Exploring the derivative suffix frequency effect in Spanish speaking children

Lázaro, Miguel; Acha, Joana; Rosa, Saray de la; García, Seila; Sáinz, Javier

doi:10.1007/s11145-016-9668-2

Cited by 14 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 49 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This finding further demonstrates the role of morphemes even during the first grade. This would also be in line with the finding that words with more frequent suffixes are read faster by Spanish second-graders (Lázaro et al, 2017). As children have been exposed to words with locatives to a larger degree, one may also argue that they have developed sight vocabulary for some words in their locative forms.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Syllables and inflectional morphemes in early Finnish readers: evidence from eye-movements

Häikiö

Vainio

2018

J. Child Lang.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Finnish is a language with simple syllable structure but rich morphology. It was investigated whether syllables or morphemes are preferred processing units in early reading. To this end, Finnish first- and second-grade children read sentences with embedded inflected target words while their eye-movements were registered. The target words were either in essive or inessive/adessive (i.e., locative) case. The target words were either non-hyphenated, or had syllable-congruent or syllable-incongruent hyphenation. For the locatives, the syllable-incongruent hyphenation coincided with the morpheme boundary, but this was not the case for the essives. It was shown that the second-graders were slowed down by hyphenation to a larger extent than first-graders. However, there was no slowdown in gaze duration for either age group when the syllable-incongruent hyphen was morpheme-congruent. These findings suggest that Finnish readers already utilize morpheme-level information during the first grade.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Syllables and inflectional morphemes in early Finnish readers: evidence from eye-movements

Häikiö

Vainio

2018

J. Child Lang.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Indeed, there is evidence of the role of derivational suffix knowledge in decoding morphologically complex words (e.g., see Mann and Singson, 2003 ). Furthermore, several studies have shown effects of suffix properties in lexical decision tasks and on the eye-movement behavior of children (e.g., Lázaro et al, 2017 ) and adults (e.g., Ford et al, 2010 ; Kuperman et al, 2010 ). In previous studies on Italian children, both with and without dyslexia, although not affecting reading speed, the presence of a suffix in a pseudoword exerted a facilitating effect on reading accuracy ( Traficante et al, 2011 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Derived Words by Italian Children With and Without Dyslexia: The Effect of Root Length

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Children with dyslexia are extremely slow at reading long words but they are faster with stimuli composed of roots and derivational suffixes (e.g., CASSIERE, ‘cashier’) than stimuli not decomposable in morphemes (e.g., CAMMELLO, ‘camel’). The present study assessed whether root length modulates children’s morphological processing. For typically developing readers, root activation was expected to be higher for longer than shorter roots because longer roots are more informative access units than shorter ones. By contrast, readers with dyslexia were not expected to be facilitated by longer roots because these roots might exceed dyslexics’ processing capacities. Two groups of Italian 6th graders, with and without dyslexia, read aloud low-frequency derived words, with familiar roots and suffixes. Word reaction times (RTs) and mispronunciations were recorded. Linear mixed-effects regression analyses on RTs showed the inhibitory effect of word length and the facilitating effect of root frequency for both children with and without dyslexia. Root length predicted RTs of typically developing readers only, with faster RTs for longer roots, over and above the inhibitory effect of word length. Furthermore, typically developing children had faster RTs on words with more frequent suffixes while children with dyslexia were faster when roots had a small family size. Generalized linear regression analyses on accuracy showed facilitating effects of word frequency and suffix frequency, for both groups. The large word length effect on latencies confirmed laborious whole-word processing in children when reading low-frequency derived words. The absence of a word frequency effect along with the facilitating effect of root frequency indicated morphemic processing in all readers. The reversed root length effect in typically developing readers pointed to a stronger activation for longer roots in keeping with the idea that these represent particularly informative units for word decoding. For readers with dyslexia the facilitating effect of root frequency (not modulated by root length) confirmed a pervasive benefit of root activation while the lack of root length modulation indicated that the longest roots were for them too large units to be processed within a single fixation.

show abstract

“…However, future studies might include a larger number of items with suffixes at opposite ends of the frequency continuum. For example, Lázaro, Acha, de la Rosa, García, and Sainz () conducted a study with Spanish monolingual children that was specifically designed to contrast words with very high‐frequency suffixes compared to words with very low‐frequency suffixes. Another important consideration, suggested by an anonymous reviewer, is to manipulate the sentence context as an independent variable.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creativity and Conventionality in Heritage Speaker Bilingualism

Zyzik

2019

Language Learning

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the performance of heritage speakers on a bimodal acceptability judgment task that targeted morphologically complex words. A major goal of the study was to compare participants’ acceptance of conventional and creative words. Data were collected from 57 adult heritage speakers of Spanish who were subsequently divided into two groups based on language dominance; 18 monolingual native speakers served as a control group. The data were analyzed with a mixed‐effects logistic regression model, which showed that item type (conventional vs. creative) had a very strong effect on participants’ performance. In addition, there were differences between Spanish‐dominant and English‐dominant heritage speakers, but only on the creative items. The results are discussed in relation to the Principle of Contrast (Clark, 1987) proposed for first language acquisition and the role of analogy in making acceptability judgments.

show abstract

Exploring the derivative suffix frequency effect in Spanish speaking children

Cited by 14 publications

References 49 publications

Syllables and inflectional morphemes in early Finnish readers: evidence from eye-movements

Syllables and inflectional morphemes in early Finnish readers: evidence from eye-movements

Reading Derived Words by Italian Children With and Without Dyslexia: The Effect of Root Length

Creativity and Conventionality in Heritage Speaker Bilingualism

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About