EFFECT OF ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH ON READING IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH
By
GREGORY H. BONTRAGER
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2020
© 2020 Gregory H. Bontrager
To my grandparents, without whose constant and eager support I would be neither half the scholar nor half the man I am today
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge my advisory committee, composed of Dr. Caroline
Wiltshire, Dr. Lori Altmann, Dr. Brent Henderson, and Dr. Ann Kathryn Wehmeyer, as well as the many other scholars whose research is referenced in this work. I particularly wish to thank
Dr. Altmann for her patient guidance on statistical analysis and interpretation, Dr. Wiltshire for alerting me to some very useful literature, and Dr. Wehmeyer for her vigilance against typos and any errors of detail. The latter two members were also quite active in ensuring proper citation and organization, for which I am also very grateful. The entire committee helped to make this project the best that it could be. Whatever insight may be gleaned in the forthcoming pages was only possible because I stood on their shoulders.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4
LIST OF TABLES ...... 7
LIST OF FIGURES ...... 8
ABSTRACT ...... 9
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION ...... 11
Overview ...... 11 Writing Systems ...... 13 Isomorphy, Regularity, and Transparency ...... 18 Orthographic Depth ...... 21
2 LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 25
Introduction: Phonological Transparency ...... 25 Interaction with Lexical Effects ...... 26 Literacy Acquisition by Children ...... 34 Environmental and Contextual Factors ...... 39 Summary: Phonological Transparency ...... 44 Introduction: Morphological Transparency ...... 45 Morphological Awareness ...... 45 Priming Studies on Adults ...... 49 Reading Comprehension in Children ...... 52 Evidence from Non-Phonemic Scripts ...... 58 Summary: Morphological Transparency ...... 66
3 METHODOLOGICAL AND MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL BACKGROUND...... 68
Cross-Linguistic versus Intra-Lingual Approaches ...... 68 Word Recognition and Text Comprehension ...... 71 English Dactylic Laxing and Vowel Reduction ...... 73 Spanish Vowel Breaking and Raising ...... 77
4 METHODOLOGY ...... 81
Subjects...... 82 Stimuli ...... 83 Procedure ...... 88 Hypotheses and Research Questions ...... 90
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5 RESULTS ...... 92
Reaction Times for Lexical Decision ...... 92 Accuracy for Lexical Decision ...... 96 Inhibition by Orthographic Overlap ...... 99 Control for Ambiguity and Direction ...... 103 Cloze Test Performance ...... 108 Conclusions...... 109
6 DISCUSSION ...... 111
Morphological Priming and Reading Comprehension ...... 111 Summary ...... 111 Limitations ...... 116
APPENDIX
A PRIMING STIMULI ...... 119
B CLOZE TEXTS ...... 133
True Love, adapted from Tales with Soul by Rosario Gómez ...... 133 Amor Verdadero, adaptado de Cuentos con Alma por Rosario Gómez ...... 134 Psychology by Ingrid Nakagawa Mendoza ...... 135 Psicología por Ingrid Nakagawa Mendoza ...... 136
C BILINGUALISM QUESTIONNAIRE (ENGLISH TRANSLATION) ...... 138
LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 139
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 144
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LIST OF TABLES
Table page
5-1 Mean Reaction Times and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) ..... 93
5-2 Mean Priming Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) ..... 94
5-3 Mean Accuracy Rates and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language ...... 97
5-4 Mean Accuracy Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language ...... 98
5-5 Isolated Mean Facilitation Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) ...... 100
5-6 Isolated Mean Facilitation Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language with Calibration of Spanish AL (in ms) ...... 102
5-7 Mean Reaction Times and Standard Deviations by Ambiguity, Direction, and Language in (in ms) ...... 104
5-8 Mean Accuracy Rates and Standard Deviations by Direction and Language ...... 105
A-1 English List #1 ...... 119
A-2 English List #2 ...... 121
A-3 Spanish List #1 ...... 124
A-4 Spanish List #2 ...... 128
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure page
5-1 Mean Reaction Times and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) ..... 93
5-2 Mean Priming Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) ..... 95
5-3 Mean Accuracy Rates and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in %) ...... 97
5-4 Mean Accuracy Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in %) .... 98
5-5 Isolated Mean Facilitation Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) ...... 101
5-6 Isolated Mean Facilitation Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language with Calibration of Spanish AL (in ms) ...... 103
5-7 Mean Reaction Times and Standard Deviations by Ambiguity, Direction, and Language (in ms) ...... 105
5-8 Cloze Test Scores as a Function of Morphological Priming ...... 109
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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
EFFECT OF ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH ON READING IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH
By
Gregory H. Bontrager
August 2020
Chair: Caroline Wiltshire Major: Linguistics
In the Sound Pattern of English, Chomsky and Halle (1968) posited that English orthography, despite the complexity in how it relates to phonology, is in fact more "optimal" in at least one aspect: how it relates to morphology. A root or stem tends to maintain a constant visual form across words built upon it even as its pronunciation alternates considerably across derivatives. The suggestion is that a spelling system which makes strategic concessions to the regularity of its grapheme-phoneme correspondences in order to render morphological links between words more visually obvious, such as English, may better facilitate comprehension than a system which prioritizes consistency of symbol-to-sound mapping above all else, such as
Spanish. In order to test this hypothesis, groups of native Anglophones and native
Hispanophones were given a lexical decision task in their respective mother tongues. Stimuli included morphologically related prime/target pairs that instantiate common patterns of phonological stem allomorphy. In Spanish, the written form of each shared stem differed between prime and target whenever its pronunciation alternated, while in English, the shared stem was spelled identically regardless of alternation. The degree of facilitation seen between primes and targets in English was compared to that observed in Spanish. In a second experiment, cloze tests of reading comprehension were administered in both tongues. Within
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each language, scores were tested for any correlation with morphological priming, and across both languages, average scores were compared. The results reveal no evidence for such a benefit of morphological transparency, as no significant difference between facilitation effects was found between the two languages, nor were the cloze test scores significantly different. What the results did show is evidence of an inhibitory effect of orthographic overlap on reaction times in both languages as well as hints at interaction(s) between priming direction, lexical ambiguity, and language. The absence of any significant difference in morphological priming between alternating and non-alternating pairs as well as between languages has implications for the debate between full-listing and full-decomposition models of lexical access as well as the relative merits of deep versus shallow orthographies.
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
Overview
In their seminal work Sound Pattern of English, Chomsky and Halle (1968) argued that many of the irregularities in English orthography at the phonological level actually serve to streamline the system at the morphological level. The written representation of a root or stem shared by related words often holds constant even as its pronunciation changes from derivative to derivative. This consistency of visual form is attained by spelling the morpheme in question according to its underlying form rather than its surface form, the latter of which may be subject to morphophonological alternation. The precise nature and psychological reality of the proposed underlying forms remains debatable. Nonetheless, many English orthographic conventions that make little sense from a strictly sound-based perspective indeed become easier to understand if examined through the lens of ensuring that a morpheme maintains an identical spelling across different morphological contexts and that morphologically related words resemble each other visually even when their auditory resemblance is not as strong. From this perspective, English orthography becomes "optimal."
This outlook invokes the idea of ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH and touches upon the accompanying ORTHOGRAPHIC DEPTH HYPOTHESIS (ODH). Broadly defined, orthographic depth refers to the regularity of an orthography, principally from a phonemic standpoint (Seymour et al., 2003). As Katz and Frost (1992) note, depth may often reflect and/or be determined by the relative priority a spelling system places on morphology versus phonology. A deep spelling system is one that can more frequently make strategic concessions to the consistency of sound- to-symbol correspondences in order to render the ties between morphologically related words more obvious to the eye. A shallow spelling system is one that more highly privileges the
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consistency of sound-to-symbol correspondences and thus cannot make as many (if any) such concessions, even if it means that closely related words sometimes look quite different. Most generally, the ODH posits that the regularity and/or depth of an orthography wields significant influence on the nature of reading proficiency and acquisition (Katz & Frost, 1992).
While pertinent literature seems largely supportive of the ODH (e.g. Frost et al., 1987;
Wimmer and Goswami, 1994; Ziegler et al., 2001), few studies have focused specifically on the effects of a writing system's relative prioritization of morphology versus phonology. The proposed priming study aims to alleviate that shortage by using two languages whose orthographies differ markedly in this very parameter. English spelling generally prioritizes morphological transparency over phonological transparency, while Spanish predominantly demonstrates the opposite prioritization. A group of native Anglophones and a group of native
Hispanophones were each given a lexical decision task in their respective mother tongue.
Stimuli included morphologically related prime/target pairs that instantiate common patterns of phonological stem allomorphy. In Spanish, the written form of each shared stem differed between prime and target because of alternation in how it is pronounced. In English, on the other hand, each shared stem was spelled identically in spite of such alternation. The degree of facilitation seen between such primes and targets in English was compared to that observed in
Spanish. Then, in a second experiment, carefully designed cloze tests of reading comprehension were administered in both tongues. Within each language, the scores were tested for any correlation with morphological priming, and across both languages, the average scores were compared. The results shed focused light on the question of whether the presence of morphological cues in written words confers any significant processing advantage for readers
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which is sufficient to significantly outweigh the reported benefits of simpler and more regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences.
An introduction to the diversity of writing systems in general and one way in which they can be organized will be followed by a particular exploration of alphabetic scripts and how they vary among themselves in regularity and structure. The focus will than sharpen further onto the concept of orthographic depth and the associated hypothesis regarding its role in the reading process. At least when framed in a way that highlights the relative interactions of morphology and phonology with orthography, this concept helps to set the stage for the study reported in later chapters.
Writing Systems
A survey of the various forms written language can take will be worth establishing as a foundation upon which to build. It is important to clarify here that, at least in the categorization scheme elaborated here, the existence of any writing system which is purely of one type without any deviation is dubious at best. Instead, scripts will generally be classified according to their overall principles and/or dominant tendencies, in spite of some often contextual features that may not strictly fit the relevant definitions. For example, even in an otherwise very archetypal alphabet, such as Finnish orthography, the use of Arabic numerals, which is nowadays very common cross-linguistically especially among European languages, constitutes a subsystem that behaves much more like what has traditionally been called a "logography." Perhaps the clearest example of this is the three-in-one Japanese script, whose hybridization is sufficiently pervasive as to defy easy classification even by a standard that does not require absolute purity. With that caveat in mind, a writing system may primarily be classified by its grain size, which refers to the type of linguistic unit that the written symbols generally target for representation. The key question is what each irreducible and freestanding grapheme stands for. If the answer is a 13
morpheme, or irreducible unit of correspondence between sound and meaning, then the system is a morphography, of which the best-known example is the standard Chinese script. If the answer is any sort of phonological unit, then the system is a phonography. While there are no notable subdivisions within the former category, the latter does encompass at least a few major subtypes based on the size of the targeted phonological unit. First, one can distinguish between phonemic codes, which operate on phonemes (at least individual consonants if not also individual vowels), from supra-phonemic codes, which operate on larger phonological units.
The phonemic class is comprised of abjads, alphabets, and the very rare featural alphabet(s). Abjads, such as the Arabic and Hebrew scripts, are writing systems that assign graphemes to consonant phonemes but leave the vowels largely unwritten and left to contextual inference. Alphabets, such as the Roman and Cyrillic scripts, are otherwise similar codes that assign individual and independent graphemes to vowels as well. In the supra-phonemic class are the moro-syllabaries, among which Japanese katakana and hiragana are particularly well- known, and abugidas, of which the most typically cited example is the Devanagari script of
India. The first group obviously includes moraic systems, in which each symbol corresponds to a mora (which may or may not constitute a complete syllable), and true syllabaries, in which each symbol reliably corresponds to a complete syllable. The inclusion of abugidas in this group, however may not be quite as obvious. These are essentially abjads with a supplementary system of diacritics that signal adjacent vowels. One might thus be tempted to consider abugidas to be phonemic scripts. However, the categories outlined here are defined by the function of the smallest individual glyph that can stand on its own. The vowel diacritics used in abugidas cannot generally stand alone but are instead parasitic on the consonant graphemes (though at least in the Devanagari system, word-initial vowels can stand alone). Therefore, any minimally
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independent grapheme in an abugida is usually a combination of a consonant base and an attached vowel marker, which means that the combined glyph actually represents a C(C)(C)V sequence. So a freestanding grapheme in an abugida will typically encode what amounts to at least a mora if not a syllable, which motivates the classification of such systems as moro-syllabic rather than phonemic despite all phonemes having some unique visual manifestation.
