The role of syllables and morphemes in silent reading: An eye-tracking study.

German skilled readers have been found to engage in morphological and syllable-based processing in visual word recognition. However, the relative reliance on syllables and morphemes in reading multi-syllabic complex words is still unresolved. This study aimed to unveil which of these sublexical units are the preferred units of reading by employing eye-tracking technology. Participants silently read sentences while their eye-movements were recorded. Words were visually marked using colour alternation (Experiment 1) or hyphenation (Experiment 2)-at syllable boundary (e.g., Kir-schen), at morpheme boundary (e.g., Kirsch-en), or within the units themselves (e.g., Ki-rschen). A control condition without disruptions was used as a baseline (e.g., Kirschen). The results of Experiment 1 showed that eye-movements were not modulated by colour alternations. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that hyphens disrupting syllables had a larger inhibitory effect on reading times than hyphens disrupting morphemes, suggesting that eye-movements in German skilled readers are more influenced by syllabic than morphological structure.

What is a Bayes factor?

The use of Bayes factors is becoming increasingly common in psychological sciences. Thus, it is important that researchers understand the logic behind the Bayes factor in order to correctly interpret it, and the strengths of weaknesses of the Bayesian approach. As education for psychological scientists focuses on frequentist statistics, resources are needed for researchers and students who want to learn more about this alternative approach. The aim of the current article is to provide such an overview to a psychological researcher. We cover the general logic behind Bayesian statistics, explain how the Bayes factor is calculated, how to set the priors in popular software packages to reflect the prior beliefs of the researcher, and finally provide a set of recommendations and caveats for interpreting Bayes factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of complexity and unpredictability on the learning of an artificial orthography.

Orthographies vary in complexity (the number of multi-letter grapheme-phoneme rules describing print-to-speech regularities) and unpredictability (the number of words which cannot be read correctly, even with at-ceiling knowledge of the rules). To assess how these constructs affect reading acquisition, we used an artificial orthography learning paradigm, where participants learn to read pseudowords written in unfamiliar symbols, and subsequently read aloud novel words written in the same symbols (generalisation). In three experiments (third experiment pre-registered), we manipulated the consistency of symbol-to-sound mappings: in the first inconsistent condition, vowel pronunciation depended on the subsequent letter (condition complexity), and in the second inconsistent condition, vowel pronunciation was unpredictable from the context (condition unpredictability). Across experiments, we found that pseudowords with inconsistent mappings are more difficult to learn than pseudowords with consistent mappings only, regardless of whether the inconsistency is due to complexity or unpredictability. Numerically, participants learning orthographies containing unpredictable correspondences seem to be less likely to form rules, either for simple or for complex correspondences. We propose that rule extraction and distributional learning happens simultaneously during reading acquisition: in a mathematical model, we show that distributional learning may lead to more complete knowledge than rule extraction for orthographies that are high in unpredictability.

Attentional Prioritization of Infant Faces in Parents: The Influence of Parents' Experiences of Care.

Infant faces are prioritized by the attentional system in parents, resulting in a greater cognitive engagement in terms of response time. However, many biological, contextual and environmental factors relating to this cognitive mechanism have been left unexplored. To fill this gap, this study aims to (i) confirm that infant faces engage more attention compared to adult faces; (ii) investigate whether the attention to infant faces is affected early care experiences of parents; (iii) explore the effect of parents' sex by taking the amount of involvement with early childcare into consideration. 51 mothers and 46 fathers completed a modified Go/no-Go task, a brief sociodemographic questionnaire, the short version of the Adult Parental Acceptance-Rejection scale, and an ad-hoc question relating to the amount of parental involvement with early childcare. Parents' response times were slowed in the presence of infant versus adult faces. Parents whose mother was perceived as more sensitively accepting were more engaged by infant cues. By considering the amount of early parental involvement, the sex of parents did not significantly interact with the type of face. These findings provide new insights on the attention process in response to infant cues in parents and suggest that the investigation of experience-based factors may shed further light on this topic.

