Search

Research into second language (L2) reading is an exponentially growing field. Yet, it still has a relatively short supply of comparable, ecologically valid data from readers representing a variety of first languages (L1). This article addresses this need by presenting a new data resource called "MECO L2" (Multilingual Eye Movements Corpus), a rich behavioral eye-tracking record of text reading in English as an L2 among 543 university student speakers of 12 different L1s. MECO L2 includes a test battery of component skills of reading and allows for a comparison of the participants' reading performance in their L1 and L2. This data resource enables innovative large-scale cross-sample analyses of predictors of L2 reading fluency and comprehension. We first introduce the design and structure of the MECO L2 resource, along with reliability estimates and basic descriptive analyses. Then, we illustrate the utility of MECO L2 by quantifying contributions of four sources to variability in L2 reading proficiency proposed in prior literature: reading fluency and comprehension in L1, proficiency in L2 component skills of reading, extralinguistic factors, and the L1 of the readers. Major findings included (a) a fundamental contrast between the determinants of L2 reading fluency versus comprehension accuracy, and (b) high within-participant consistency in the real-time strategy of reading in L1 and L2. We conclude by reviewing the implications of these findings to theories of L2 acquisition and outline further directions in which the new data resource may support L2 reading research.

Purpose: Previous studies examining the inter-relations between serial and discrete naming with reading have found that the ability to efficiently process multiple items presented in a sequence (indexed by serial naming) is a unique predictor of word- and text-reading fluency. However, conclusions have been tempered by the concurrent nature of the available data and the uniformly low demands of the materials (words and texts). Here we go beyond previous studies by using more varied materials to examine the relations of serial and discrete naming with the discrete reading of words and the serial reading of word lists and connected text over time. Method: Two hundred and eight English-speaking Canadian children (51% female, Mage = 7.2 years) were followed from Grade 2 to Grade 5 and were assessed on serial and discrete digit naming and serial and discrete word reading at both measurement points. Results: Strong associations between discrete naming and discrete reading already from Grade 2 indicated that short and high-frequency words were processed in parallel early in development. By Grade 5, when word recognition was presumably automatized, serial naming accounted for unique variance in serial reading of word lists and connected texts after controlling for discrete word reading. More importantly, Latent Change Score modeling indicated that serial naming was the main predictor of growth in serial reading from Grade 2 to Grade 5. Conclusion: These findings suggest that, beyond individual word recognition, reading fluency development also requires efficient processing of multiple items presented in serial format (termed "cascaded processing"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The serial advantage, defined as the gain in naming rate in the serial over the discrete task of the same content, was examined between grades and types of content in English and Greek. 720 English- and Greek-speaking children from Grades 1, 3, and 5 were tested in rapid naming and reading tasks of different content, including digits, objects, dice, number words, and words. Each type of content was presented in two presentation formats: multiple stimulus displays (i.e., serial naming) and isolated stimulus displays (i.e., discrete naming). Serial tasks yielded faster naming rates--irrespective of task content--in both languages. However, content-specific characteristics influenced the trajectory of the serial advantage between grades. Improvement in the serial advantage between grades was found to be greatest for word reading, which started off similar to object naming in Grade 1, but ended up similar to digit or dice naming by Grade 5. In addition, growth in serial advantage was found to be associated with growth in discrete naming rate only in grade level analysis. For individuals, greater serial advantage was found to rely on processing skills specific to serial naming rather than on differences in the rate of naming isolated items. Our findings suggest that group level findings may not generalize to individuals, and although practice and familiarity with the content on the naming/reading task may impact the development of serial advantage, isolated item identification processes contribute little to individual differences in the gain in serial naming rates.

This study aimed to examine (a) the developing interrelations between the efficiency of reading individually presented words (i.e., isolated word recognition speed) and the efficiency of reading multiword sequences (i.e., word list and text reading fluency); (b) whether serial digit naming, indexing the ability to process multi-item sequences, accounts for variance in word list and text reading fluency beyond isolated word recognition speed; and (c) if these patterns of relations/effects differ between two alphabetic languages varying in orthographic consistency (English and Greek). In total, 710 Greek- and English-speaking children from Grades 1, 3, and 5 completed a serial digit naming task and a set of reading tasks, including unconnected words presented individually, unconnected words presented in lists, and sentences forming a meaningful passage. Our results showed that the relation between isolated word recognition speed and both word list and text reading fluency gradually decreased across grades, irrespective of contextual processing requirements. Moreover, serial digit naming uniquely predicted both word-list and text reading fluency in Grades 3 and 5, beyond isolated word recognition speed. The same pattern of results was observed across languages. These findings challenge the notion that individual word recognition and reading fluency differ only in text-level processing requirements. Instead, an additional component of processing multi-item sequences appears to emerge by Grade 3, after a basic level of both accuracy and speed in word recognition has been achieved, offering a potential mechanism underlying the transition from dealing with words one at a time to efficient processing of word sequences.

