The role of vowels in reading: A review of studies of English and Hebrew.

Shimron, Joseph

doi:10.1037/0033-2909.114.1.52

Cited by 108 publications

(83 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…In shallow and deep orthographies e.g., Arabic or Hebrew, reading comprehension is affected by the unique characteristics of these Semitic orthographies. Students gained more comprehension of vowelized scripts than unvowelized texts in Arabic (Abu-Rabia, 1999Hussien, in press) and similarly, students accomplished more comprehension of pointed texts than unpointed in Hebrew (Abu-Rabia, 1999Shimron, 1993;Shimron & Sivan, 1994). This may also explain why students had difficulty in making inferences from unvowelized scripts used in the current study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

The Indicating Factors of Oral Reading Fluency of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Egypt

Hussien¹

2014

IES

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This study examined oral reading fluency (ORF) of bilingual and monolingual students. The author selected a sample of 510 (258 males and 252 females) native Arabic-speaking sixth-graders (62 bilinguals and 448 monolinguals) in Egypt. The purposes were; (a) to examine oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, prosody, and oral reading comprehension as indicating factors in ORF, and b) to investigate the impact of bilingual education on students' ORF in Arabic. Participants individually completed the author-developed Oral Reading Fluency Measure. Results indicated a very good fit between the proposed model and the observed data i.e., oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, prosody, and oral reading comprehension are significant indicators of ORF. Interestingly, results revealed that the bilingual students performed better than their monolingual counterparts on oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, and prosody but not on oral reading comprehension. The discussion concludes that (a) in addition to oral reading rate, oral reading accuracy, and prosody, oral reading comprehension is a significant indicating factor of ORF, (b) learning a second language, English, has a positive effect on ORF in the first language, Arabic, and (c) the nature of Arabic orthography is an indispensible factor when examining ORF in science of reading.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

The Indicating Factors of Oral Reading Fluency of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Egypt

Hussien¹

2014

IES

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“…The same total duration was replaced for each sentence across all entropy conditions for a given boxcar-duration condition. Segment duration (2) and entropy level (3) were fully crossed to generate six experimental conditions; a seventh control condition was added to assess baseline intelligibility.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1, p. 211; asterisks added). Consonants provide much more information than vowels for reading text (2,3), largely because the number of orthographic vowels in English (five or six) is well exceeded by the number of consonants (20 or 21). Independent of the role of sequential probabilities, vowels are less important for reading because there is much less uncertainty among 5 vowels than among 20 consonants, just as there is less uncertainty in flipping a coin (2 outcomes) versus rolling a die (6).…”

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confidence: 99%

Cochlea-scaled entropy, not consonants, vowels, or time, best predicts speech intelligibility

Stilp

Kluender²

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

102

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Speech sounds are traditionally divided into consonants and vowels. When only vowels or only consonants are replaced by noise, listeners are more accurate understanding sentences in which consonants are replaced but vowels remain. From such data, vowels have been suggested to be more important for understanding sentences; however, such conclusions are mitigated by the fact that replaced consonant segments were roughly one-third shorter than vowels. We report two experiments that demonstrate listener performance to be better predicted by simple psychoacoustic measures of cochlea-scaled spectral change across time. First, listeners identified sentences in which portions of consonants (C), vowels (V), CV transitions, or VC transitions were replaced by noise. Relative intelligibility was not well accounted for on the basis of Cs, Vs, or their transitions. In a second experiment, distinctions between Cs and Vs were abandoned. Instead, portions of sentences were replaced on the basis of cochlea-scaled spectral entropy (CSE). Sentence segments having relatively high, medium, or low entropy were replaced with noise. Intelligibility decreased linearly as the amount of replaced CSE increased. Duration of signal replaced and proportion of consonants/vowels replaced fail to account for listener data. CSE corresponds closely with the linguistic construct of sonority (or vowel-likeness) that is useful for describing phonological systematicity, especially syllable composition. Results challenge traditional distinctions between consonants and vowels. Speech intelligibility is better predicted by nonlinguistic sensory measures of uncertainty (potential information) than by orthodox physical acoustic measures or linguistic constructs.

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“…In the Hebrew orthography, all Hebrew letters stand for consonants, and four also designate vowels. Consonants are fully represented by letters while vowels are only partially represented (Levin, Ravid & Rapapaort, in press;Shimron, 1993). In fact, there are two different systems of marking vowels in Hebrew.…”

Section: Ofra Koratmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spelling Acquisition in Two Social Groups: Mother-Child Interaction, Maternal Beliefs and Child's Spelling

Korat

Levin

2002

Journal of Literacy Research

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Spelling was investigated from socio-cultural and cognitive perspectives among low and high SES groups. Collaborative writing among 40 mothers and their second-grade children was observed, and maternal beliefs on spelling were extracted from interviews. Children's spelling was assessed prior to interaction. LSES children had more spelling errors and discussed spelling with their mothers more frequently than the HSES children. LSES mothers expressed nontolerant beliefs on spelling errors compared to the HSES mothers. Correlations were found within groups between the child's independent spelling level and the degree to which spelling was discussed in the interaction, but no correlations were found between maternal beliefs and child's spelling. Implications for children's spelling development in a sociocultural context are discussed.

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The role of vowels in reading: A review of studies of English and Hebrew.

Abstract: who commented on earlier versionsofthisarticle. lam particularly grateful to two reviewers and to Morre Goldsmith, who helped me to shape up the final version. I am also indebted to Morre Goldsmith for sharpening some distinctions.

Cited by 108 publications

References 73 publications

The Indicating Factors of Oral Reading Fluency of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Egypt

The Indicating Factors of Oral Reading Fluency of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Egypt

Cochlea-scaled entropy, not consonants, vowels, or time, best predicts speech intelligibility

Spelling Acquisition in Two Social Groups: Mother-Child Interaction, Maternal Beliefs and Child's Spelling

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