Developmental Dyslexia, Reading Acquisition, and Statistical Learning: A Sceptic's Guide.

Many theories have been put forward that propose that developmental dyslexia is caused by low-level neural, cognitive, or perceptual deficits. For example, statistical learning is a cognitive mechanism that allows the learner to detect a probabilistic pattern in a stream of stimuli and to generalise the knowledge of this pattern to similar stimuli. The link between statistical learning and reading ability is indirect, with intermediate skills, such as knowledge of frequently co-occurring letters, likely being causally dependent on statistical learning skills and, in turn, causing individual variation in reading ability. We discuss theoretical issues regarding what a link between statistical learning and reading ability actually means and review the evidence for such a deficit. We then describe and simulate the "noisy chain hypothesis", where each intermediary link between a proposed cause and the end-state of reading ability reduces the correlation coefficient between the low-level deficit and the end-state outcome of reading. We draw the following conclusions: (1) Empirically, there is evidence for a correlation between statistical learning ability and reading ability, but there is no evidence to suggest that this relationship is causal, (2) theoretically, focussing on a complete causal chain between a distal cause and developmental dyslexia, rather than the two endpoints of the distal cause and reading ability only, is necessary for understanding the underlying processes, (3) statistically, the indirect nature of the link between statistical learning and reading ability means that the magnitude of the correlation is diluted by other influencing variables, yielding most studies to date underpowered, and (4) practically, it is unclear what can be gained from invoking the concept of statistical learning in teaching children to read.

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

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.

What Do Artificial Orthography Learning Tasks Actually Measure? Correlations Within and Across Tasks.

Artificial Orthography Learning (AOL) may act as a possible candidate to model the learning of print-to-speech correspondences. In order to serve as an adequate task, however, we need to establish whether AOL can be reliably measured. In the current study, we report the correlations between the learning of two different artificial orthographies by the same 55 participants. We also explore the correlation between AOL skill and other participant-level variables, namely Paired Associate Learning (PAL) performance, word and nonword reading ability, and age. We find high correlations between learning of two different artificial orthographies. Correlations with reading fluency and PAL are low. These results leave questions about the link between reading acquisition and AOL. At the same time, they show that AOL ability can be reliably measured and justify its use for future studies.

Variations in the use of simple and context-sensitive grapheme-phoneme correspondences in English and German developing readers.

Learning to read in most alphabetic orthographies requires not only the acquisition of simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) but also the acquisition of context-sensitive GPCs, where surrounding letters change a grapheme's pronunciation. We aimed to explore the use and development of simple GPCs (e.g. a ➔ /æ/) and context-sensitive GPCs (e.g. [w]a ➔ /ɔ/, as in "swan" or a[l][d] ➔ /o:/, as in "bald") in pseudoword reading. Across three experiments, English- and German-speaking children in grades 2-4 read aloud pseudowords, where vowel graphemes had different pronunciations according to different contexts (e.g. "hact", "wact", "hald"). First, we found that children use context-sensitive GPCs from grade 2 onwards, even when they are not explicitly taught. Second, we used a mathematical optimisation procedure to assess whether children's vowel responses can be described by assuming that they rely on a mix of simple and context-sensitive GPCs. While the approach works well for German adults (Schmalz et al. in Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 26, 831-852, 2014), we found poor model fits for both German- and English-speaking children. Additional analyses using an entropy measure and data from a third experiment showed that children's pseudoword reading responses are variable and likely affected by random noise. We found a decrease in entropy across grade and reading ability across all conditions in both languages. This suggests that GPC knowledge becomes increasingly refined across grades 2-4.

Statistical learning and dyslexia: a systematic review.