We implemented the connectionist model of social-pragmaticword learning (Caza & Knott, 2012) to test the hypothesis thatreduced joint attention between infant and mother wouldincrease the difference in acquisition between nouns andverbs as observed in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Theratio of objects to actions in the observed event stream wasmanipulated to create an original noun-verb asymmetry. Tensimulations were run for each of the combinations of threeconditions of communicative reliability and two conditions ofunfiltered random associative learning, which is regarded bysome researchers as the primary mechanism of languagelearning in ASD. The simulations indicated that the reductionin the reliability of communicative actions does not lead toincreased noun-verb asymmetry within the originally plannedtraining epochs. A trend in the predicted direction appearedtoward the end of training, suggesting that further simulationsmay help resolve the issue within the current architecture.

Category learning is thought to be mediated—in at least somecategory structures—by hypothesis-testing processes. Verballabels for the stimuli and stimulus individuation have beenshown to facilitate the formation, testing, and application ofrules of category membership (Fotiadis & Protopapas, 2014).We sought to replicate the phenomenon of facilitation due toverbal names for the stimuli by training participants for twoconsecutive days to either learn new names for abstractshapes, or learn shape-ideogram pairings; a third group wasunexposed to the shapes. After training, participants weregiven a Type II categorization task—thought to be mediatedby verbal processes of rule discovery—utilizing the trainedshapes. We hypothesized that verbal labels for the shapes andshape individuation would provide facilitative effects inlearning to categorize. Results revealed no effect of trainingon categorization performance. This study suggests thatcaution should be taken when generalizing findings acrossperceptual modalities or different experimental paradigms.

We examined differences between the processing of inflectional versus derivational morphology, using Greek nounsand verbs with a primed lexical decision task. Previous work suggested that both noun and verb targets were significantlyprimed by the same grammatical class. However, when preceded by different grammatical class, verb but not noun targetsshowed priming. We attributed the asymmetrical priming to the materials used: noun stimuli were derived by their verbcounterparts, suggesting an important inherent asymmetry between nouns and verbs. To further investigate this suggestion,we used materials with the opposite asymmetry (verbs derived by nouns) expecting an asymmetry in the opposite direction toemerge for derivationally related words. A clear explanation of the asymmetry would allow us conclusions about the (debated)existence of differences in representation and processing between inflectional and derivational morphological relations and thusprovide evidence for or against a fully decompositional view of processing morphologically complex words.

Word list reading fluency is theoretically expected to depend on single word reading speed. Yet the correlation between the two diminishes with increasing fluency, while fluency remains strongly correlated to serial digit naming. We hypothesized that multi-element sequence processing is an important component of fluency. We used confirmatory factor analyses with serial and discrete naming tasks with matched items, including digits, dice, objects, number words, and words, performed by about 100 Greek children in each of Grades 1, 3, and 5. Separable serial and discrete factors emerged across grades, consistent with distinct skill dimensions. Loadings were greater for serial than discrete, suggesting that discrete processing does not fully determine serial processing. Average serial performance differed more than discrete between grades, consistent with improvement beyond single-item speed. Serial word reading aligned increasingly with the serial factor at higher grades. Thus, word reading fluency is gradually dominated by skill in simultaneously processing multiple successive items through different stages (termed "cascading"), beyond automatization of individual words.

We examined the manifestation of dyslexia in a cross-linguistic study contrasting English and Greek children with dyslexia compared to chronological age and reading-level control groups on reading accuracy and fluency, phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, orthographic choice, and spelling. Materials were carefully matched across languages in item properties and structure. English children with dyslexia were more impaired on reading accuracy and phoneme deletion but not on reading fluency, memory, naming, or orthographic choice. No differences in impairment were observed between words and pseudowords across languages. Orthographic tests targeted specific morphemes to examine the accessibility of functionally distinct word parts across languages. There were no differences in prefix and stem orthographic choice, but English children were less successful in spelling inflectional suffixes despite greater morphological richness in Greek, highlighting the need for additional considerations beyond grain size in cross-linguistic work.

