The goal of this study was to examine the relation of morphological skills with reading fluency in 2nd grade Greek-speaking children and if phonological awareness and vocabulary mediate their ...relation. The sample consisted of 105 2nd grade Greek-speaking students (46 males; Mage = 7.83 years, SD = 3.31). Morphological awareness was assessed with four tasks, examining inflectional and derivational morphology both at an epilinguistic and metalinguistic level. Reading fluency was assessed with oral and silent measures. Results of path analyses indicated that inflectional and derivational morphology contributed to reading fluency through multiple pathways, controlling for the effect of Rapid Automatized Naming. Phonological awareness fully mediated the relation of inflectional and derivational morphology with text reading fluency. Vocabulary partially mediated the relation of inflectional and derivational morphology with silent reading fluency. Furthermore, derivational morphology directly affected silent reading fluency. Overall, the relation of morphological awareness with reading fluency appeared to be dynamic and varied depending on the morphological awareness skill and measure of reading fluency. Regarding the mediating role of phonological awareness and vocabulary, the results showed that children in lower elementary grades in a transparent orthography with a rich morphological system used morphological skills as activators to existing phonological and semantic skills in supporting reading fluency processes.
El propósito de este trabajo es hacer un estudio historiográfico del proceso de oficialización de la ortografía española en el siglo XIX. Con base en una serie de publicaciones de la prensa española ...durante la primera mitad de ese siglo, se pretende evaluar el alcance de las propuestas reformistas decimonónicas y analizar, desde la conjunción de las perspectivas interna y externa de la historiografía lingüística, el papel de los maestros en este proceso, junto al de la prensa, que, como foro de opinión pública, no sólo sirve de testigo, sino también de difusor y catalizador de toda esta empresa que conduce a la oficialización de la ortografía académica.
This article offers a historiographic study of the officialization of Spanish orthography in the 19th century. By examining the Spanish press during the first half of the 19th century, we intended to evaluate the significance of the proposals for reform put forward during this period. Viewing linguistic historiography from both an internal and external perspective, we analyse the role of teachers as well as that of the press which, as a forum for public opinion, not only reflects the process that leads to the formalization of academic orthography, but also serves to broadcast and accelerate this process.
Language skills play an important role in mathematics development. Students (7 to 10 years of age) learning school mathematics either in the same language used at home (first-language learners; n = ...103) or in a different language (second-language learners; n = 57) participated in the study. Relations among cognitive skills (i.e., receptive vocabulary, working memory, quantitative skills), domain-specific language skills (i.e., mathematical vocabulary, mathematical orthography), word-problem solving, arithmetic fluency, and word reading were investigated. Second-language learners had lower scores on measures with strong language components (i.e., receptive vocabulary, subitizing, and word-problem solving) than first-language learners, whereas they performed equally well on other tasks. Mathematical vocabulary and receptive vocabulary contributed to word-problem solving success for first-language learners, whereas only receptive vocabulary in the language of instruction related to mathematical outcomes for second-language learners. Mathematical vocabulary was related to arithmetic fluency for both groups, but mathematical orthography was not. For both groups, students' word reading was predicted by receptive vocabulary but not by quantitative skills, highlighting the domain-specific nature of these skills. These findings have implications for supporting mathematical learning in second-language students.
Educational Impact and Implications StatementHow do language skills affect mathematics for second-language learners? Vocabulary skills in the instructional language were more strongly related to word-problem solving and arithmetic skills for second- than first-language learners. Teachers of second-language learners may need to adapt materials or reduce language demands so that all students have equal opportunity to develop competent mathematical skills. For all students, explicit instruction on mathematical vocabulary and mathematical orthography may support their mathematical competency.
This study examined the dynamic relationships among the components of the Simple View of Reading (SVR) in a transparent orthography (Finnish) and the predictive value of cognitive skills ...(phonological awareness, letter knowledge, rapid naming, and vocabulary) on the SVR components. Altogether, 1,815 Finnish children were followed from kindergarten to Grade 3. Their cognitive skills were assessed in kindergarten, listening comprehension and reading fluency in Grades 1 and 2, and reading comprehension in Grades 1–3. Reading fluency and listening comprehension accounted for 37% of the variance in reading comprehension in Grade 2 and 28% in Grade 3. The direct effect of reading fluency on reading comprehension disappeared after Grade 1, whereas the effect of listening comprehension remained significant across time. Cognitive skills predicted reading comprehension mainly indirectly via listening comprehension and reading fluency in Grade 1. These findings support the validity of the SVR model in the context of a transparent orthography, but they also show that the direct effect of reading fluency on reading comprehension wanes after the early school years.