Returning to phonemic scripts, there is one more subtype that is particularly noteworthy, namely featural alphabets, of which the only major example is reputedly Korean hangul. Each freestanding character in hangul represents a phoneme, be it vowel or consonant, so it is technically an alphabet. Nevertheless, while the graphemes of conventional alphabets are largely arbitrary in form, those of a featural alphabet are shaped to depict articulatory features. At least originally, the letters of hangul were designed as pictographic representations of the vocal tract as it is configured when uttering the associated phonemes. For example, Korean /m/ is written as a square or rectangle with the horizontal sides invoking the lips as they appear when pressed together to form that sound. The bilabial oral stops are elicited by adding parallel upper or lower strokes to what is essentially the /m/ base glyph. Meanwhile, the symbols for some other consonants visualize the pertinent posing of the tongue, at least according to some scholars
(Sampson, 1985). While Korean is the only example of this approach being used systematically, though not without critics of its characterization (Rogers, 2005) as such, hints of it can be seen elsewhere. When the late author George Bernard Shaw bequeathed funds to a contest for the design of a streamlined alternative to standard English orthography, the winner was Shavian, a non-Roman alphabet that used glyph rotation to indicate voicing. For example, the letters for /k/ and /g/ were mirror images of each other. In addition, Greek also takes a somewhat featural approach to the formation of digraphs for rendering foreign loanwords. Greek natively lacks
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voiced stop phonemes, but when borrowing a word from a language that does have such phonemes, the usual solution is to encode such a sound as if it were the relevant voiceless counterpart preceded by a homorganic nasal. Hence a word imported from English with an initial /b/ would usually be spelled in Greek with an initial sequence of <μπ>, which technically encodes /mp/. Of course, this combination is not an irreducible grapheme in the same way that a hangul character is, but the parallel is notable nonetheless.
This compositional use of <μπ> in Greek is an example of the variation in structure that is not uncommon among scripts that use principally the same grain size or even within a single script. More specifically, it is a polygraph, which is a fixed combination of two or more graphemes which together encode a single phoneme that is not necessarily related in a straightforwardly systematic way to the sounds associated with the component letters individually. Further examples include the English digraph
/oi/ or its nearest analog in the pertinent language is likely to be spelled
/ks/ and/or /gz/. Finally, scripts which are phonographic in principle can often vary in the consistency and/or complexity of the phoneme/grapheme correspondences, with some even
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incorporating morphographic cues, such as English rendering the regular plural suffix with <-s> even when its surface pronunciation is /z/ (e.g.
However polyvalent the fundamental mappings between sound and symbol may be, they can often be modulated (to varying degrees) by positional rules. As defined in Bontrager (2015, p. 20), a positional rule is a pattern "by which one or more possible mappings of sound to symbol or vice-versa can be eliminated based on the relevant grapheme or phoneme's position relative to other graphemes, other phonemes, word edges, and/or contrastive prosodic features." Some of the best examples of such rules come from the Romance languages. For instance, in Italian, the letter
(phonologically /e/ or /i/) and as "hard" elsewhere. Hence,
Romance family, Old English had a similar though not quite as predictable system in which
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circle are inherited from later Romance (especially French) influences. Notably, however, modern English orthography often fails to enforce the rule that the Romance languages uphold much more strictly. A very common example is the word get, which is not pronounced homophonously with jet and might therefore be expected to have a written form more like
Isomorphy, Regularity, and Transparency
The duality of
It is for this reason that, in Bontrager (2015), I distinguish not only between
PHONEMICITY and GRAPHEMICITY but also between RAW and ADJUSTED ratings of each.
Phonemicity refers to consistency in the symbol-to-sound direction and may best be thought of as the number of discernments that a reader must make in decoding a written text. Graphemicity refers to consistency in the sound-to-symbol direction and may be thought of as the number of discernments that a writer must make in encoding a spoken text. Note that, although these two attributes can be equal, they are not necessarily so. As an illustration, consider a hypothetical system in which /k/ is represented either by
while neither letter is ever used for anything else (i.e.
After coining and defining these terms, I go on to offer two techniques for objectively estimating the phonemicity and/or graphemicity (raw and/or adjusted) of any phonographic writing system. The first takes a brief sample text and calculates the average number of different ways each word could be pronounced (if measuring phonemicity) or written (if measuring graphemicity). For example, the English word /spiːk/ would be counted as having at least six different plausible renderings (
This method provides an estimate of adjusted phonemicity or graphemicity. A second more precise way is to tabulate each and every mapping in the orthography and basically find the average number of phonemes assigned to each grapheme or vice versa. Using the latter method,
Spanish orthography is found to be 98% phonemic and 58% graphemic with positional rules taken into account (Bontrager, 2015). If analyzed in the same way, analogous ratings for English would undoubtedly be much lower, especially given that many reputed "rules" are merely broad tendencies that fall short of the absolute inviolability required to count in the calculation.
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Most of the literature on orthographic transparency focuses specifically on how consistently an alphabetic orthography maps onto the phonology of the host language (e.g.
Goswami et al., 1998; Landerl, 2000; Thorstad, 1991; Treiman et al., 1995), but the mapping between orthography and morphology is also worthy of comparable investigation.
Morphophonological alternation can often cause transparency of pronunciation to clash with transparency of morphological composition, as implied by Chomsky and Halle's (1968) notion of a morpheme's underlying phonological representation (UPR) as an "optimal" basis for spelling, as opposed to its surface phonemic representation (SPR). This balancing act raises the central question of the forthcoming research. Is phonological transparency (i.e. phonemicity) or morphological transparency more influential upon literacy acquisition and performance?
While PHONOLOGICAL TRANSPARENCY refers to the reliability and ease with which a word's pronunciation can be deduced from its written form, MORPHOLOGICAL TRANSPARENCY refers to the reliability and ease with which a word's morphological composition can be deduced from its written form. In many cases, a phonologically transparent spelling is also a morphologically transparent one. For instance, the Spanish word trabajador can be easily and uniquely decoded into /tɾabaxaˈdoɾ/, and it is also a clear concatenation of the verb root trabaj-
(/tɾabax/), the verb class theme vowel -a- (/a/), and the agentive suffix -dor (/doɾ/). Of course, the boundary between the two component morphemes is not marked, but crucially, each constituent is visibly contained within the full written word in a form that remains immediately recognizable in different morphological contexts. Such constancy of visual form may be especially convenient when interpreting related words. However, when one or more of a word's component morphemes is subject to phonological allomorphy, the two types of transparency are likely to clash, such that one cannot be preserved without sacrificing the other, and the
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connection between related words might not be as visually apparent as it otherwise would be.
The tautology of "El trabajador trabaja" ("The worker works") may be at least slightly more obvious than that of "El soñador sueña" ("The dreamer dreams"), with the latter using two different allomorphs (/soɲ/ and /sueɲ/) of the same verb root. A corresponding example in
English would be, "The worker worked" (/ðə ˈwɜ˞kə˞ wɜ˞kt/) versus, "The drinker drank" (/ðə
ˈdɹɪŋkə˞ dɹæŋk/). The latter sentence in each language instantiates a common vowel shift pattern that visually obscures the relationship between two morphologically related words. English, however, more frequently produces forms like, "Atoms are atomic" (/ˈætəmz ɑ˞ əˈtɒmɪk/), in which the spelling abstracts away from the allomorphy. It looks on the page like the worker/worked example but is in fact much more akin to the drinker/drank example, a kinship that only comes to light when the sentences are spoken aloud or transcribed phonetically. This is what makes English orthography more morphologically transparent than Spanish orthography.
Meanwhile, the Spanish system is more phonologically transparent than the English system, since the atoms/atomic example is only made possible by allowing the grapheme sequence
Orthographic Depth
The term "orthographic depth" has been defined summarily as the degree of consistency in the sound/symbol mappings of an alphabetic orthography, and in this sense, it matches our notions of phonemicity/graphemicity and phonological transparency. Seymour et al. (2003, p.
145) write that, "The orthographic depth dimension contrasts alphabetic writing systems which approximate a consistent one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds (e.g. Finnish) with those which contain orthographic inconsistencies and complexities, including multi-letter graphemes, context-dependent rules, irregularities, and morphological effects." Some work on 21
the topic focuses particularly on the last of those factors, namely the interaction of orthography with morphology. In a language with rich phonological allomorphy, the spelling system "has the option of representing either morphological invariance (a deep orthography) or following grapheme-phoneme invariance (a shallow orthography)" (Katz & Frost, 1992, p. 149). So orthographic depth could, at least in some cases, be largely described as the point on the generative chain between underlying and surface forms from which the orthography most often tends to derive its representations, and in this sense, it is at least an important factor in what we have been calling the morphological transparency of a writing system. For example, the English phonemes /eɪ/ and /æ/ have been analyzed as possible alternants of a more abstract unit that occurs in the underlying form of many morphemes and/or related word families, such as the shared element in nation (/ˈneɪʃən/) and national (/ˈnæʃənəl/) (Chomsky & Halle, 1968). In this interpretation, the standard orthography acts as if the spelling is generated at or near the start of the derivational process that turns an initially identical first vowel into a distinct /eɪ/ in nation and /æ/ in national. This would be a feature of a deep orthography. If analogously abstract forms are assumed for Spanish, than its standard orthography appears to apply at or near the end of the derivational process by which the shared element in muerte ("death") and mortal ("mortal") splits into two distinct pronunciations. This would be characteristic of a shallow orthography. In other words, the "depth" of an orthography may well be thought of as a spectrum between absolute deference to morphological transparency and absolute deference to phonological transparency.
The deeper the orthography, the greater the preference for morphological transparency over phonological. Put yet another way, as in Bontrager (2015, pp. 15 - 16), a deep orthography
"prefers to spell the same morpheme according to the pronunciation of its most basic allomorph even in positions where morphophonemic alternation renders that spelling inaccurate from a
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purely phonemic perspective," while a shallow orthography "draws the basis for its representation closer to the surface, explicitly representing morphophonemic alternants of the same morpheme." Hence, in this more focused sense, orthographic depth becomes effectively synonymous with morphological transparency. A deep orthography is one that generally privileges morphological transparency over phonological transparency, while a shallow orthography is one with the opposite tendency.
In discussing orthographic depth and its effects, a dual-route model of reading, of which a summary can be found in the work of Coltheart (2005) or Grainger and Ziegler (2011), is often pertinent. This model postulates that there are two main avenues of written word processing.
The phonological route recodes the written word via correspondence rules into a sequence of phonemes, which can then serve as the input to the mental lexicon. In the direct orthographic route, on the other hand, the relevant lexical entry is accessed directly from the visual representation. At least in its stricter form, the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (ODH) assumes a dual-route model of the reading process in order to posit that mastery of phonological recoding alone is sufficient for mastery of reading in a shallow orthography but not in a deep orthography.
In its more modest form, both routes are utilized to some extent in any code, even the shallowest, but the relative proportions of usage are influenced by orthographic depth (Katz & Frost, 1992).
The necessity of two functional routes rather than just one, as suggested by the stronger version of the hypothesis, is cited by some as a primary reason for the longer time it typically takes to acquire a deep orthography (Seymour et al., 2003).
If true, this would seem to be a clear advantage of a shallow orthography, and as will be seen in the upcoming literature review, there is indeed evidence for shallower writing systems offering detectable benefits at least to learners if not also to experienced readers. The central
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theme of this work is whether morphological transparency offers any advantage(s) of its own that could outweigh the apparent perks of phonological transparency, specifically in how efficiently individual words are recognized and how well longer texts are understood. While the forthcoming study examines comprehension of whole texts with a carefully constructed cloze test, it operationalizes the use of morphological cues in word recognition via a morphological priming experiment.