Background: In languages with lexical stress, reading aloud must include stress assignment. Stress information sources across languages include word-final letter sequences. Here, we examine whether such sequences account for stress assignment in Greek and whether this is attributable to absolute rules involving accenting morphemes or to probabilistic lexical information. Methods: Pseudowords were constructed to not resemble particular words and were suffixed with derivational morphemes associated with specific stress patterns, to be read aloud, presented either without a stress diacritic or with a diacritic congruent or incongruent with the suffix. Morphemes differed in whether or not there were stress competitors ending in the same letter sequences. Results: Stress was assigned consistent with the suffix in the absence of the diacritic, more so when there were no stress competitors in the lexicon. Conclusions: Results suggest a lexically based probabilistic mechanism taking into account pattern distributions rather than absolute rules based on the morphological accenting.

Although it is established that reading fluency is more strongly related to serial naming of symbols than to naming of isolated items ("serial superiority effect"), the reason for the difference remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of executive functions in explaining the serial superiority effect. One hundred seven Grade 6 Greek children were assessed on serial and discrete naming (digits, objects, and words), executive (inhibition, shifting, and updating) and non-executive tasks (simple choice reaction), and on a serial Rapid Alternating Stimuli task. Reading fluency correlated more strongly with serial naming than with discrete naming, consistent with the serial superiority effect. In hierarchical regression analyses, executive measures failed to account for variance shared between serial naming and reading fluency. In confirmatory factor analyses, including a discrete and a serial factor for the naming tasks, variance in the executive tasks not shared with simple choice reaction was not associated with the serial factor. Thus, the executive tasks failed to account for the serial superiority effect. The high correlation between the simple choice factor and the discrete naming factor suggests that method variance partially underlies the observed relationship between executive function tasks and word reading. We argue that the distinction between serial and discrete dimensions indicates that internally regulated cognitive control is crucial for the serial superiority in naming symbols and words.

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item repetition. A group of 129 participants performed lexical decision and naming, in counterbalanced order, using a set of 150 Greek words in which these variables were decorrelated. Frequency, length, and syllable frequency effects were reduced by a preceding task. Length effects were inversely related to years of education. Neighborhood effects depended on the metric used. There were no significant effects or interactions of bigram frequency or consistency. The results suggest that exposure to a word causes transient effects that may cumulatively develop into permanent individual differences. Models of word recognition must incorporate item-specific learning to account for these findings.

The concept of Matthew effects in reading development refers to a longitudinally widening gap between high achievers and low achievers. Various statistical approaches have been proposed to examine this idea. However, little attention has been paid to psychometric issues of scaling. Specifically, interval-level data are required to compare performance differences across performance ranges, but only ordinal-level data are available with current literacy measures. To demonstrate the interpretability problems of contrasting growth slopes, we use data from a longitudinal study of literacy development. We explore the possibility of comparing across ages, matched for performance, and we examine the consequences of nonlinear growth, temporal lag estimates, and individual differences in developmental progression. We conclude that, although conceptually appealing, the widening gap prediction is not empirically testable.

Dyslexic difficulties in lexical stress were compared to difficulties in segmental phonology. Twenty-nine adolescents with dyslexia and 29 typically developing adolescents, matched on age and nonverbal ability, were assessed on reading, spelling, phonological and stress awareness, rapid naming, and short-term memory. Group differences in stress assignment were larger than in segmental phonology in reading and spelling pseudowords but not words, indicating a fragility of explicit processes that manipulate stress representations. Despite impaired stress performance in dyslexia at the group level, individual variability failed to reveal evidence for a stress-specific deficit or for a distinct stress-impaired subgroup.

Labels for the categories have been found to facilitate learning by boosting accuracy. According to the label-feedback hypothesis, this facilitation is due to a mechanism selectively sensitising perceptual dimensions. To further investigate the label-facilitation phenomenon, one group of participants in our study learned both named and hard-to-name artificial categories, in a novel, within-subjects design. Another group of participants was administered a—highly similar—paired-associate task purportedly not involving sensitization of dimensions. Results showed that labels boosted accuracy during learning, but only when learning to categorise—not when learning to associate. The label-feedback hypothesis posits that labels exert an influence also after new categories have been learned. To test for sustained effects of labels, we administered a post-learning visual discrimination task while monitoring participants' eye movements and analysing dwell time on the trained shapes. There was some indication of sustained effects of labels for newly-learned categories, but there was no effect following learning to associate. Our results suggest that labels for newly learned categories have immediate effects during learning and that the effects of labels may also be sustained during post-learning processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]