that was developed to explain these findings, with a focus on the distinction between location-specific and location-invariant orthographic representations. Finally, I describe work extending this theoretical framework in two main directions: first, to the realm of reading development, with the aim to specify the key changes in the processing of letters and letter strings that accompany successful learning to read, and second, to the realm of sentence reading, in order to specify how orthographic information can be processed across several words in parallel, and how skilled readers keep track of which letters belong to which words.

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Section: Learning the Orthographic Codementioning

confidence: 99%

Orthographic processing: A ‘mid-level’ vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture

Grainger

2018

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

125

135

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In this article, we examine whether the orthographic-specific characteristics of the Thai writing system shape the process of letter position coding. Prior research using the Roman alphabet has offered remarkably similar patterns of letter position coding across a variety of languages (e.g., across the Germanic [English: Perea & Lupker, 2003], Romance [Spanish: Perea & Lupker, 2004], pre-Indo-European [Basque: Perea & Carreiras, 2006], Semitic [Maltese: Perea, Gatt, Moret-Tatay, & Fabri, 2012], and Uralic [Hungarian: Tóth & Csépe, 2016] families). This could be taken to suggest that letter position coding processes are to some degree language-independent, at least in alphabetic languages using the Roman alphabet.…”

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confidence: 99%

How orthographic-specific characteristics shape letter position coding: The case of Thai script

2017

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A central question for any model of visual word identification is the representation of the position at which letters are encoded (e.g., calm vs. clam). In this article, we examine whether the orthographic-specific characteristics of a writing system-namely, Thai-shape the process of letter position coding. Thai is an alphabetic script that lacks interword spaces and has an orthographic order that does not necessarily correspond to the phonological order for initial vowels. This implies that the initial letter position coding in Thai needs to be flexible enough that readers can successfully encode the letter positions of words. To compare letter position coding in Thai to that in English, we conducted an experiment that paralleled Experiment 3 in Gomez, Ratcliff, and Perea (Psychological Review, 115, 577-600, 2008), including 23 conditions (single-letter replacements, letter transpositions, letter migrations, and a corresponding control). We obtained fits from Gomez et al.'s overlap model, which is a model that has been shown to account for letter position coding in the Roman alphabet across this variety of letter manipulations. The overlap model was found to successfully fit the Thai data. Our results revealed that the position encoding was better for the first letter than for the rest of the positions in both languages; however, in English the position uncertainty grows as a function of letter order quite abruptly, whereas in Thai it grows gradually. Thus, the orthographic-specific characteristics of the Thai writing system do play a role in shaping the process of letter position coding.

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“…One option is that it is not the development of letter-identity or letter-position processing per se, but their interaction with the representations in the orthographic lexicon. As words in English have on average more substitution neighbors than letter-transposition neighbors, children will more quickly tune their orthographic representations letter identity-wise than letter order-wise (Tóth & Csépe, 2017). This nicely accounts for the finding that substitution errors already become rare in early reading development.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who are the noisiest neighbors in the hood? Using error analyses to study the acquisition of letter-position processing.

Marinus

Kezilas

Kohnen

et al. 2018

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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This research examines the acquisition of letter-position processing. Study 1 investigated letter-position processing in Grades 1-6 and adult readers, using the occurrence of specific error types as the outcome measure. Between Grades 1 and 2, there was a shift from making more other-word to making more letter-position errors. This shift was a function of reading proficiency, not of years of reading instruction. Based on the multiple-route model of reading development (Grainger, Lété, Bertand, Dufau, & Ziegler, 2012), we argue that the fact that children make fewer other-word errors (i.e., mostly letter-identity errors) opens up the opportunity for them to make "the more advanced" letter-position errors. Finally, skilled adult readers still made fewer letter-position errors than typical readers in Grade 6, suggesting that the acquisition process is not finalized by the end of primary school. In Study 2, we directly compared letter-position processing with letter-identity processing. Thirty children in Grade 3 and 30 children in Grade 4 read aloud words with and without higher-frequency distractors. Children more often misread a word with a higher-frequency distractor than without such a distractor and this effect was stronger for below-average than for above-average readers. Converging with the results of Study 1, we found that a letter-position distractor is more disruptive than a letter-identity distractor. These results confirm that the acquisition of letter-position processing lags behind of that of letter-identity processing. The results are discussed within the framework of the Lexical Tuning Hypothesis (Castles, Davis, Cavalot, & Forster, 2007), which stresses the importance of feedback between letter (identity and position) coding and (developing) orthographic representations. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Adaptive specialization in position encoding while learning to read

Cited by 7 publications

References 48 publications

Orthographic processing: A ‘mid-level’ vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture

Orthographic processing: A ‘mid-level’ vision of reading: The 44th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture

How orthographic-specific characteristics shape letter position coding: The case of Thai script

Who are the noisiest neighbors in the hood? Using error analyses to study the acquisition of letter-position processing.

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