Are children's representations of words distributed? effects of orthographic neighbourhood size, consistency and regularity of naming

Abstract

Two groups of-children with mean ages of 7.47 and 9.04 years and with reading ages of 7.27 and 9.48 years respectively were asked to read lowfrequency words which differed in the consistency and regularity of their endings and which had many or few orthographic neighbours. Both groups found words with many neighbours easier to read than those with few. Only the better readers were affected by the type of ending; regular-consistent words were easier than both regular-inconsistent words and exception words which were irregular and inconsistent. However, there was no difference between the latter two types of word. It is suggested that consistency affects children's reading before regularity per se and some regularity effects may be attributable to consistency. The pattern of performance observed is most easily interpreted within connectionist models of reading in conjunction with a distributed model of phonological production such as that of Dell (1986).

Word Length and Orthographic Neighborhood Size Effects in the Left and Right Cerebral Hemispheres

“…The experiment successfully repeated the well-established facilitatory N effects for lexical decision for centrally presented words (Laxon et al, 1988(Laxon et al, , 1994. Experiment 2 investigated whether VHF and length would interact once N was controlled.…”

“…Orthographic neighborhood size (''N'') is defined as the number of words differing from a target word by one letter (i.e., ''neighbors'') (Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besner, 1977). Previous studies have shown, in general, facilitation effects in lexical decision for words with larger N's (''friendly'' words) (Laxon, Coltheart, & Keating, 1988;Laxon, Masterson, & Moran, 1994). N effects are robust when frequency, regularity, and age of acquisition are controlled, though frequency of the neighboring words may interact with N (Perea & Pollatsek, 1998;Segui & Grainger, 1993).…”

Manulex-infra: Distributional characteristics of grapheme—phoneme mappings, and infralexical and lexical units in child-directed written material

“…2 In addition to the infralexical characteristics of words, several studies indicate that reading performance is affected by the density of a word's lexical neighborhood, which corresponds to the number of orthographically similar words. Laxon and colleagues (Laxon, Coltheart, & Keating, 1988;Laxon, Masterson, & Moran, 1994) showed that words that are orthographically similar to many other words are read better by children. A similar effect has been observed for French-speaking adults reading words that were GPC-consistent (Dubois-Dunilac, Peereman, & Content, in preparation;Peereman & Content, 1995.…”

A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Word Frequency and Rime-Neighborhood Size on Beginning Readers' Rime Reading Accuracy in Words and Nonwords

“…The strategy may be: If I don't know a word I'm going to guess the most common real word that has the same initial sound(s). These miscues may also be explained through the frequency of orthographic triples (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989;Laxon et al, 1994) in that che_ is more commonly followed by e than s, and dre is more common than des. Whatever the theoretical interpretation of these miscues, they are very similar to those reported by Laxon et al (1988;.…”

“…The percentages of miscues on low-frequency words and nonwords read from lists were calculated based on each reader's correct reading of the rime in the matching highfrequency target word. These miscues were then placed into three categories depending on which part of the target word or nonword was preserved in the miscue: (a) rime-match miscues were defined as incidents when readers maintained the rime portion when misreading the low-frequency word or nonword; (b) scaffolded miscues (Laxon et al, 1994) were defined as miscues that maintained the initial and final sounds of the target word or nonword; and, (c) single-phoneme miscues were defined as miscues that preserved one phoneme of the target word or nonword. The percentage of miscues on low-frequency words and nonwords attempted in lists can be seen in Table 2.…”