The single most important question addressed here can be exemplified by asking if nation primes national more than muerte primes mortal. In other words, between morphologically related words instantiating phonological stem allomorphy, is there more morphological facilitation (measured by decrease in reaction times) in English than in Spanish? Furthermore, do English speakers fare better than Spanish speakers in understanding full prose text? Finally, how well does morphological priming predict reading comprehension aptitude?
First, however, due diligence compels a survey of what the current literature has already found on both phonological transparency and morphological transparency in Chapter 2. This will be followed by an exploration in Chapter 3 of some key considerations for undertaking and/or interpreting such research as well as the morphophonological processes in English and
Spanish relevant to the work put forth here. With those foundations in place, the methodology of this new study will be detailed in Chapter 4, followed by an analysis of the results in Chapter 5, and finally the conclusions drawn from that analysis in Chapter 6.
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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction: Phonological Transparency
The Orthographic Depth Hypothesis (ODH) argues that the depth of an orthography influences the parsing and/or retrieval strategies employed in reading words. A shallow orthography promotes the phonological recoding route, while a deep orthography promotes the direct, or orthographic, route. As Katz and Frost (1992, p. 150) put it, "It [ODH] states that shallow orthographies are more easily able to support a word recognition process that involves the language’s phonology. In contrast, deep orthographies encourage a reader to process printed words by referring to their morphology via the printed word’s visual-orthographic structure."
Some studies addressing the ODH can shed light on the specific ways in which a shallow orthography may be advantageous at least for students in the process of acquiring literacy if not for already skilled readers, though this need not be the central purpose. Literature on grain size will also be particularly informative, since the evidence suggests that it is an important consideration in determining how phonological transparency impacts parsing strategies. In addition, word naming will feature prominently in the methodologies, providing a very direct measurement phonological transparency. The forthcoming review begins with a revelation of orthographic depth's capacity to modulate or otherwise interact with certain lexical effects (e.g. word length). Then, investigations of how phonological transparency influences the acquisition of literacy by children, including a look at text comprehension beyond individual word recognition, will receive some focus. Finally, attention will turn to some key environmental and contextual factors that can be important to consider when designing or interpreting studies on orthographic depth.
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Interaction with Lexical Effects
One way in which the ODH has been tested has been to compare the strength of lexical effects in different orthographies. Frost et al. (1987) used lexical decision and word naming tasks to make just such a comparison of Hebrew, English, and Serbo-Croatian systems (listed in descending order of depth). In each language, they compared the responses to stimuli in three frequency categories: high, low, and nonce. Their working hypothesis was that any differences observed in reaction times to these three types of stimuli would be greatest in Hebrew and least in Serbo-Croatian, with the English results falling somewhere in the middle. In the first of three experiments, the effect of frequency on word naming indeed decreased with orthographic depth, though notably, the difference between English and Serbo-Croatian was significant only when the nonce stimuli were included in the analysis. The second experiment focused on semantic priming, under the assumption that such priming would be at its most influential in the deepest orthography, where semantic information would presumably be most important for word identification. The results revealed that priming effects were greatest in Hebrew, slightly weaker in English, and much weaker in Serbo-Croatian, which was again consistent with the working hypothesis. Notably, in Hebrew, nonce primes failed to prime their respective targets even more than unrelated real-word primes. Finally, in the third experiment, the researchers addressed a potential confound, namely that the ratio of real-word stimuli to nonce stimuli may have biased the subjects towards a particular decoding strategy. A high proportion of nonsense items, for instance, may have prompted greater reliance on phonological recoding than is actually typical for the participants. Another word naming task was administered, this time exposing each subject to a list composed of either 80% or 20% nonce words. Hebrew and English readers committed significantly more errors on the lists containing 80% non-words, though the significance in the case of English was marginal (p < 0.063), while no significant difference 26
between list types was observed among Serbo-Croatian readers. Overall, this trio of experiments showed that the impacts of lexical status, frequency, semantic priming, and proportion of nonsense words all decrease with orthographic depth. In sufficiently shallow orthographies, such effects are greatly reduced if not eliminated (Frost et al., 1987).
However, as Frost et al. (1987) themselves acknowledge, the evidence regarding the
ODH is by no means unanimous. Ziegler et al. (2001) re-frame the ODH by arguing that, "what seems to differ between orthographies is not the amount of phonological recoding required but rather the nature of the phonological recoding process." More specifically, their version proposes that deeper orthographies require parsing in a wider variety of grain sizes (e.g. phonemes, rimes, syllables), while shallower orthographies can rely on fewer levels of analysis
(perhaps even just one, likely that of phonemes). In order to test this modified version of the
ODH, they compared the effects of neighborhood size (i.e. the number of words sharing the same rime) to the effects of word length, using the former as an indicator of coarse-grained parsing and the latter as an indicator of fine-grained parsing. As one might expect, in both English (the deeper orthography) and German (the shallower orthography), shorter words were read faster than longer ones, and those with larger neighborhoods were read faster than those with smaller ones. However, the observed effects of length were greater in German than in English, while neighborhood size effects were greater in English than in German. Crucially, the choice of languages for comparison meant that English- and German-speaking participants were often responding to orthographically identical strings (e.g. the English word
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right. Regardless of what it means for grain size, it seems that neighborhood size wields greater impact in deeper orthographies (like English), while word length is more influential in shallower orthographies (like German).
Similarly, Goswami et al. (1998) argue that, while phonemic awareness plays an important role in the acquisition of any alphabetic language, the phonological units that correspond most consistently to graphological units will be most salient for users. In a naming study of children learning to read English, French, and Spanish orthography (listed here in descending order of depth), they tested this idea with three different types of nonsense words.
The first, O+P+, comprised non-words that shared both orthographic and phonological rimes with real words (e.g.
French, which is much more consistent at the level of individual phonemes. Another useful comparison could be made between the O-P+ and O-P- forms, this time with respect to the role of phonological familiarity. If O-P+ words are read more easily than O-P-, then this would implicate familiarity effects. Finally, a third source of insight was to compare the responses to
O-P- items versus the O+P+ items. If students are learning how their respective orthography
1 It is worth noting that Hayes and White (2013) suggest that /eɪʃ/ may not be a licit rime in English, so this particular example may not have been a fair stimulus to include.
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maps onto their respective native phonology, then a significant difference is to be expected across all languages, but that difference may be smaller in more transparent systems.
These hypotheses were tested in a series of three experiments carried out on child readers of each language sorted into three groups based on reading age (not chronological age) according to a standardized reading test. A fourth group in each language consisted of college students.
Participants were asked to read each non-word aloud as quickly and as accurately as possible.
The first experiment, on English and French, only mostly supported the first hypothesis.
Although the French children performed better overall on the word naming task and there was significant facilitation for O+P+ items (as opposed to the O-P+ items) in both languages, that facilitation effect was greater for the English children. The second experiment essentially repeated the first, except that it compared O-P+ and O-P- items. Again, the prediction regarding this comparison was largely borne out. Both English and French children read the O-P+ words more quickly and accurately than the O-P- words, with the French subjects performing better overall. The speed advantage in response to O-P+ items versus O-P- items was, however, much smaller in English than in French. Notably, the French readers showed an advantage in speed for
O-P+ words that was absent for the English readers. A third and final experiment, again using largely similar procedures, compared the naming of nonsense O+P+ and O-P- words of English-,
French-, and Spanish-speaking readers. Again, the results were generally in favor of the third hypothesis. O+P+ words were read more easily than O-P- words across all languages, and the
Spanish children performed better overall than the French children, who in turn outperformed the
English children. Importantly, the effect of phonological familiarity were significant in French and English but not significant in Spanish, the shallowest of the three orthographies examined.
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Such results further implicate an effect of orthographic depth on the parsing strategies employed by juvenile readers.
As for adult readers, while the previously cited work by Frost et al. (1987) as well as
Ziegler et al. (2001) was based on data gathered from adult subjects, it remains worthwhile to highlight a few more studies performed at least primarily if not exclusively on adult participants.
As one such in-depth example, Treiman et al. (1995) examined English words of the form CVC
(e.g. heap), specifically the consistency in pronunciation of not only the individual phonemes but also of the onset/nucleus as a unit and the nucleus/coda as a unit. By examining the orthographic neighbors of each word relative to each unit (e.g. leap and cheap as VC2 neighbors; hand and head as C1 neighbors), both by type and by token, they found that, while the individual consistency of the final consonants and nuclear vowels was relatively low, the onsets (i.e. initial consonants, or C1) and rimes (i.e. nuclear vowels and final consonants, or VC2, considered together as combined subunits of their respective host words) of CVC words were two of the most consistently pronounced components. They then posed the question of whether fluent (i.e. adult) readers use the enhanced regularity of onsets and rimes in reading. Notably, regularity was treated as a continuous rather than binary variable, enabling more fine-grained analysis than many other similarly themed studies. They also looked for any interaction of regularity with frequency, since prior studies had suggested its existence, as well as for any effect of neighborhood size with respect to each unit (i.e. the number of words that share the unit in question with the target).
In a regression analysis, the only consistent effect on reaction times in a word naming task was wielded by the regularity of pronunciation of the C1 and that of the VC2. Reaction times increased as regularity decreased. There was also a significant interaction of C1 regularity
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and frequency, such that the effect of C1 regularity was higher for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words. The only neighborhood size variable to wield a significant effect was that of nuclear vowel alone. Words with common vowel phonemes elicited slower responses than words with rare vowel phonemes. Although this analysis was carried out with neighborhood consistency and size measured by type, another analysis based on measurements by token produced very similar results. Only two additional significant effects emerged: homophony and
C2 neighborhood size. Subjects responded more slowly to homophones than to non-homophones and more slowly to words with common codas than to words with rare codas. When the researchers turned to error rates, the findings were similar to those for reaction times. In addition to significant main effects of C1 and VC2 consistency, the V by itself wielded significant impact.
Words containing inconsistently pronounced nuclear vowels invoked more errors than those containing consistently pronounced nuclear vowels. The effect of C2 consistency was only significant for infrequent words, and while inconsistent VC2 units induced high error rates regardless of frequency, the effect was significantly more pronounced for infrequent words.
Testing the same analysis on a second, independent data set replicated the consistency effects already reported but not any reliable main effects of neighborhood size. However, V and VC2 neighborhood size did interact with frequency. Infrequent words with dense V neighborhoods tended to invoke slower responses, while infrequent words with dense VC2 neighborhoods tended to invoke faster responses. With respect to error rates, only C1 consistency, VC2 consistency, word familiarity, and initial phoneme showed any significant effects.
Treiman et al. (1995) next replaced the various neighborhood size measures with a single variable, N, which measured the number of words sharing all but one letter with the target. They then analyzed the same two data sets as previously examined. Regarding one data set, the
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interaction of N and frequency was significant in five out of six analyses. Subjects responded to infrequent words with populous neighborhoods more quickly than to infrequent words with more scanty neighborhoods, whereas frequent words showed the opposite trend. Similar results were observed when examining error rates, but only in one out of six analyses. Regarding the other data set, only one analysis found a significant main effect of N, such that words with many neighbors elicited faster responses than words with few neighbors. These results are consistent with those of at least two other similar studies. No other effects were found in any other analysis. The findings of Treiman et al. (1995) generally support the hypothesis that fluent readers have noticed regularities at the onset/rime level and utilize them in the reading process.
Words with more consistent onsets and/or rimes tended to elicit better performance than those with less consistent onsets and/or rimes. Moreover, word frequency modulates the effects of orthographic consistency, with the impact of irregularity being greater on infrequent words than on frequent words. The variance explained by the researcher's model ranged from approximately
7% to approximately 50%, and an examination of the residuals suggests that most of the non- error variance is successfully accounted for.
