Sensitivity to meaningful regularities acquired through experience

Ulicheva, Anastasia; Marelli, Marco; Rastle, Kathleen

doi:10.1007/s11525-020-09363-5

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 51 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The first is the difference between reliance on O-S regularities and reliance on imageability: We observed a positive association between reading skill and reliance on O-S regularities (in the same direction as reliance on O-P regularities), in contrast to the negative correlations between reading skill and reliance on imageability ; see also Table 6). The positive correlation between reliance on O-S regularities and skill aligns with a recent study showing that adults who are more sensitive to correspondences between orthographic cues and lexical categories (e.g., better at classifying a pseudoword ending with -ful as an adjective rather than a noun) show better performance in a variety of language tasks including reading, spelling, and author recognition (Ulicheva et al, 2021). We claim that the dissociation between reliance on O-S regularities versus reliance on imageability suggests that better early readers are those who are most able to capitalize on the statistical regularities in their writing system, and that these regularities include both O-P and O-S correspondences.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…Yet note that our prior study and others on adult populations (e.g., Woollams et al, 2016; but see Ulicheva et al, 2021) examined individual differences in the extent of semantic involvement during word naming by focusing on reliance on imageability. In the present study, we extend this analysis to focus instead on individual differences in reliance on the actual regularities between orthography and semantics, as reflected by the effect of OSC on individuals' naming accuracy.…”

Section: Individual Differences In Reliance On O-s Regularities Durin...mentioning

confidence: 97%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Quantifying the regularities between orthography and semantics and their impact on group- and individual-level behavior.

Siegelman¹,

Rueckl²,

Lo³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Statistical views of reading highlight the link between proficient literacy and the assimilation of various regularities embedded in writing systems, including those in the mapping between print and meaning. Still, orthographic-semantic (O-S) regularities remain relatively understudied, with open questions regarding 3 issues: (a) how O-S regularities should be quantified, (b) how they impact the behavior of proficient readers, and (c) whether individual differences in sensitivity to these regularities predict reading skills. The goal of the current article is to address these questions. We start by reviewing previous studies estimating print-meaning regularities, where orthography-to-semantics consistency (OSC) is defined as the mean semantic similarity between a word and its orthographic neighbors. While we adopt this general strategy, we identify a potential confound in previous operational definitions. We therefore offer a modified measure, which we use to examine group-level OSC effects in available data sets of single word recognition and reading for comprehension. Our findings validate the existence of OSC effects but reveal variation across tasks, with OSC effects emerging more strongly in tasks involving a direct mapping of print to meaning. Next, we present a reanalysis of word naming data from 399 second through fifth graders, where we examine individual differences in reliance on O-S regularities and their relation to participants' reading skills. We show that early readers whose naming accuracy is more influenced by OSC (i.e., those who rely more on O-S) have better passage comprehension abilities. We conclude by discussing the role of O-S regularities in proficient reading and literacy acquisition.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Individual Differences In Reliance On O-s Regularities Durin...mentioning

confidence: 97%

Quantifying the regularities between orthography and semantics and their impact on group- and individual-level behavior.

Siegelman¹,

Rueckl²,

Lo³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…From this perspective, an individual’s greater reliance on imageability reflects increased reliance on inefficient O-S processes, which is expected in readers with an underdeveloped system (Siegelman, Rueckl, et al, 2020; see also Pugh et al, 2008; Woollams et al, 2016, for related findings and discussion). This point also raises an intriguing possibility, that reading skills and intervention gains may be positively correlated with alternative measures, not explored here, that tap into individuals’ knowledge of the regularities that do exist in the O-S mapping, including in particular morphological relations (see Ulicheva et al, 2020, for preliminary evidence).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

How you read affects what you gain: Individual differences in the functional organization of the reading system predict intervention gains in children with reading disabilities.

Siegelman

Rueckl

Bunt

et al. 2022

Journal of Educational Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is now considerable evidence regarding the types of interventions that are effective at remediating reading disabilities on average. It is generally unclear, however, what predicts the magnitude of individual-level change following a given intervention. We examine new predictors of intervention gains that are theoretically grounded in computational models of reading and focus on individual differences in the functional organization of the reading system. Specifically, we estimate the extent to which children with reading disabilities (n = 118 3rd-4th graders) rely on two sources of information during an oral word reading task-print-speech correspondences and semantic imageability-before and after a phonologically-weighted intervention. We show that children who relied more on print-speech regularities and less on imageability preintervention had better intervention gains. In parallel, children who over the course of the intervention exhibited greater increases in their reliance on print-speech correspondences and greater decreases in their reliance on imageability, had better intervention outcomes. Importantly, these two factors were differentially related to specific reading task outcomes, with greater reliance on print-speech correspondences associated with pseudoword naming, while (lesser) reliance on imageability related to word reading and comprehension. We discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical received funding from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), Grant 48/20.

show abstract

“…Yet, the pseudowords included in the SPP were not selected ad hoc for our aims and may contain key linguistic units trivially known to carry meaning. Indeed, the morphological characteristics of the strings of letters composing a pseudoword, such as particular linguistic regularities like affixes (e.g., in English words ending in -acy are indicative of a state or a quality, such as in the words privacy, fallacy or delicacy), are informative of meaning and were shown to affect processing (e.g., Amenta, Günther, & Marelli, 2020;Marelli & Baroni, 2015;Ulicheva et al, 2021). As a consequence, the observed semantic effect could have been driven by these linguistically defined meaning-carrying sublexical elements, and not by a broader, more general, sub-word semantic effect.…”

Section: Discussion Of Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Out-of-vocabulary but not meaningless: Evidence for semantic-priming effects in pseudoword processing

Gatti¹,

Marelli²,

Rinaldi³

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Non-arbitrary phenomena in language, such as systematic association in the form-meaning interface, have been widely reported in the literature. Exploiting such systematic associations previous studies have demonstrated that pseudowords can be indicative of meaning. However, whether semantic activation from words and pseudowords is supported by the very same processes, activating a common semantic memory system, is currently not known. Here, we take advantage of recent progresses from computational linguistics models allowing to induce meaning representations for out-of-vocabulary strings of letters via domain-general associative-learning mechanisms applied to natural language. We combined these models with data from priming tasks, in which participants are showed two strings of letters presented sequentially one after the other and are then asked to indicate if the latter is a word or a pseudoword. In Experiment 1 we re-analyzed the data of the largest behavioral database on semantic priming, while in Experiment 2 we ran an independent replication on a new language, Italian, controlling for a series of possible confounds. Results were consistent across the two experiments and showed that the prime-word meaning interferes with the semantic pattern elicited by the target pseudoword (i.e., at increasing estimated semantic relatedness between prime word and target pseudoword, participants’ reaction times increased and accuracy decreased). These findings indicate that the same associative mechanisms governing word meaning also subserve the processing of pseudowords, suggesting in turn that human semantic memory can be conceived as a distributional system that builds upon a general-purpose capacity of extracting knowledge from complex statistical patterns.

show abstract

Sensitivity to meaningful regularities acquired through experience

Cited by 15 publications

References 51 publications

Quantifying the regularities between orthography and semantics and their impact on group- and individual-level behavior.

Quantifying the regularities between orthography and semantics and their impact on group- and individual-level behavior.

How you read affects what you gain: Individual differences in the functional organization of the reading system predict intervention gains in children with reading disabilities.

Out-of-vocabulary but not meaningless: Evidence for semantic-priming effects in pseudoword processing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About