Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech... more Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a speech perception and a production task. In the perception task, a behavioral adaptation of the oddball paradigm was used. Children had to detect orthographically consistent /t/, which has a unique orthographic representation (〈t〉), and inconsistent /k/, which maps onto three different graphemes (〈c〉, 〈qu〉, and 〈k〉), both appearing infrequently within a repetitive auditory sequence. In the production task, children produced these same sounds in meaningless syllables. Results: Perception results show that all children were faster at detecting consistent than inconsistent sounds regardless of their decoding skills. In the production task...
Supplemental material, QJE-STD-18-036.R3-Supplementary_Material for Does the visual attention spa... more Supplemental material, QJE-STD-18-036.R3-Supplementary_Material for Does the visual attention span play a role in the morphological processing of orthographic stimuli? by Alexia Antzaka, Joana Acha, Manuel Carreiras and Marie Lallier in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
This thesis studies some of the factors modulating the size of the orthographic units (or grains)... more This thesis studies some of the factors modulating the size of the orthographic units (or grains) that are used in reading. Two of these factors are reading expertise and word familiarity that are both related to whether the individual can link the orthographic units of the word to its orthographic and subsequently phonological and semantic representations in the lexicon. The thesis studies how this skill develops and the possible influence of the mappings between lexical and sub-lexical orthographic grains at the semantic/morphological and phonological level by studying the influence of orthographic depth and morphological complexity. The main goal of this thesis was to specifically study the modulation of orthographic grain size in reading, focusing on the visual aspects of orthographic processing and using the visual attention span as an indirect measure of orthographic grain size in reading. In particular, we studied the effect of a language's orthographic depth and morpholo...
In delineating the amount of orthographic information that can be processed in parallel during a ... more In delineating the amount of orthographic information that can be processed in parallel during a single fixation, the visual attention (VA) span acts as a key component of the reading system. Previous studies focused on the contribution of VA span to normal and pathological reading in monolingual and bilingual children from different European languages, without direct cross-language comparison. In the current paper, we explored modulations of VA span abilities in three languages -French, Spanish, and Arabic- that differ in transparency, reading direction and writing systems. The participants were skilled adult readers who were native speakers of French, Spanish or Arabic. They were administered tasks of global and partial letter report, single letter identification and text reading. Their VA span abilities were assessed using tasks that require the processing of briefly presented five consonant strings (e.g., R S H F T). All five consonants had to be reported in global report but a ...
The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-let... more The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-letter processing in two reading-related skills: visual attention span (VAS) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). VAS (i.e., the number of visual elements that can be processed at once in a multi-element array) was tested with a visual 1-back task and RAN was measured in a serial letter naming task that introduced a novel manipulation (some letter sequences formed frequent words). Spanish-Basque and French-Basque bilingual children were tested at early (30 children in 1st and 2nd grade), and more advanced (24 children in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade) stages of reading acquisition to investigate whether they would be differently biased towards multi-letter processing due to reading in two shallow (Spanish, Basque), or a deep and a shallow (French, Basque) orthography. The French-Basque bilinguals, who read in a deep orthography, were expected to rely on larger orthographic units in reading and thus to be more biased towards multi-letter processing in both tasks. This was expected to be reflected by: (a) a uniform distribution of attention across letter strings in the VAS task, and (b) a greater interference of the embedded words on letter-by-letter naming in RAN, leading to longer naming times. The expected group differences were observed in the more advanced readers, with French-Basque bilinguals showing a wider distribution of VAS across letter strings and longer naming times in RAN. The article can be found at: http://rdcu.be/yvtA
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) , 2019
We investigated whether the link between visual attention span and reading is modulated by the pr... more We investigated whether the link between visual attention span and reading is modulated by the presence of morphemes. Second and fourth grade children, with Basque as their first language, named morphologically complex and simple words and pseudowords, and performed a task measuring visual attention span. The influence of visual attention span skills on reading was modulated by the presence of morphemes in naming speed measures. In addition, fourth grade children with a larger visual attention span showed larger lexicality effects (pseudoword-word reading times) only for morphologically simple stimuli. Results are interpreted as support for the notion that both transparency and morphological complexity are important factors modulating the impact of visual attention span skills on reading. Keywords: morphological processing, reading development, visual attention span
Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech... more Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a speech perception and a production task. In the perception task, a behavioral adaptation of the oddball paradigm was used. Children had to detect orthographically consistent /t/, which has a unique orthographic representation (〈t〉), and inconsistent /k/, which maps onto three different graphemes (〈c〉, 〈qu〉, and 〈k〉), both appearing infrequently within a repetitive auditory sequence. In the production task, children produced these same sounds in meaningless syllables. Results: Perception results show that all children were faster at detecting consistent than inconsistent sounds regardless of their decoding skills. In the production task...