In a more focused follow-up study, the researchers manipulated and directly compared consistent versus inconsistent VC2 and C1V units. Based on the results of the prior study just described, they expected the consistency of the VC2 units to wield substantial influence and the consistency of the C1V units to wield little or no influence. Although an analysis of variance revealed no significant effects on naming latency, it did reveal a significant effect of VC2 consistency on accuracy. There were more errors in response to words with inconsistently pronounced rimes than in response to consistently pronounced rimes. While this first experiment used only type counts to categorize rime units as consistent or inconsistent, a second portion
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expanded on the first to include token counts as well. Here, the only significant effect on naming latency was that of C1V consistency, of which both the presence and direction were unexpected.
Consistently pronounced C1V units triggered slower responses than inconsistently pronounced
C1V units. With respect to accuracy, VC2 units once again emerged as the only significant effect, working in the familiar direction. Words with consistently pronounced rimes invoked fewer errors than words with inconsistently pronounced rimes. Since the surprising effect of
C1V consistency did not appear in any of their prior reported research, the investigators do not consider this finding to be very robust.
Somewhat echoing the suggestions of Ziegler et al. (2001), Treiman et al. (1995) thus provide three currently relevant findings by examining English monosyllabic CVC words. First, vowel graphemes are more varied in their pronunciations than consonant graphemes. Second, uncertainty regarding vowel pronunciation is diminished when the vowel is considered as part of a VC2 unit but not when it is considered as part of a C1V unit. Third (and most importantly for current purposes), adult readers notice and exploit this higher-order regularity, faring better at naming words with consistently pronounced rimes than words with inconsistently pronounced rimes. It seems that even adult readers of English are impacted by orthographic consistency at some phonological grain size or other, whether it be at the level of individual phonemes or onsets and rimes. More recently, Rau et al. (2015) also examined both children and adults and found further support for some persistent effect of orthographic consistency into adulthood, at least with respect to the reading of non-words. Similarly, Mason (1978) classified adult readers as highly skilled or less skilled and found that orthographic regularity, as measured by spatial redundancy (the comparative probabilities of letters occurring in particular positions within a word), distinguished the two groups in proficiency at naming non-words. Only the less skilled
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adult readers showed a significant effect of consistency. This suggests that, while any impact of orthographic irregularity is in principle superable with age and experience, not all adults in fact overcome it, and some may remain at a disadvantage when decoding non-words.
Literacy Acquisition by Children
Shallow orthographies are often touted for obviously being easier to learn, and there is in fact some evidence for this intuitive claim. Among the most ambitious work on this topic is that of Seymour et al. (2003). They classified several European languages according to two criteria: orthographic depth and syllable complexity. The former dimension ranges from systems with simpler and more consistent phoneme-grapheme correspondences to those that are more irregular and/or complex. The latter dimension refers to whether the language is dominated by open syllables, as tends to be the case in the Romance family, or characterized by numerous closed syllables and consonant clusters, as is typical of the Germanic languages. Literacy attainment was measured via tests of letter knowledge, familiar word reading, and simple non-word reading.
The findings showed that orthographies for languages with more complex syllable structures take longer to acquire than those for more phonotactically simple and restrictive languages, deeper orthographies take longer to acquire than shallow ones, and these two effects interact. That is, among languages at least roughly matched for syllable complexity, the deeper orthographies take longer to master, and among orthographies matched for depth, the ones representing more complex syllable types were more difficult. English, with both complex syllable types and an exceptionally deep orthography (at least relative to those studied), required approximately twice the time required by most or all other languages compared to attain foundational proficiency.
Not only do such results support a primary effect of orthographic depth, they also converge with the aforementioned research on the tendency of deeper orthographies to intensify the effects of other factors (e.g. length, neighborhood size, or in this case, syllable complexity). However, 34
some caution is likely warranted in the interpretation of such findings. Comparing different orthographies nearly always entails comparing different languages and, in turn, different nations or ethnic communities. This means that several potential confounds will almost certainly arise and demand some measure of control. They include socio-economic status, local educational practices, the pedagogical approaches of individual teachers, and even the phonological properties of the relevant languages. Seymour et al. (2003) actually highlighted that last variable and made a reasonable effort to account and control for the other extraneous variables. In addition, at least some of these concerns are also addressed in other relevant research. Spencer and Hanley (2003) compared English (a deep orthography) and Welsh (a shallow orthography).
Since Welsh is taught alongside English in British schools, the study could be carried out within the same country and thus hold national educational policy constant. All participating students were from the same local area, started schooling at the same age, and were instructed via phonics-based methodology. Furthermore, English and Welsh are more similar phonologically than some other pairings that have been used in related literature, such as English and Italian.
Young native speakers of each language were tested on phoneme segmentation, word reading, and non-word reading. Among the English words, a distinction between regular and irregular items was also maintained. In the first round of experimentation, the Welsh-speaking children outperformed their English-speaking counterparts on word reading, and although the effect was greater for irregular words, the significant advantage of Welsh words was observed even for regular words. While regularity had a greater impact on Welsh performance than on
English, the Welsh subjects fared better at non-word reading. The nature of errors also differed across the two languages, with the English readers tending to mistake the stimuli for other real words while Welsh readers were more likely to form nonce responses by substituting a mistaken
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phoneme in what would have otherwise been correct. Notably, this is a pattern that seems particularly recurrent in the pertinent literature (e.g. Ellis et al., 2004). Moreover, English participants were also more easily impeded when the number of graphemes in the stimulus differed from the number of corresponding phonemes. Finally, when the data was analyzed by quartile, the poorest of readers were revealed to benefit the most from the shallower orthography.
The same experiment was repeated the following year, and the second iteration produced much the same results. Both groups improved substantially in reading ability, with the English children showing the greatest improvement (which the authors presume to be a consequence of ceiling effects limiting the "scope for improvement in the Welsh children" (Spencer & Hanley,
2003, p.18). It is worth noting that, between the first and second iteration of this study, the
Welsh speakers begin receiving weekly English-language instruction, and one novel finding involved second-language reading skills. The native Welsh children now read English words better than the native English children read Welsh words. Still, growing bilingualism is unlikely to account for the observed differences between language groups. The Welsh-speaking subjects were still essentially monolingual when the study began, and as it progressed, their advantage in reading skill held steady and did not increase in parallel with their bilingualism (Spencer &
Hanley, 2003).
It is worthwhile to note here that, in a very similar study that included reading comprehension as a dependent variable, the English-speaking children scored higher on the reading comprehension test than their Welsh-speaking compatriots, in spite of the latter group's superior performance at naming individual words (Hanley et al., 2004). Furthermore, in the aforementioned study by Frost et al. (1987), semantic priming was shown to be greater in the deeper orthography. Such results suggest that deeper spelling systems may provide an advantage
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for more integrated comprehension at the textual level, beyond the identification of individual words, presumably by facilitating more immediate access to meaning and easier recognition of the semantic connections among words. A later study by Oakhill et al. (2003) further highlights the likelihood that successful decoding of individual words is just one of several important facets in the integrated comprehension of a cohesive text. Among other such factors are metacognitive self-monitoring and vocabulary, though not so much the sheer breadth of the latter as "the richness of a child's semantic representations," and a "rich and interconnected knowledge base"
(as opposed to a vocabulary that is merely rich in number) may be an important contributor to proficient reading skill (Oakhill et al., 2003, p. 463). If the ODH is true, this might be explained as a consequence of the greater reliance on the direct route of lexical access that deep orthographies foster, which would compel the student to develop those sophisticated semantic representations and connections. Examining the text-level comprehension of people who read a more morphographic script, such as Chinese characters, may be one way to test this hypothesis.
Thorstad (1991) managed to combine cross-linguistic and intra-lingual approaches to the question of orthographic depth effects on acquisition. His study compared two groups of
English-speaking children and one group of Italian-speaking children, since Italian spelling is much shallower than English. One group of Anglophone subjects was instructed in traditional orthography (TO), while the other was instructed in the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), a much shallower code for English from which they would later transition to TO. The English TO and
Italian participants were comparable in age, ability, and socio-economic status, and the average age of the English ITA participants overlapped with the lower end of the range found among the
English TO and Italian learners. The pedagogical approach for both languages was phonics- based, though the Italian curriculum focused more on writing while the English counterpart
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focused more on reading. A test of non-verbal intelligence and reading ability was administered to each group. The English and Italian children were matched on visuo-motor skills, and while the English children fared better on the non-verbal intelligence test, they were in the average range for their nationality. The Italian students performed better than the English TO students at writing in all three grades and at reading in both of the lower two grades. Furthermore, the extent to which students could spell the same words they could read was greatest for Italian, less for English ITA, and least for English TO. At the same time, the Italian subjects read more slowly than their English TO counterparts, though that difference in speed decreased significantly in the higher grades. Based on the nature of their errors, the Italians also seemed to rely more on phonological recoding than the Anglophones, who seemed to depend more on syntactic cues and/or semi-holistic impressions, as when thermometer was interpreted as "their mother." Notably, the speed and apparent decoding route of the English ITA children were more similar to those of the Italian students than to those of the English TO children. As a follow-up experiment to sharpen the test of comparative literacy skills even further, the same participants were tested on their ability to read and write eight low-frequency cognates of Greco-Latinate origin with similar spellings across the two languages. Most of the Italian subjects could both read and spell them, but among the English TO students, few could read them and even fewer could spell them. Furthermore, this divergence in spelling proficiency only increased as the children grew older, which suggests that English TO spelling skill does not reliably keep pace with English TO reading skill. Once again, the English ITA children fared most similarly to the
Italians at reading these infrequent cognates, though the same could not be said with regards to spelling those same words. With respect to rate and ease of literacy acquisition, these results lend further credence to at least some form of the ODH. Perhaps most importantly, the inclusion
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of both cross-linguistic (English versus Italian) and intra-lingual (English TO versus English
ITA) comparisons renders this study especially potent. The latter juxtaposition holds phonology constant and thus eliminates phonological differences between English and Italian as a sufficient alternative account for the differences observed in literacy skill. It is noteworthy that the English
ITA children matched their Italian counterparts less at writing than at reading. This may be explained as a consequence of the greater emphasis on reading in English schools and on writing in Italian schools (Thorstad, 1991).
Environmental and Contextual Factors
Thorstad's recognition that both inter- and intra-lingual methods are important for this research topic was rather astute. As previously mentioned, the necessity of comparing different writing systems almost inevitably leads to selecting groups of people with different languages, which in turn almost always means that the comparison will also be between people from different cultures, nations, and/or communities. This introduces a host of potential confounds that will need to be accounted or controlled for. On the other hand, comparing two or more subgroups within the same language, which would make it much easier to eliminate such extraneous variables from the outset, is practically guaranteed to hold constant the very factor that needs to vary in order to address the question(s) at hand (i.e. orthography). The ideal testing ground for research on orthographic depth effects is a single language with two or more orthographies associated with it, but such scenarios are extremely rare across the world. In addition, these orthographies must differ significantly along the specific dimension that is under investigation, which only narrows the range of candidates even further. This is why intra-lingual approaches to studying orthographic depth effects, difficult though they may be, are likely worth more attention if we are to reach any definitive conclusions. Indeed, the advantages of cross- linguistic and intra-lingual methodologies may well be complementary, each compensating for 39
the weaknesses of the other. Thorstad's combination of both techniques within a single study renders his work especially potent, and he provides a potentially useful template for future research on this topic.