The existing literature on developmental dyslexia (hereafter: dyslexia) often focuses on isolating cognitive skills which differ across dyslexic and control participants. Among potential correlates, previous research has studied group differences between dyslexic and control participants in performance on statistical learning tasks. A statistical learning deficit has been proposed to be a potential cause and/or a marker effect for early detection of dyslexia. It is therefore of practical importance to evaluate the evidence for a group difference. From a theoretical perspective, such a group difference would provide information about the causal chain from statistical learning to reading acquisition. We provide a systematic review of the literature on such a group difference. We conclude that there is insufficient high-quality data to draw conclusions about the presence or absence of an effect.

Two distinct parsing stages in nonword reading aloud: Evidence from Russian.

Word reading partly depends on the activation of sublexical letter clusters. Previous research has studied which types of letter clusters have psychological saliency, but less is known about cognitive mechanisms of letter string parsing. Here, we take advantage of the high degree of context-dependency of the Russian orthography to examine whether consonant-vowel (CV) clusters are treated as units in two stages of sublexical processing. In two experiments using a nonword reading task, we use two orthogonal manipulations: (a) insertion of a visual disruptor (#) to assess whether CV clusters are kept intact during the early visual parsing stage, and (b) presence of context-dependent grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs; e.g., л[а] → /l/; л[я] → /lj/), to assess whether CV clusters remain intact or are split during the print-to-speech conversion stage. The results suggest that although CV clusters are initially processed as perceptual units in the early visual parsing stage, letters and not CV clusters drive print-to-speech conversion.

Distinguishing Target From Distractor in Stroop, Picture-Word, and Word-Word Interference Tasks.

Lexical selection-both during reading aloud and speech production-involves selecting an intended word, while ignoring irrelevant lexical activation. This process has been studied by the use of interference tasks. Examples are the Stroop task, where participants ignore the written color word and name the color of the ink, picture-word interference tasks, where participants name a picture while ignoring a super-imposed written word, or word-word interference (WWI) tasks, where two words are presented and the participants need to respond to only one, based on an pre-determined visual feature (e.g., color, position). Here, we focus on the WWI task: it is theoretically impossible for existing models to explain how the cognitive system can respond to one stimulus and block the other, when they are presented by the same modality (i.e., they are both words). We describe a solution that can explain performance on the WWI task: drawing on the literature on visual attention, we propose that the system creates an object file for each perceived object, which is continuously updated with increasingly complete information about the stimulus, such as the task-relevant visual feature. Such a model can account for performance on all three tasks.

Getting to the bottom of orthographic depth.

Orthographic depth has been studied intensively as one of the sources of cross-linguistic differences in reading, and yet there has been little detailed analysis of what is meant by orthographic depth. Here we propose that orthographic depth is a conglomerate of two separate constructs: the complexity of print-to-speech correspondences and the unpredictability of the derivation of the pronunciations of words on the basis of their orthography. We show that on a linguistic level, these two concepts can be dissociated. Furthermore, we make different predictions about how the two concepts would affect skilled reading and reading acquisition. We argue that refining the definition of orthographic depth opens up new research questions. Addressing these can provide insights into the specific mechanisms by which language-level orthographic properties affect cognitive processes underlying reading.

Phonological decoding or direct access? Regularity effects in lexical decisions of Grade 3 and 4 children.

Learning to read fluently involves moving from an effortful phonological decoding strategy to automatic recognition of familiar words. However, little is known about the timing of this transition, or the extent to which children continue to be influenced by phonological factors when recognizing words even as they progress in reading. We explored this question by examining regularity effects in a lexical decision task, as opposed to the more traditionally used reading-aloud task. Children in Grades 3 and 4 made go/no-go lexical decisions on high- and low-frequency regular and irregular words that had been matched for consistency. The children showed regularity effects in their accuracy for low-frequency words, indicating that they were using phonological decoding strategies to recognize unfamiliar words. The size of this effect was correlated with measures of reading ability. However, we found no regularity effects on accuracy for high-frequency words or on response times for either word type, suggesting that even 8-year-old children are already relying predominantly on a direct lexical strategy in their silent reading of familiar words.