Order among chaos: Cross-linguistic differences and developmental trajectories in pseudoword reading aloud using pronunciation Entropy

Abstract

In this work we propose the use of Entropy to measure variability in pronunciations in pseudowords reading aloud: pseudowords where participants give many different pronunciations receive higher Entropy values. Monolingual adults, monolingual children, and bilingual children proficient in different European languages varying in orthographic depth were tested. We predicted that Entropy values will increase with increasing orthographic depth. Moreover, higher Entropy was expected for younger than older children, as reading experience improves the knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). We also tested if interference from a second language would lead to higher Entropy. Results show that orthographic depth affects Entropy, but only when the items are not strictly matched across languages. We also found that Entropy decreases across age, suggesting that GPC knowledge becomes refined throughout grades 2-4. We found no differences between bilingual and monolingual children. Our results indicate that item characteristics play a fundamental role in pseudoword pronunciation variability, that reading experience is associated with reduced variability in responses, and that in bilinguals’ knowledge of a second orthography does not seem to interfere with pseudoword reading aloud.

Constructing Pseudowords with Constraints on Morphological Features - Application for Polish Pseudonouns and Pseudoverbs

“…Wuggy also calculates orthographic neighborhoods using the OLD20 method, which quantifies the similarity of the given pseudoword generated to the 20 most similar words from the corpus. With the function of splitting the word into syllables before generating the output and adjusting the values of the subsyllabic elements, it is possible to generate pseudowords from the input coming from English (Tucker & Brenner, 2017), Dutch (Heyman et al, 2015), German (Hasenäcker et al, 2017), Turkish (Erten, 2013), Basque (Ferré et al, 2015), French (De Simone et al, 2021), Spanish (Aguasvivas et al, 2018), and Bulgarian (Shtereva et al, 2020). This makes Wuggy a tool with the most extensive and detailed options that can be customized for not only positional languages but also those with more complex morphology, such as Polish.…”

Effects of a Morpheme-based Spelling Intervention Challenging Previous Results

“…While there is large variability among orthographic systems in their transparency and reliability of lettersound correspondences (De Simone et al, 2021;Schmalz et al, 2016), Indo-European orthographies typically represent morphological structure in a consistent way (e.g., Ulicheva et al, 2018). The orthographic principle of morphological constancy has been mostly discussed for English, which is notoriously inconsistent and irregular at the lettersound level.…”

Influence of Vocalized Reading Practice on English Learning and Psychological Problems of Middle School Students

“…The vocalized reading practice plays a critical role in the construction of sentence and discourse frameworks (Bourguignon et al, 2020 ). In English learning, the vocalized reading practice can cultivate the habit of oral expression of the students and help them build up solid memory for knowledge points, through which students can also feel the difference between phonemes and the changes in pronunciations (De Simone et al, 2021 ). Meanwhile, the vocalized reading practice can be used to train the pronunciation and intonation of the students, and it is also believed to be the best way to improve their listening and speaking skills.…”