There are a few other major relevant factors that may, depending on the specifics of experimental design, prove rather important and pose a challenge with respect to minimizing or eliminating them as potential confounds. These include word frequency (Thorstad, 1991), age at start of acquisition (e.g. Spencer & Hanley, 2003), and pedagogical approach (e.g. Landerl,
2000). Significant frequency effects are observed quite often in the literature (e.g. Perfetti &
Hogaboam, 1975) and are rendered particularly important for dual-route models of reading that assume that direct orthographic access and phonological recoding compete with each other word by word, usually in a kind of race to the target lexical item. Such models essentially posit that direct orthographic access is more efficient for higher frequency items, while phonological recoding is more efficient for lower frequency items (Katz & Frost, 1992). This claim takes on a certain developmental dimension in the work of Share (1995). In arguing that phonological awareness is the "sine qua non of reading acquisition," he proposes frequency (specifically, frequency of exposure) as the primary means by which the optimal route for retrieval of any given word shifts over time as a reader becomes more experienced. According to Share, phonological recoding is a self-teaching mechanism that enables the novice reader to acquire word-specific orthographic information. A child begins by using simple phoneme-grapheme correspondences, but with each successful decoding of a novel word, the exposure presents an opportunity to acquire contextual, positional, and morphemic constraints or regularities above and beyond segmental correspondences. In this way, the child's orthographic representations become progressively more nuanced and lexicalized. Citing the idea that children initially rely on
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phonological recoding before gradually shifting to more direct lexical access (Barron, 1986;
Jorm & Share, 1983), Share argues that the conflicting empirical findings can be explained as an interaction of item frequency and phonology. Since each encounter and decipherment of a word is a learning opportunity, the orthographic representations of more frequent words will more quickly become less dependent on segmental recoding and more reliant on higher-order patterns.
Purely logographic reading, Share argues, is unlikely to become as predominant of a strategy as many may think, because it is utterly useless in deciphering an unknown monomorphemic word
(though the same cannot be said of compounds). In fact, after surveying the evidence in favor of the self-teaching hypothesis and the effectiveness of phonemic awareness training in reading instruction, he turns to non-alphabetic systems such as Chinese characters and Japanese kanji and posits that self-teaching, presumably via phonological recoding is "central" even in the acquisition of such non-segmental systems (Share, 1995), perhaps precisely because no morphography (or "logography") is absolutely pure, and thus, they all incorporate some phonological elements. It is generally agreed, for instance, that the Chinese script is actually dominated by "semantic-phonetic compounds" (Rogers, 2005, p. 34).
Age at the start of literacy acquisition is also featured in some of the literature hitherto examined. Spencer and Hanley (2003) observed that, although the Welsh readers in their study performed better than their English counterparts, they made more non-phonological errors on real words than the Austrian children whose performance was analyzed in a similar study by
Wimmer and Hummer (1990). The main suggested explanation for this is that the Austrian subjects were 18 months older than the Welsh subjects at the start of their schooling. On its part, pedagogical approach has also been shown to wield observable impact. It was made a central variable alongside orthographic depth by Landerl (2000), who measured both the speed and
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accuracy of child readers in another longitudinal experiment. Very shallow orthographies like
German are predominantly taught using phonics-based instruction, but teaching methodologies for English, a notoriously deep orthography, range more widely from focusing on phonics to focusing on "whole-word" reading (i.e. direct orthographic access). Landerl compared a single group of German students to two groups of English students, one learning mainly via phonics while the other learned via a "standard" approach which blended phonic and whole-word techniques into a hybrid methodology. The first task had subjects reading number words, numerals, and non-words formed by substituting one phoneme for another in each number word
(e.g. twive in English). With respect to the non-words, the English phonics students were evaluated using two different rubrics. The stricter criteria required a real-word analog (i.e. a word with the same orthographic rime that also shares the same phonological rime) to the pronunciation given in order to be considered correct (e.g. nour was counted only as correct if it rhymed with, for instance, our, tour, or four). The more lenient criteria, on the other hand, accepted any plausible result of phonological recoding regardless of relative grapheme position or attestation among real words (e.g. pronouncing sen as /si:n/ was counted as correct only under this criteria). This dual scoring was included to control for a potential disadvantage the English phonics students might well have had relative to the German students, who were only assessed according to the latter rubric, since the greater consistency of German orthography left no room for any meaningful distinction between it and the former rubric. Among the English speakers, errors were more frequent from those subject to the hybrid pedagogy than from those subject to the more purely phonics-based pedagogy, though the difference decreased as the children grew older. Under the strict criteria, non-word reading by the English phonics pupils was significantly less accurate than that of the German students, but under the more lenient criteria, it was roughly
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equal in accuracy. In terms of reading speed, there was initially no difference between the two groups of English, but they quickly diverged in subsequent grade levels, with the phonics students performing roughly as well as the Germans while the "standard" students fell behind.
The Anglophone children actually showed an advantage on the numeral and number word reading tasks, so general naming speed is unlikely to account for the data regarding non-word reading. As a caveat, Landerl reports that the German subjects were somewhat older than the
English speakers, though the latter had also started their schooling somewhat earlier and had thus received more formal instruction by the time this study began.
Nevertheless, a second iteration of this experiment attempted to further control for that confound by matching the subjects for reading age. The English standard students once again performed more poorly than the English phonics students. The German students fared even better than the English phonics students in the lower grades, while this trend reversed itself in the upper grades, though the difference became unreliable. Among younger English-speaking first- graders, the difference between the standard and phonics pupils lay more in the nature of their failures than in the sheer number thereof, with the students of the standard pedagogy being significantly less likely than those under phonics-based instruction to even attempt pronunciation of a target word. This difference disappeared by the fourth grade. Meanwhile, faulty grapheme- to-phoneme recodings easily predominated among German errors. In contrast to earlier findings,
English standard readers emerged as the fastest readers, followed by German readers, with the
English phonic readers being the slowest. However, the difference in speed among all three groups attenuated quickly, fading into statistical insignificance after the first grade. An examination of general naming speed again served to eliminate it as a plausible confounding variable. Landerl's survey of related literature reveals that reading skill in English tends to vary
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quite widely, and it is therefore possible that the subjects used in the second phase of this study accidentally included a higher proportion of better readers. The initial hypothesis that the instructional methods would be most influential in the lower grades could not be confirmed, but the impact of orthographic consistency did appear to be at its peak among younger readers and grow progressively weaker with age. Some caution in the interpretation of these results is still recommended, since matching the groups for reading age necessarily entailed allowing chronological age to very significantly. Despite this, these findings provide at least some support for two main conclusions. First, phonics-based instruction is generally more effective than whole-word or hybrid methods, at least in early stages. Second, while a reliable main effect of pedagogical approach did not conclusively emerge, some interaction thereof with orthographic depth seems probable. Landerl proposes that explicit phonics-based teaching is more important in a deeper orthography, whereas in a shallower one, the mappings of symbol to sound and vice- versa are readily clear enough that acquisition and mastery need not rely as much on overt instruction (Landerl, 2000).
Summary: Phonological Transparency
To summarize, the complexity and regularity of phoneme-grapheme correspondences vary substantially and seem to have some measurable impact on five aspects of reading: the mode of lexical retrieval (i.e. phonological recoding versus direct orthographic access) or the grain size(s) of phonological recoding (i.e. onsets and rimes versus individual segments), the effect of neighborhood size and word length on word recognition, the rate of learning, and the nature of errors. Some research also suggests that orthographic depth can have some effect on the comprehension of texts beyond the level of the individual word. Furthermore, some interaction with word frequency, teaching methodology, and age at the start of literacy acquisition has also been shown or at least suggested. Those latter two factors as well as other 44
cultural and/or socio-economic factors make it especially important to either control for potential confounds in cross-linguistic studies and/or carry out intra-lingual studies to complement them.
In any case, the bulk of relevant literature, as just surveyed, supports the intuitive notion that a shallow orthography offers some advantages to novice readers.
Introduction: Morphological Transparency
Having thus explored the role and impact of phonological transparency, we turn now to deep orthographies. In the same way that a shallow orthography is essentially one that excels in phonological transparency, a deep orthography is one that excels in morphological transparency.
What noteworthy effects and/or benefits of its own does morphological transparency have with respect to reading proficiency? In answering this question, we should perhaps begin with what it means for a reader to be morphologically aware, or sensitive to morphological transparency, as it is almost certainly a key determining factor. Morphological priming studies will then prove very useful in probing the role of such awareness in the reading process, since facilitation between related words implicates the kind of sensitivity being examined. Mirroring the survey in the immediately preceding sections, an examination of the role of morphological awareness in literacy acquisition will also be included. Finally, at least some of the same issues will be explored regarding morphographic scripts, in which one might expect morphological awareness to be especially crucial.
Morphological Awareness
Morphological awareness is the ability to analyze the morphological structure within a word and mentally disassemble a morphologically complex word into its constituent morphemes.
Carlisle (2000, p. 170) describes it thus: "Morphological awareness, as it contributes to reading, must have as its basis the ability to parse words and analyze constituent morphemes for the purpose of constructing meaning." One of the most important roles for such a skill is the
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comprehension of novel words formed from the recombination of familiar morphemes. For instance, any competent English speaker will readily understand the word unamusingly as an adverb meaning "in a way that fails to amuse," despite it being almost certainly an invented word and thus unlikely to have previously existed in his/her mental lexicon. This compositional induction of meaning from such coinages relies on morphological awareness, which allows the reader or hearer to identify the component morphemes, place them in a hierarchy, and thence assemble an interpretation of the word's meaning based on the meanings of its constituents and how they relate to each other. The negating prefix /ʌn/, the root verb /əˈmjuːz/, the participial suffix /ɪŋ/, and the adverbial suffix /liː/ can all be parsed, identified, and placed in a hierarchical structure (i.e. [un+[[amuse+ing]+ly]]). Moreover, the same linear string of morphemes can sometimes be analyzed into two different structures, with each option invoking a distinct meaning. A classic example is unlockable, since that word can plausibly be parsed as
[un[lock+able]], which means "unable to be locked," or [[un+lock]+able], which means "able to be unlocked." When faced with such structural ambiguity, uncertainty on the hearer or reader's part (at least in the absence of sufficient context) is a sign of aptitude rather than deficit.
In some languages, it may be difficult to locate the boundary between the kind of morphological awareness relevant to practical language use and what might be more properly called etymological awareness, mostly because the line between strictly synchronic and largely diachronic relationships is similarly blurry, and this distinction is not as routinely addressed in the literature as it perhaps should be. As an example, is the word adhere monomorphemic or bimorphemic? From the perspective of the average English speaker, it is almost surely the former, but a sufficiently erudite Anglophone might be tempted to decompose it into the Latinate prefix ad- (meaning "to") and the equally Latinate bound verbal root -her- (meaning "stick or
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cling"). Both elements occur in other words with at least roughly the same meaning (cf. cohere, admission), so each one arguably fits at least the traditional definition of a morpheme, some morphophonological alternation notwithstanding. On the other hand, there are other bound roots of Greco-Roman origin that defy coherent definition based on the words that contain them, and their productivity is limited at best. For example, the original meaning of -mit- (i.e. "send") is somewhat discernible in submit and transmit, but how does that meaning relate to items like permit and commit, and why does a coinage like supermit not sound nearly as natural as unamusingly? Such cases are usually analyzed as polymorphemic words with bound roots and non-compositional meaning rather than monomorphemic words with partial homophony, but if the semantic connection is buried deeply enough in history, they may not be processed as such by the typical speaker, which has important implications for probing and/or measuring morphological awareness.
In any case, while unamusingly does not exist as its own preformed entry in the typical speaker's mental dictionary, the simpler word amusing likely does exist in that capacity for most competent English speakers. In parsing an item like unamusingly, then, does the process end at amusing, which should theoretically be sufficient to determine meaning, or does it continue until the root verb amuse is identified? In other words, must the mental analysis proceed until each and every element is irreducible, or can it end as soon as each and every element matches a pre- existing lexical item, even if that item may itself be further reducible? This is the principal question that distinguishes "full listing" and "(full) decomposition" models. In the former, any sufficiently common polymorphemic word is listed as a pre-assembled unit with its own node in the lexicon, and once such a unit is reached, any potential reduction into further subunits is unnecessary. In the latter, only an irreducible constituent can constitute its own lexical item, and
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morphological parsing must therefore always persist until all parsed components are irreducible.