Supplemental material, QJE-STD-18-036.R3-Supplementary_Material for Does the visual attention spa... more Supplemental material, QJE-STD-18-036.R3-Supplementary_Material for Does the visual attention span play a role in the morphological processing of orthographic stimuli? by Alexia Antzaka, Joana Acha, Manuel Carreiras and Marie Lallier in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
This thesis studies some of the factors modulating the size of the orthographic units (or grains)... more This thesis studies some of the factors modulating the size of the orthographic units (or grains) that are used in reading. Two of these factors are reading expertise and word familiarity that are both related to whether the individual can link the orthographic units of the word to its orthographic and subsequently phonological and semantic representations in the lexicon. The thesis studies how this skill develops and the possible influence of the mappings between lexical and sub-lexical orthographic grains at the semantic/morphological and phonological level by studying the influence of orthographic depth and morphological complexity. The main goal of this thesis was to specifically study the modulation of orthographic grain size in reading, focusing on the visual aspects of orthographic processing and using the visual attention span as an indirect measure of orthographic grain size in reading. In particular, we studied the effect of a language's orthographic depth and morpholo...
In delineating the amount of orthographic information that can be processed in parallel during a ... more In delineating the amount of orthographic information that can be processed in parallel during a single fixation, the visual attention (VA) span acts as a key component of the reading system. Previous studies focused on the contribution of VA span to normal and pathological reading in monolingual and bilingual children from different European languages, without direct cross-language comparison. In the current paper, we explored modulations of VA span abilities in three languages -French, Spanish, and Arabic- that differ in transparency, reading direction and writing systems. The participants were skilled adult readers who were native speakers of French, Spanish or Arabic. They were administered tasks of global and partial letter report, single letter identification and text reading. Their VA span abilities were assessed using tasks that require the processing of briefly presented five consonant strings (e.g., R S H F T). All five consonants had to be reported in global report but a ...
The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-let... more The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-letter processing in two reading-related skills: visual attention span (VAS) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). VAS (i.e., the number of visual elements that can be processed at once in a multi-element array) was tested with a visual 1-back task and RAN was measured in a serial letter naming task that introduced a novel manipulation (some letter sequences formed frequent words). Spanish-Basque and French-Basque bilingual children were tested at early (30 children in 1st and 2nd grade), and more advanced (24 children in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade) stages of reading acquisition to investigate whether they would be differently biased towards multi-letter processing due to reading in two shallow (Spanish, Basque), or a deep and a shallow (French, Basque) orthography. The French-Basque bilinguals, who read in a deep orthography, were expected to rely on larger orthographic units in reading and thus to be more biased towards multi-letter processing in both tasks. This was expected to be reflected by: (a) a uniform distribution of attention across letter strings in the VAS task, and (b) a greater interference of the embedded words on letter-by-letter naming in RAN, leading to longer naming times. The expected group differences were observed in the more advanced readers, with French-Basque bilinguals showing a wider distribution of VAS across letter strings and longer naming times in RAN. The article can be found at: http://rdcu.be/yvtA
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) , 2019
We investigated whether the link between visual attention span and reading is modulated by the pr... more We investigated whether the link between visual attention span and reading is modulated by the presence of morphemes. Second and fourth grade children, with Basque as their first language, named morphologically complex and simple words and pseudowords, and performed a task measuring visual attention span. The influence of visual attention span skills on reading was modulated by the presence of morphemes in naming speed measures. In addition, fourth grade children with a larger visual attention span showed larger lexicality effects (pseudoword-word reading times) only for morphologically simple stimuli. Results are interpreted as support for the notion that both transparency and morphological complexity are important factors modulating the impact of visual attention span skills on reading. Keywords: morphological processing, reading development, visual attention span
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