Words that sound similar tend to have similar meanings, at a distributed, sub-symbolic level (Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014). We extend this paradigm for measuring systematicity to ...letters and their canonical pronunciations. We confirm that orthographies that were consciously constructed to be systematic (Korean and two shorthand writing systems) yield significant correlations between visual distances between characters and the corresponding phonological distances between canonical pronunciations. We then extend the approach to Arabic, Hebrew, and English and show that letters that look similar tend to sound similar in their canonical pronunciations. We indicate some of the implications for education, and for understanding typical and atypical reading. By using different visual distance metrics we distinguish between symbol-based (Korean, shorthand) and effort-based (Arabic, Hebrew, English) grapho-phonemic systematicity. We reinterpret existing demonstrations of phono-semantic systematicity in terms of cognitive effort.
Language switching has been one of the main tasks to investigate language control, a process that restricts bilingual language processing to the target language. In the current review, we discuss the ...How (i.e., mechanisms) and Where (i.e., locus of these mechanisms) of language control in language switching. As regards the mechanisms of language control, we describe several empirical markers of language switching and their relation to inhibition, as a potentially important mechanism of language control. From this overview it becomes apparent that some, but not all, markers indicate the occurrence of inhibition during language switching and, thus, language control. In a second part, we turn to the potential locus of language control and the role of different processing stages (concept level, lemma level, phonology, orthography, and outside language processing). Previous studies provide evidence for the employment of several of these processing stages during language control so that either a complex control mechanism involving different processing stages and/or multiple loci of language control have to be assumed. Based on the discussed results, several established and new theoretical avenues are considered.
This book makes use of digital corpora to give in-depth details of the history and development of the spelling of Latin. It focusses on sub-elite texts in the Roman empire, and reveals that ...sophisticated education in this area was not restricted to those at the top of society. Nicholas Zair studies the history of particular orthographic features and traces their usage in a range of texts which give insight into everyday writers of Latin: including scribes and soldiers at Vindolanda, slaves at Pompeii, members of the Praetorian Guard, and writers of curse tablets. In doing so, he problematises the use of 'old-fashioned' spelling in dating inscriptions, provides important new information on sound-change in Latin, and shows how much can be gained from a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of ancient texts.
Prominent theories of reading development have separately emphasized the relevance of children's skill in learning (Share, 2008) and lexical representations (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Integrating these ...ideas, we examined whether skill in learning lexical representations is a mechanism that might explain children's reading development. To do so we conducted a longitudinal study, following 139 children from Grades 3 to 5. In Grade 3, children completed measures of word reading and reading comprehension and again at Grade 5. In Grade 4, children read short stories containing novel words; they were later tested on their memory for the spellings and meanings of these new words, capturing orthographic and semantic learning, respectively. Using multiple-mediation path analysis, we tested whether children's skill in learning orthographic and semantic dimensions of new words was a mediator of individual differences in each of word reading and reading comprehension. In models controlling for nonverbal ability, working memory, vocabulary, and phonological awareness, we found two clear effects: individual differences in orthographic learning at Grade 4 mediated the gains that children made in word reading between Grades 3 and 5 and individual differences in semantic learning at Grade 4 mediated gains in reading comprehension over the same time period. These findings suggest that children's ability to learn lexical representations is a mechanism in reading development, with orthographic effects on word reading and semantic effects on reading comprehension. These findings show the power and the specificity of children's capacity to learn in determining their progress in learning to read. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Visual–verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship ...has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the strongest cognitive and linguistic predictors of reading acquisition. Critically, PAL is a complex task involving different components, and there is still no consensus on which is more involved, crossmodal associative learning or verbal learning, although the latter has received much support in the literature. The first aim of this study was to test the unique contribution of PAL in French, which has an intermediate level of orthographic transparency compared to other languages. The second aim of this study was to disentangle the mechanisms that account for this relationship. A battery of reading and reading-related tests as well as a visual–verbal PAL task were administered to 227 French children in first and second grade. The results showed that PAL makes a unique contribution to word reading in French, but not to nonword reading scores, over and above the strongest language predictors of reading: phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, short-term phonological memory, vocabulary, and age. Our data do not support the putative involvement of the crossmodal associative learning mechanism. We therefore suggest that verbal learning explains the entire contribution of PAL. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
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