Put another way, in the decomposition model, "the unit of lexical representation – and therefore the unit for lexical access – is not the full word form, but rather the stem of a morphologically complex word," while in the full listing model, "for each word – be it mono- or polymorphemic
– there is one corresponding word form in the mental lexicon" (Schriefers et al., 1991, pp. 26 -
27). Full decomposition is almost certainly the most accurate model for inflectional morphology, but the answer regarding derivational morphology is much less clear. This is one clear example of why synchronic salience (i.e. the distinction between morphological and etymological awareness) matters. If an experiment uses too many words that are only polymorphemic from a theoretical standpoint (e.g. permit) and not from a practical standpoint, then it could bias the results in favor of full listing. In fact, some of the best evidence for some degree of morphological parsing and against full listing come from priming studies in which synchronic semantic relatedness is a key variable in the investigation. Paterson et al. (2011) observed that unmasked priming studies (in which primes are displayed long enough to enter conscious awareness with no visual mask) tended to find interaction between semantic and morphological relatedness while masked priming studies (in which primes were preceded by a visual mask and displayed too briefly to enter conscious awareness) did not. Using eye-tracking methodology and stimuli presented in framing sentences rather than in isolation, the researchers saw results which supported the trend found among unmasked priming studies, suggesting that indeed, morphological relatedness facilitates fluent reading, and that effect is enhanced when accompanied by semantic relatedness. Therefore, establishing the role played by morphological priming as seen in literate adults is an important step in examining the effects of morphological awareness on both the acquisition of literacy and the efficiency with which it is exercised.
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Priming Studies on Adults
A 1995 study on English and Hebrew by Feldman, Frost, and Pnini provides some support for the impact of morphology on reading achievement. For English speakers, each trial consisted of a source word with a portion at the end highlighted. The task was to append the highlighted string to the subsequent target word and pronounce the result. Among the source stimuli, identical highlighted strings varied in morphemic status. For instance, the sequence
(hence brighten was the expected response). The researchers hypothesized that response times would be shorter when the shifted portion formed a suffix than when it did not, and indeed, the recombined words were pronounced significantly faster when the appended string served as a suffix in the source item. Further testing showed no correlation between this effect and surface form frequency. The authors subsequently added control measures for pseudo-stems (incidental matches to shorter words) within the monomorphemic primes and shared grammatical category between prime and target. Neither of these additional controls altered the results with respect to the effect in question. The same experiment was then adapted as closely as possible to Hebrew, a language with largely non-concatenative morphology. Most of what would otherwise be affixes in Hebrew instead take the form of vowel sequences which are interspersed into roots, which consist of two- or three-consonant sequences. Instead of asking participants to transfer contiguous strings from prime to target, the experimenters had the subjects transfer each vowel pattern from prime to target. The semantic transparency of the prime (thus the degree to which the consonant sequence stood out as a clear and distinct root morpheme) varied from trial to trial.
All source words were provided with standard auxiliary vowel markings to maximize phonological transparency, and all targets were tri-consonantal pseudo-roots. The results showed that the transfer of vowel patterns was faster for transparent source words (i.e. those with 49
distinct and easily recognizable roots) than with more opaque words. Since the Hebrew script is an abjad which generally represents vowels merely as diacritic "points" among consonant-only letters (if at all), this also enabled a comparison between the effects of those patterns that only consist of such points to those of patterns that disrupt the orthographic integrity of the root by adding or altering full-fledged letters. This was the topic of the fourth experiment in this study, in which two types of word patterns were used. Patterns of the first type combined vowel diacritics with freestanding vowel letters that were infixed amidst the consonantal roots. The second type comprised those patterns consisting of consonants and pointed vowels that were appended concatenatively to the roots. The segment shifting task was more difficult overall than it was in the third experiment, but the findings regarding shared variables were replicated in the fourth. No statistically significant difference was found between the effect of root transparency on one type of word pattern and its effect on the other type, suggesting that orthographic root integrity is not an important factor. In fact, an examination of the second pattern type particularly suggests that each morphological pattern is treated as a coherent unit despite its dispersal throughout its host word. This study supplements similar findings by Feldman (1991) on Serbo-Croatian, a language whose orthography is shallower than that of both English and
Hebrew (Feldman et al., 1995).
Morphological relatedness between words often necessarily entails orthographic overlap as well, so it can be quite difficult to isolate the former from the latter. Nonetheless, some scholars have succeeded in providing reasonable control for mere orthographic similarity. A common tactic is exemplified by Grainger et al. (1991) in a masked priming study of French speakers performing a lexical decision task. They used control primes that were unrelated to their targets but shared incidental orthographic overlap comparable to that of related primes. All
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targets were polymorphemic, and the morphologically related primes varied between affixed words that shared the same stem as the affixed target and the respective stems by themselves.
Each prime was consistently more frequent than its corresponding target. Two key results emerged from this experiment. First, among the trials featuring a genuine morphological relationship, responses were faster to prefixed targets than to suffixed targets. Second, affixed primes and bare-stem primes were roughly equal in their facilitatory effect. A subsequent iteration of this experiment included morphologically unrelated but orthographically overlapping primes in which the overlap was crucially aligned with the edge at which the corresponding target was affixed. Lexical decision proved to be faster when prime and target were morphologically connected than when they shared neither morphology nor orthography, and surprisingly, responses were slowest when they were subject to incidental orthographic overlap.
Higher-frequency targets also accelerated lexical decision, and with the added control for superficial orthographic similarity, the difference in priming between prefixed and suffixed targets disappeared. The suggestion here is that, in the first round of experimentation, mere orthographic overlap had an inhibitory effect that was at least partially canceling out the facilitation of suffixed targets (Grainger et al., 1991). This is not the only study to implicate orthographic overlap between unrelated words as an inhibitor. At least one explanation posits that, while reading the prime, the brain suppresses orthographic neighbors as a way of narrowing down the possible readings and preventing confusion, and this tactic subsequently delays recognition of the target. In the words of Drews and Zwitserlood (1995, p. 1112), "The inhibition can be located at the level of lexical form, where orthographically similar word nodes compete with each other. During prime processing the letter nodes activate a set of orthographically similar word nodes. As soon as the prime has reached a sufficient level of
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activation, it will start to inhibit competing word nodes." The same researchers observe that such an explanation is supported by the fact that, when targets were matched with orthographically overlapping non-words rather than real words, there was actually mild facilitation of those targets rather than inhibition. In addition, Allen and Badecker (1999) found that underlyingly homographic roots inhibited each other even when their surface forms diverged, as when in
Spanish the prime cierra (an inflected form of the alternating verb cerr-, meaning "close") inhibited the target cerro (a non-alternating noun meaning "hill"). This simultaneously strengthens the case for both orthographic inhibition and provides some evidence that morphological priming is insensitive to surface-level stem allomorphy, the latter of which directly addresses the central question posed by this dissertation.
In addition to controlling for orthographic overlap effects, Marslen-Wilson et al. (1994) also controlled for semantic relatedness as well as priming direction (i.e. stem-to-derivative versus derivative-to-stem) in their extensive study of morphological priming. Their series of cross-modal experiments not only found evidence of morphological decomposition in lexical decision but also addressed the question of whether the semantic similarity that inevitably comes along with sufficiently compositional morphological relationships might account for what would otherwise be attributed to morphology. By using both semantically transparent and semantically opaque pairs of morphologically related words, they observed that priming only appeared in the former pair type, while the latter behaved like completely unrelated stimuli. They therefore concluded, "Semantic relatedness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for priming to occur" (Marslen-Wilson, 1994, p. 17).
Reading Comprehension in Children
Such research constitutes substantial evidence for at least some morphological parsing on the part of adult readers with respect to individual words, but what insight can be gleaned on how 52
younger readers decipher integrated sentences and paragraphs? Carlisle (2000) argues that an affinity for seeing the morphological structure of words becomes important at least as early as middle school, when over half of the words that students encounter are derived words with fairly compositional meaning built from familiar morphemes. She maintains that the research largely supports an important role for morphological processing and further notes that the transparency and productivity of the derivational morphology that children encounter can have an effect on the development of such processing. Carlisle examined the role of morphological awareness in the decoding of both individual words and cohesive texts. First, children were assessed on their ability to read derived words with transparency and frequency as the main independent variables.
Transparency is the presence or absence of affix-induced allomorphy (in sound and/or spelling) in the base morpheme. In a shifted item, the base would demonstrate some phonological and/or orthographic alternation (natural; /ˈnæ͡tʃə˞(ɹ)əl/ instead of /ˈneɪ͡tʃə˞(ɹ)əl/), whereas in a transparent item, the base would remain both phonologically and orthographically unaltered by affixation
(e.g. movement; /ˈmuːvmənt/, in which /muːv/ occurs unaltered). All stimuli used to test for transparency effects were high-frequency. Another class of stimuli consisted of derived words which were themselves infrequent (i.e. low surface frequency) but built upon more frequent bases (i.e. high base frequency). Second, the researcher(s) administered a cloze test that required the deconstruction and assembly of polymorphemic words in order to arrive at correct answers.
The words involved in this test were all of high frequency, and both tasks used equal numbers of shifted and transparent items. A third and final stage evaluated students' vocabulary, focusing on their ability to define derived words and their reading comprehension.
Carlisle found that the fifth-graders fared better than the third-graders on defining derived words, scores on derivative production tended to be higher than scores on derivative
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definition, and likewise with transparent items versus shifted ones. In both the third and fifth grades, morphological awareness accounted for significant variance in performance on the definition task, with performance on productive derivation being the only other significant contributor. Success at deriving shifted words also significantly predicted success at defining shifted words at both grade levels, and among third-graders, morphological decomposition skill correlated with the reading of frequent shift words and infrequent transparent words. Finally, morphological awareness accounted for significant variance in vocabulary for both third and fifth grades, with that contribution growing by 10% between grade levels, and findings with respect to reading comprehension were similar (Carlisle, 2000).
While agreeing that the importance of morphological awareness in reading proficiency swells between the third and sixth grades if not throughout middle school, Vaknin-Nusbaum et al. (2016) observe that the relevant literature also shows that some contribution thereof may emerge much earlier. Realizing that both orthographic depth and morphological complexity could modulate the impact of morphological awareness on reading ability, the researchers again turned to Hebrew, a language with a much richer morphological repertoire than English, in order to extend the work of Carlisle and others. As mentioned before, Hebrew morphology is dominated by non-concatenative root-and-pattern constructions, but it does use some concatenative morphemes as well. This language is also somewhat prone to combining long sequences of bound morphemes, and that tendency has been shown to slow word recognition and reading comprehension. Hebrew spelling also exhibits a high degree of morphological transparency. Most roots are comprised of two or three consonants, while most inflectional and derivational elements take the form of vowel patterns that are infixed among those consonants.
In turn, if vowels are represented explicitly at all, they are written diacritically as "points." This
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means that, despite a root's phonological contiguity rarely surviving word formation, its orthographic contiguity often remains undisrupted. In addition to any primary effect of morphological awareness, the researchers also probed for interactions with phonological decoding skill. They sorted participants into a group with low phonological decoding scores
(LPD) and another with high phonological decoding scores (HPD), hypothesizing based on prior research that the role of morphological awareness would be greater in the latter than in the former.
Morphological awareness was assessed using a second-grade test in which participants selected the correct plural or possessive (e.g. forms for each of 16 words, both irregular (e.g. beytza axad "one egg"; harbe beytzim/*beytzot "many eggs") and regular (e.g. kadur exad "one ball"; harbe kadurim/*kadurot "many balls"). Among the plural forms, roughly half underwent some phonological alternation between base and inflected form. Orthographic word recognition was also tested by presenting students with several items and asking them to select the ones that named animals. Finally, phonological decoding was evaluated by asking participants to identify pseudo-words that were homophonous with names of food items (essentially deliberate misspellings, analogous to frute in English), and reading comprehension was probed with a true- or-false test based on a passage that students were given to read. The morphological awareness and reading comprehension tests were given twice, once at the start of the school year and again at the end. Overall, the results yielded a significant correlation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. Furthermore, proficiency at inflectional morphology and word recognition at the start of second-grade were both notable predictors of reading comprehension at the end of second grade. Progress in phonological decoding was also evident for all students, with the LPD readers showing more improvement in that regard than the HPD
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readers. The same pattern of greater gains in the LPD group than in the HPD group also held true with respect to reading comprehension and orthographic word recognition. At the same time, while HPD readers showed roughly equal aptitude with both plural and possessive forms, the latter seemed significantly more difficult than the former for the LPD readers. For HPD readers, reading comprehension at the end of second grade was predicted by possessive morphology awareness at the beginning, while for LPD readers, only orthographic word recognition played that role. Meanwhile, for both HPD and LPD students, morphological awareness and reading comprehension at the onset of the school year predicted reading comprehension attainment at its end.
