Lexical and semantic age-of-acquisition effects on word naming in Spanish

Understanding how we read is a fundamental question for psychology, with critical implications for education. Studies of word reading tend to focus on the mappings between the written and spoken forms of words. In this paper, we review evidence from developmental, neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and computational studies that show that knowledge of word meanings is inextricably involved in word reading. Consequently, models of reading must better specify the role of meaning in skilled reading and its acquisition. Further, our review paves the way for educationally realistic research to confirm whether explicit teaching of oral vocabulary improves word reading.Key words: reading, learning, orthography, phonology, semantics WORD MEANING AND READING / 4 HOW WORD MEANING INFLUENCES WORD READINGReading is fundamental to operating in modern society. For literate adults, reading is immediate, automatic, and efficient. Despite this, reading is not an innate capability but is parasitic upon an earlier acquired spoken language system that includes information about what words sound like (phonology) and what they mean (semantics). The ultimate goal of learning to read is to comprehend texts, for which knowledge of word meanings is essential.The ability to recognise and read aloud words (encompassed by the term word reading throughout this review) is a pre-requisite for reading comprehension. Research has focused on the orthography (print) to phonology connections that underpin word reading. However, the role of word meanings in word reading is less well understood and is thus the focus of this review. As suggested by Balota (1990), seminal findings from the adult behavioural literature now demonstrate that word reading efficiency is significantly influenced by semantic variables, over and above frequency and orthographic factors (Cortese & Schock, 2013). Building on this, we review recent evidence from a number of research traditions, which show conclusively that word reading in alphabetic languages is influenced by knowledge of semantics.Cognitive models of reading all include orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations of words, as well as the mappings between them. In computational models based on a classical dual-route approach ( Figure 1A; Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001;Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007), activation of a word's semantics is not necessary for recognising or reading it aloud. In contrast, the triangle modelling tradition ( Figure 1B; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004;Monaghan & Ellis, 2010;Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996;Woollams, Lambon Ralph, Plaut, & Patterson, 2007) posits that semantic WORD MEANING AND READING / 5 information directly affects the learning and processing of mappings between the written and spoken forms of words. More specifically, it predicts that meaning particularly aids print-to-sound mapping when this process is difficult (as in words with exceptional spellings, or for poorer readers), and also that skilled reading involves increased...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Future research should examine more fully the role of semantics in word reading in languages with more regular (e.g., Spanish, c.f. Davies, Barbón, & Cuetos, 2013) and exceptional (e.g., Chinese, c.f.Williams & Bever, 2010) orthography-phonology mappings. Nonetheless, we have shown conclusively that semantic knowledge is implicated in word reading.…”

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confidence: 99%

How Word Meaning Influences Word Reading

Taylor

Duff

Woollams

et al. 2015

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

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“…The seven variables presented in the previous section can be divided into word form variables, such as word length in phonemes and syllables (Barca et al, 2002;Davies, Barbón, & Cuetos, 2013); lexical phonological or lexeme-level variables, as the H statistic for name agreement, name agreement as a percentage, and subjective frequency (Barry et al, 1997;Cuetos et al, 1999); and semantic variables, as familiarity and imageability (Cortese & Schock, 2013;Yap & Balota, 2009). Current computational models of reading aloud predict the effects of word length and lexical phonological variables (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001;Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010), as well as the influence of semantic variables on reading aloud (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996;Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989).…”

Section: The Influence Of the New Variables In Reading Aloud In Tunismentioning

confidence: 99%

Norms for name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability for 348 object names in Tunisian Arabic

