German and English Bodies: No Evidence for Cross-Linguistic Differences in Preferred Orthographic Grain Size

Abstract

Previous studies have found that words and nonwords with many body neighbours (i.e., words with the same orthographic body, e.g., cat, brat, at) are read faster than items with fewer body neighbours. This body-N effect has been explored in the context of cross-linguistic differences in reading where it has been reported that the size of the effect differs as a function of orthographic depth: readers of English, a deep orthography, show stronger facilitation than readers of German, a shallow orthography. Such findings support the psycholinguistic grain size theory, which proposes that readers of English rely on large orthographic units to reduce ambiguity of print-to-speech correspondences in their orthography. Here we re-examine the evidence for this pattern and find that there is no reliable evidence for such a crosslinguistic difference. Re-analysis of a key study ), analysis of data from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007), and a large-scale analysis of nine new experiments all support this conclusion. Using Bayesian analysis techniques, we find little evidence of the body-N effect in most tasks and conditions. Where we do find evidence for a body-N effect (lexical decision for nonwords), we find evidence against an interaction with language.

Cross-linguistic transfer in bilinguals reading in two alphabetic orthographies: The grain size accommodation hypothesis

“…3b). Overall, to avoid reporting inconsistent findings across studies (e.g., Schmalz, Robidoux, Castles, Coltheart, & Marinus, 2017), future studies attempting to test our predictions in bilinguals through lexical effects on reading should systematically take into account both accuracy and speed measures in relation to phonological and visual grain sizes.…”

Variations in the use of simple and context-sensitive grapheme-phoneme correspondences in English and German developing readers

“…Often, for monosyllabic words in the English orthography, the CS_GPC involves constraints imposed by the consonants following a vowel rather than the ones preceding it (Treiman et al, 1995). The orthographic unit consisting of the vowel and subsequent consonant(s) of a monosyllabic word is referred to as the body and the pronunciation of this unit as the rime (Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 2000;Peereman & Content, 1998;Schmalz, Robidoux, Castles, Coltheart, & Marinus, 2017). However, all body-rime correspondences can also be described as CS_GPCs.…”

Differences in Visual Word Recognition Between L1 and L2 Speakers

“…In orthographically transparent languages, like German, readers have been found to rely more on smaller units (graphemes, phonemes), whereas in opaque languages, like English, larger units (bodies, rhymes) are more reliable (Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, & Braun, 2001). Although a recent review of existing research on the grain size theory suggests that there are no differences in reliance on large units between German and English (Schmalz, Robidoux, Castles, Coltheart, & Marinus, 2017), there is evidence for differences in the reliance on small units (Rau, Moll, Snowling, & Landerl, 2015). This, in turn, could contribute to the difference in findings on the impact of neighborhood size in German compared to English.…”