Hence morphological awareness and reading comprehension skill generally increased in parallel over time. One interesting observation from this study is that morphological awareness was a significant predictor of end-of-year reading ability only for HPD readers, while individual word recognition was the only such contributor for LPD readers. The researchers note that this latter finding conflicts with some other studies on the topic and suggest that age might account for at least some of that discrepancy, since the subjects in their experiment were younger than those generally used in similar yet contradictory literature. In any case, this experiment lends additional support to the general effect of morphological awareness on reading proficiency as well as its fairly early emergence, at least in languages with sufficiently rich morphological systems such as Hebrew. This is also another study which raises the possibility that the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension could be bidirectional. Moreover, it demonstrates modulation of morphological awareness effects by phonological decoding skill and type of morphological inflection (Vaknin-Nusbaum et al., 2016).
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What does the role of morphological awareness mean for classroom application?
According to Kieffer and Lesaux (2007), students with limited vocabularies are likely to arrive at only a vague understanding of a novel word if they come to understand it at all, even if a teacher reads the host text to them. Much of the relevant research attests to an abrupt decline in reading comprehension ability in late elementary school referred to as the "fourth grade slump."
Notably, this slump seems to align at least roughly with the swelling of morphological awareness effects on which the aforementioned studies converge. One especially potent contributor to this phenomenon is a limited academic vocabulary (i.e. vocabulary pertinent to or useful in the discussion of scholarly topics and themes). The overall importance of vocabulary is largely undisputed, but any concurrence on how best to expand students' mental lexica is much weaker.
Kieffer and Lesaux recommend a hybrid methodology that combines direct teaching of new words and their meanings with training in techniques for the independent decipherment of unfamiliar lexemes. As one might expect at this point, one such technique is morphological parsing. Young readers with a natural knack for lexical acquisition "attack unknown words, break them down into their meaningful parts, hypothesize meaning for the larger words, and then check their meanings against the context of the text as well as their own background knowledge." These authors agree with those cited herein that the proportion of derived vocabulary encountered by children increases significantly during the fourth-grade slump. They also cite other pertinent literature supporting the idea that the ability to analyze and deconstruct the structure of polymorphemic words in order to build meaning is a potent tool in decoding and ultimately acquiring novel words.
On their part, Kieffer and Lesaux carried out a study of their own in an urban environment with both natively Anglophone pupils and natively Hispanophone English learners
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as subjects. Their morphological awareness was assessed via a sentence completion task in which each answer was a root word that had to be extricated from a given polymorphemic derivative (e.g. The girl wanted to be very ______, given the prompt popularity). In addition, a combination of a standard cloze and multiple-choice test was used to evaluate reading comprehension. With individual word reading fluency held constant, they found a correlation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension that increased from the fourth grade to the fifth grade. This was observed among both L1- and L2-English speakers, and the data also suggested a bidirectional relation between morphological awareness and vocabulary.
As a result of their findings, the researchers recommend three main strategies for the improvement of L1 English-speaking students' vocabulary and reading proficiency. First, instruction in morphology should form an important and yet distinct part of any vocabulary- building curriculum. Second, morphological parsing should be clearly taught as a step-by-step independent learning technique rather than as a set of rules to be memorized. Third, instruction should include both contextual and more direct methods, with the focus of the latter on refining awareness of roots, affixes, and even morphophonological alternation (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2007).
Evidence from Non-Phonemic Scripts
The research so far summarized here has examined the role of morphological awareness in primarily phonemic scripts, but this discussion could surely benefit from investigating similar effects in moro-syllabic or morphographic scripts. The corpus of such investigation is younger, but what literature exists in that regard has yielded findings broadly similar to those of the more established body of work on alphabets and abjads. For instance, Inoue et al. (2017) propose the
"orthographic breadth hypothesis" (OBH), a parallel to the ODH based on the size of the grapheme inventory used in a writing system. While an orthography can be "consistent" or
"inconsistent" on the depth spectrum, the breadth spectrum ranges from "extensive" to 58
"contained." Analogously to the ODH, the OBH posits that orthographic breadth can influence the nature of the reading process and literacy acquisition. "As learning the symbol set in an extensive orthography is a demanding and protracted process," they write, "it is likely that the cognitive skills employed during this process are, at least partially, different from those needed to learn a contained orthography" (Inoue et al., 2017, p. 1336) With that in mind, Inoue and colleagues exploit the multi-script Japanese writing system to test their hypothesis. More specifically, they compare consistent and contained hiragana (a moro-syllabic code) with inconsistent and extensive kanji (a morphographic code imported from Chinese). The standard
Japanese writing system actually combines three distinct scripts of two different types.
Morphographic kanji inherited and adapted from Chinese are supplemented by both hiragana and katakana, two distinct moro-syllabaries collectively referred to as kana. Although any
Japanese text of a sentence or more inevitably uses at least two of the three systems (hiragana and kanji) simultaneously, acquisition by children is typically sequential. Instruction in hiragana starts as early as preschool, but even the most basic kanji are not usually introduced until the first grade. The overall suggestion of prior literature is that morphological awareness may be especially important in learning an inconsistent orthography with an extensive grapheme roster, a description which aptly characterizes kanji. Meanwhile, related research has implicated phonological awareness as playing a role in hiragana mastery comparable to the role it plays in the mastery of Western alphabets, but to Inoue's knowledge, no previous work had addressed the contribution of morphological awareness in any component of the Japanese spelling system.
Japan is a particularly good setting for studies of this sort. The tripartite nature of written
Japanese allows such research to compare different orthographies while holding the host language and nationality constant. In this case at least, not even the participants changed
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between scripts. Altogether, this provides an otherwise very elusive level of built-in experimental control.
Inoue and colleagues' main independent variables were the phonological, orthographic, and morphological skills of 200 Japanese schoolchildren. A phoneme elision task probed their phonemic awareness (e.g. /haNko/ "stamp" without the /N/ is /hako/ "box"). They were also asked to identify which of 20 hiragana words were spelled correctly in order to assess their orthographic knowledge. Meanwhile, morphological awareness was examined via an analogy exercise (e.g. /taberu/ "eat" is to /tabeta/ "ate" as /nomu/ "drink" is to /noNda/ "drank"). In each trial of this analogical task, pupils were asked to provide the missing member of a pair of words that were supposed to be related to each other in the same way as a preceding complete pair.
General cognitive ability, rapid automatic naming, and phonological memory were also measured as additional independent variables. The dependent variables were reading accuracy, reading fluency, and spelling. For the first two, the same evaluation procedure was used, but with a different stated focus. Students were tasked with reading a series of printed kanji and hiragana words, with instruction to aim for maximal accuracy in one round and for maximal speed in another. At the beginning of the school year (T1), the aforementioned independent variables as well as the additional factor of hiragana literacy were all measured for comparison with another measurement at the midpoint of the same year (T2), when kanji literacy could also be meaningfully evaluated and was therefore added as a final independent variable. As a result, phonemic awareness, orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness all appeared to be significant predictors of hiragana reading accuracy, while morphological awareness and hiragana orthographic knowledge notably predicted kanji reading accuracy. Here, the researchers note that this finding converges with similar findings from studies on Chinese.
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Meanwhile, hiragana orthographic knowledge wielded at least an indirect influence on fluency in that script, while morphological awareness had a roughly corresponding impact on kanji fluency. Inoue and colleagues summarize the implications by positing that, "Japanese children learning two very different orthographic systems develop partially separate cognitive bases for literacy acquisition rather than rely on one." With respect to which factors contribute most to acquisition, hiragana resembles consistent alphabetic codes typically found among Western orthographies, whereas in the same regard, kanji behaves more like the extensive and inconsistent systems exemplified in recent work on Chinese (Inoue et al., 2017).
Regarding Chinese, Hu (2013) contributes to the nascent body of literature on the role of morphological awareness in reading principally morphographic orthographies by rather uniquely setting her research in Taiwan rather than the much more common Hong Kong or mainland
China. This location renders two main pedagogical differences potentially insightful. First,
Taiwan has retained traditional characters in lieu of the simplified ones adopted on the mainland.
Second, the acquisition process begins with training in Zhuyin-Fuhao, an auxiliary phonography whose letters encode morphograms at the level of onsets and rimes. This practice differs from the protocol used in the other major Sinophone countries. Mainland China's phonographic training wheels are based on the Roman alphabet and thus operate at the phonemic level.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong has no such sound-based transliteration system at all, instead focusing on rote memorization of morphograms from the very start of a child's education. Related literature has demonstrated that the auxiliary phonography's grain size (i.e. onsets and rimes in
Zhuyin-Fuhao versus individual phonemes in Pinyin) wields some influence on students' phonological sensitivity and may in turn also impact the relative roles of morphological and phonological awareness in reading proficiency.
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Hu hypothesized that the importance of phonological awareness should decrease with time while that of morphological awareness should remain comparatively stable. Even though the sound cues provided by phonetic radicals are not very reliable, Chinese teachers (presumably across the Sinophone world, though Hu is not explicit) still report that novice readers often rely on them when trying to decode a novel character, suggesting a certain universality to the phonological recoding strategy in early reading acquisition, and there is some evidence that its utility never completely fades away. Hu notes that the centrality of morphological awareness in reading Chinese is both intuitively and empirically supported, given that morphemes are the primary units of graphemic encoding and that most or all prior studies have observed such effects. Most Chinese words are compounds formed by two or three morphemes, which is probably why compound construction has been shown to be a good indicator of morphological awareness and was therefore the method of choice in this study. Hence the capacity to recombine known morphemes into new compounds is an essential facet of Chinese morphological awareness. Much as in English, juvenile Chinese readers tend to experience a peak in the importance of morphological awareness during the latter part of elementary school
(Hu, 2013).
About 100 Taiwanese children were examined from the third to the fifth grade. Oral vocabulary was probed via a task in which pupils matched drawings to written words that named or described what the drawings depicted. Phonemic awareness was measured via an odd-one-out
(e.g. identifying gou as the outlier among bi and ban) and sound deletion (e.g. "What would mi- feng sound like without the /m/"?) task, and morphological awareness was tested by asking the subjects to coin novel polymorphemic words based on scenarios provided by the examiner. The test called for instances of compounding, derivation, and reduplication, though compounding
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predominated. Reading ability was evaluated by having the participants read aloud 200 Chinese characters in descending order of frequency. As additional experimental controls, rapid digit naming and proficiency in Taiwanese, an important local dialect to which the subjects were immersively exposed if not outright native, were also measured. When the data were analyzed, both types of linguistic awareness correlated significantly with reading skill at every grade level.
Subsequent linear regression modeling showed that, while phonological awareness was a notable predictor of reading proficiency in every grade, morphological awareness was only significant in that capacity for fifth-graders. In fact, the latter skill was the only such predictor remaining in the fifth grade after the extrication of autoregressive effects.
Therefore, the results at least partially support the initial hypothesis. Specifically regarding morphological awareness, its lack of any significant effect until the fifth grade diverges from the findings from many but not all related experiments, in which such effects seemed to emerge earlier. One possible account for this discrepancy lies in the aforementioned pedagogical differences between Sinophone countries. Most of the studies that revealed earlier morphological awareness effects were carried out in Hong Kong, where students learn morphograms directly and holistically from the very onset of literacy training rather than first using an auxiliary phonography. Regardless of when exactly it emerges, however, the role of morphological awareness in Chinese literacy seems quite robust once it is established. In fact, it will likely even increase as students advance in their schooling and thus encounter a growing proportion of morphologically complex words (Hu, 2013).