Boukadi

Zouaidi²,

Wilson

2015

Behav Res

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Normative databases for pictorial stimuli are widely used in research on language processing in order to control for a number of psycholinguistic variables in the selected stimuli. Such resources are lacking for Arabic and its dialectal varieties. In the present study, we aimed to provide Tunisian Arabic (TA) normative data for 348 line drawings taken from Cycowicz, Friedman, Rothstein, and Snodgrass (1997), which include Snodgrass and Vanderwart's (1980) 260 pictures. Norms were collected for the following psycholinguistic variables: name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability. Word length data (in numbers of phonemes and syllables) are also listed in the database. We investigated the effects of these variables on word reading in TA. We found that word length and frequency were the best predictors of wordreading latencies in TA. Name agreement was also a significant predictor of word-reading latencies. A particularly interesting finding was that the semantic variables, imageability and familiarity, affected word-reading latencies in TA. Thus, it would seem that TA readers rely on semantics even when reading individual Arabic words that are transparent in terms of orthography-to-phonology mappings. This database represents a precious and much-needed psycholinguistic resource for researchers investigating language processing in Arabicspeaking populations.Keywords Normative database . Psycholinguistic variables . Arabic . Picture naming . Word reading . Visual word recognition It has long been established that standardized pictorial stimuli allow for more reliable comparisons between the results of different studies and for better control of psycholinguistic variables. As a result, their use has become common practice in experimental as well as clinical research on language. Indeed, the effects of several psycholinguistic variables on spoken and written word processing have been extensively documented among both healthy and language-impaired populations and in several languages, including English, French, Spanish,

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“…This is because finding out how the mind interacts with the structures of language (i.e., its sounds, its letters, its morphemes, and the meaning of its words) has proved to be a successful method of understanding the cognitive basis of language production and comprehension (Brysbaert, Van Wijnendaele, & De Deyne, 2000;Cattell, 1886;Davies, Barbón, & Cuetos, 2013;Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, & Carreiras, 2009;Frederiksen & Kroll, 1976;Izura, Hernández-Muñoz, & Ellis, 2005;Lavidor & Ellis, 2002;Levelt, 1989;Macizo & Bajo, 2006;Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994;Pérez, 2007).…”

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Age of acquisition and imageability norms for base and morphologically complex words in English and in Spanish

et al. 2015

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The extent to which processing words involves breaking them down into smaller units or morphemes or is the result of an interactive activation of other units, such as meanings, letters, and sounds (e.g., dis-agree-ment vs. disagreement), is currently under debate. Disentangling morphology from phonology and semantics is often a methodological challenge, because orthogonal manipulations are difficult to achieve (e.g., semantically unrelated words are often phonologically related: casual-casualty and, vice versa, sign-signal). The present norms provide a morphological classification of 3,263 suffixed derived words from two widely spoken languages: English (2,204 words) and Spanish (1,059 words). Morphologically complex words were sorted into four categories according to the nature of their relationship with the base word: phonologically transparent (friend-friendly), phonologically opaque (child-children), semantically transparent (habit-habitual), and semantically opaque (event-eventual). In addition, ratings were gathered for age of acquisition, imageability, and semantic distance (i.e., the extent to which the meaning of the complex derived form could be drawn from the meaning of its base constituents). The norms were completed by adding values for word frequency; word length in number of phonemes, letters, and syllables; lexical similarity, as measured by the number of neighbors; and morphological family size. A series of comparative analyses from the collated ratings for the base and derived words were also carried out. The results are discussed in relation to recent findings.Keywords Age of acquisition . Morphology . Phonology . Semantics . English . SpanishThe phonological, orthographic, morphological, and semantic characteristics of words are central elements in word processing research. This is because finding out how the mind interacts with the structures of language (i.e., its sounds, its letters, its morphemes, and the meaning of its words) has proved to be a successful method of understanding the cognitive basis of language production and comprehension (Brysbaert, Van Wijnendaele, & De Deyne, 2000;Cattell, 1886;Davies, Barbón, & Cuetos, 2013;Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, & Carreiras, 2009;Frederiksen & Kroll, 1976;Izura, Hernández-Muñoz, & Ellis, 2005;Lavidor & Ellis, 2002;Levelt, 1989;Macizo & Bajo, 2006;Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994;Pérez, 2007).Morphology, in particular, refers to the compositional structure that meaning has within the words in a language. Thus, words are often composed of smaller meaningful units called morphemes (e.g., home-work, penni-less, review-ed). Morphemes can both stand alone as monomorphemic words (e.g., truth) and be bonded to other morphemes as part of polymorphemic words (e.g., -ful in truthful). Morphologically complex words consist of a core morpheme, called root, base, or stem, and one or several add-on morphemes called affixes. In languages such as English and Spanish, affixes can be placed either at the beginning of the word (e.g., fore-in for...

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Lexical and semantic age-of-acquisition effects on word naming in Spanish

Cited by 49 publications

References 69 publications

How Word Meaning Influences Word Reading

How Word Meaning Influences Word Reading

Norms for name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability for 348 object names in Tunisian Arabic

Age of acquisition and imageability norms for base and morphologically complex words in English and in Spanish

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