While Hu enriched the corpus of relevant literature by setting the investigation in Taiwan rather than on the Asian mainland, it was further supplemented with the work of Yeung et al.
(2013). Though set in Hong Kong and thus much less unique in its location, it was an attempt to
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ameliorate what was at the time a severe shortage of longitudinal research on this topic. The subjects' oral vocabulary was evaluated with a picture naming task. Phonemic awareness, or more specifically, rhyme awareness was assessed via a rhyme detection tasks. Children were given three pictures and three corresponding spoken syllables. The tones of all three where the same, the onsets were all different, and two of the three shared the same rhyme. Each child was asked to circle the pictures corresponding to the targets. This was accompanied by a twofold assessment of orthographic skills. Participants were first shown a pseudo-character formed by recombining real radicals in novel ways and asked to select the one picture out of four that was associated in meaning with the component semantic radical. In another task, they were also asked to identify real characters that were most likely related in meaning to similarly constructed pseudo-characters. The assessment of morphological awareness was also twofold. Each trial presented three words with a shared initial syllable to the children. Two of them also had some element of meaning in common, and the task was to identify which of the three those were. A second task was much like the one used by Hu, in that subjects were challenged to derive novel polymorphemic words to refer to scenarios described by the examiner. As for the dependent variables, having participants read 150 Chinese words aloud in order of difficulty served to evaluate reading ability, while spelling ability was assessed via a dictation task. As additional independent variables, rapid digit naming and phonological memory were also probed. There were three rounds of experimentation and data collection: one during first grade (Time 1), another at the end of second grade (Time 2), and a final assessment at the start of fourth grade
(Time 3).
At all three times, morphological awareness and orthographic skills both appeared to make significant contributions to word reading ability, while phonological awareness only did so
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at Time 2, and even then, its effect, though significant, was relatively small. Morphological awareness was also a significant predictor of spelling attainment at Time 1, but it was overtaken in that regard by orthographic skills and phonological awareness at Times 2 and 3. Further analysis suggests that the influence of orthographic skills is largely direct at Time 1 but becomes mostly indirect afterwards as that early impact cascades through time, whereas the influence of morphological awareness remained significantly direct even at Time 3. As for spelling, while morphological awareness again proved a significant factor at Time 1, only the pseudo-character judgment task had any non-autoregressive effects at Time 2 or 3. In brief, then, these results confirmed a long-term role for morphological awareness in reading ability for young Chinese readers in Hong Kong, with the early onset of such effects conflicting with at least a few other studies, such as the one by Hu just discussed. Hence, the general conclusion from this study is that, in contrast to orthographic and phonological skills, whose effects are at least somewhat time-sensitive, morphological awareness remains a steadfast predictor of reading proficiency in
Hong Kong children. Yeung and colleagues posit that a possible explanation for this lies in the fact that Chinese word-building relies quite frequently on compounding. This propensity for compounds would likely render a sharp understanding of base morphemes and morphological structure especially useful in deciphering novel words (Yeung et al., 2013).
Moreover, priming studies have provided insight into Chinese similar to that which they have provided into languages such as English and Hebrew, supporting the conclusion that effects of morphological processing emerge quite early. At least some Chinese linguists classify
Chinese compounds into five main classes: coordinative, subordinative, subject-predicate, verb- object, and adjective/verb. A primed lexical decision study of third-graders by Liu and McBride-
Chang (2014) used four types of prime/target pairs: related meaning with the same structure
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(RMSS), related meaning with different structures (RMDS), different meaning with the same structure (DMSS), and different meaning with different structures (DMDS). This enabled them to detect some morphological awareness effect, though the influence of semantic relatedness was noticeably stronger. A second phase highlighted phonological and morphological awareness as independent variables and character reading as a dependent variable. This subsequent experiment revealed a distinction between implicit morphological parsing and explicit morphological awareness, as the latter was shown to be a greater predictor of word reading than the former. The researchers summarize their conclusions as supporting third-graders' sensitivity to compound structure and the predictive power of such sensitivity in determining word reading attainment (Liu and McBride-Chang, 2014).
Summary: Morphological Transparency
From the preceding review, four general conclusions emerge. First, priming studies attest quite well to morphological facilitation in adult readers. Second, while some effect of morphological awareness can be observed at an early stage in literacy acquisition, such influence clearly swells around the fourth grade (or its appropriate equivalent outside of the US and similar countries), when the proportion of morphologically complex words encountered by children increases significantly. Third, with respect to morphological awareness, research on morphographies broadly corroborates the findings of research on phonographies, though the similarity may be modulated by pedagogical methods, particularly whether or not an auxiliary phonography is used in the earlier stages of training and the grain size of any such system.
Having explored current literature on phonological transparency, morphological transparency, and orthographic depth, we may be well advised to pause and consider the challenges presented by these topics, methods of mitigation, and the resulting limitations of such
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research. As shall soon be seen, investigations on orthography present at least one uniquely inherent challenge that may render methodological variety especially important.
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CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGICAL AND MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL BACKGROUND
The effects of orthographic depth and/or regularity on reading acquisition and/or proficiency can be difficult to investigate. Typical research on this topic involves lexical decision and/or word naming tasks administered to speakers of two or more different languages whose orthographies differ notably in depth (Goswami et al., 1998; Ziegler et al., 2001). There is also a general focus on phonemic (i.e. alphabetic or abjadic) scripts, though attention to moro- syllabic or morphographic scripts has grown in recent years (Hu, 2013; Yeung, et al., 2013). In any case, examinations of orthographic influences collectively face at least a few key methodological limitations and challenges, the most important of which is how language communities are selected for study.
Cross-Linguistic versus Intra-Lingual Approaches
Studies on orthographic depth and its effects on reading acquisition and/or proficiency usually fall into one of two broad categories: cross-linguistic (e.g. Seymour et al., 2003) and intra-lingual (e.g. Inoue et al., 2017). Each has arguable advantages and disadvantages. Since it is rare for the same language to have multiple different orthographies to compare, it is usually much easier to find suitable environments and populations for cross-linguistic studies, and the results can be generalized more confidently. However, such environments also demand much more meticulous control of peripheral variables that may confound those results. Intra-lingual studies, on the other hand, prevent many such potential confounds from the very outset, but this streamlining is achieved via circumstances that are much more difficult to find, and because only a single language is being examined, the generalizability of the results is less assured. The dilemma between cross-linguistic and single-language techniques amounts to a paradox of sorts, in that manipulating the very variable in question almost inevitably entails introducing at least a
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few unwanted variables which either require additional control or limit scientific rigor. One can seldom vary orthography without simultaneously varying language, which in turn means that nationality and its relevant corollaries (e.g. culture, educational practices in the community of origin etc.) are likewise hard if not impossible to hold constant.
Yet it would be hasty to conclude that comparative cross-linguistic studies on orthographic depth are useless. Researchers need to be particularly careful both in designing and reviewing such research. For instance, the study by Seymour et al. (2003) was rather ambitious in the range of languages examined and therefore especially susceptible to some of the potential confounds just discussed. In this case, the authors dutifully tracked and controlled for socioeconomic status, age, and nationality (particularly Scottish versus English), which strengthened the scientific rigor of their findings. Alternatively, a narrower scope of comparison can also mitigate these issues. Spencer and Hanley (2003) chose to examine only two languages and their respective orthographies (Welsh and English) within the same country (the United
Kingdom). Hence, the administrative and educational practices under which the two spelling systems were taught were much more comparable. Welsh is also more phonologically similar to
English than some of the other languages to which the latter had been previously compared.
Another notable example of control for phonological factors is an experiment on English and
German by Ziegler et al. (2001). To the extent that genetic relatedness influences mutual phonological affinity, this investigation may be even more illustrative than Spencer and
Hanley's, given that English and German are both Germanic languages, while Welsh is Celtic.
Examining two closely related languages whose phonologies remain reasonably comparable could well be the next best option relative to comparing two different orthographies for the exact same language. The affinity went as far as to allow the stimuli to include several words with
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shared orthographic forms across both languages, so that German and English subjects were often responding to identical strings of graphemes (e.g. English strand and German Strand, the latter meaning "beach").
Of course, to truly isolate orthographic influences and effectively eliminate other variables, the ideal experiment would entail testing two different orthographies for the exact same language within the exact same community. However, the overall scarcity of language communities with two or more distinct writing systems means that such an optimally controlled study, when attempted at all, often requires the usage of artificial spelling systems to which the sole standard code serves as the control. One such experiment occurred in the 1960s after the invention of the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), a very shallow orthography intended as a kind of English analog to Pinyin. Children taught to read first via the ITA were compared to children presented with traditional English orthography (TO) from the very start of their training. The
ITA students could read for leisure and write their own "imaginative" stories substantially sooner than the TO-only students, (Downing & Latham, 1967), though this advantage was lost when the former transferred to TO (Warburton & Southgate, 1969). Thorstad (1991) cited and built upon that experiment by combining intra-lingual and cross-linguistic approaches in his own study on
English and Italian pupils. This yielded similar results, with the Italians faring better than the
English ITA students, who in turn fared better than the English TO students.
Another frequently used technique involves the measurement of non-word reading ability, usually to control for semantic/lexical effects and/or to consistently induce the experience of encountering unknown words in subjects whose vocabularies inevitably vary. The latter motive is especially relevant when the focus of the research is on early reading acquisition, during which encounters with words that are unfamiliar (at least in written form) are much more
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routine. There, non-words enable insight into how readily novel written forms are decoded and learned (Landerl, 2000; Wimmer & Goswami 1994). Depending on the specifics of the experiment, however, there can be some caveats associated with non-word stimuli. For example, the relative proportion of non-words versus real words in a list of stimuli may influence subjects' choice of reading strategy (Frost et al., 1987). Since unfamiliar real words are functionally equivalent to non-words when child readers encounter them for the first time, this can have implications for how children parse increasingly sophisticated text and perhaps even acquire new vocabulary.
Word Recognition and Text Comprehension
The literature on orthographic depth and reading is also limited by a tendency among scholars to measure the principal outcome of interest (i.e. reading ability) only via recognition and comprehension of individual words in isolation. Understanding at the single-word level is certainly a necessary condition for the comprehension of larger texts (Perfetti and Hogaboam,
1975), but it is probably not a sufficient condition. Longitudinal work on English and Welsh by
Hanley et al. (2004), which crucially included measures of reading comprehension at both the lexical and textual level, reveals this distinction. Despite Welsh students performing better at reading isolated words, their English counterparts performed better on a standardized test of broader reading comprehension. The work of Cain et al. (2000) provides further support for the distinction between individual word recognition and broader text comprehension. Nevertheless, this is not to say that isolated word reading has never proven sufficient to give useful and interesting results. It is simply to say that some caution is likely warranted in the interpretation of research that uses no other outcome measure. At least when one of the orthographies involved was sufficiently deep or irregular, it can provide worthwhile insight (Landerl, 2000; Wimmer &
Goswami, 1994). 71
Still, those researchers who include assessments of broader textual reading comprehension, might confront another challenge, in that such evaluation is not as straightforward as many may believe. Few if any of the popular test formats are beyond questioning, and scores can vary depending on the choice of format or design. On the question of how their English subjects were superior at integrated reading comprehension while their
Welsh subjects were superior at the decoding of individual words, Hanley et al. (2004) first hypothesized that the depth and unpredictability of English orthography could have instilled a more semantically oriented approach to reading and understanding text, but they went on to observe that the particular standardized test that they used required students to read a text aloud.
That, together with the transparency of Welsh orthography, may have reinforced a more phonologically-centered reading strategy (Spencer & Hanley, 2003), and there is research supporting the idea that different measures of reading comprehension emphasize different component skills. One noteworthy example of this, particularly regarding the relative contribution of word decoding proficiency, is an analysis by Keenan et al. (2008). Notably, the two tests in that study that were the most sensitive to individual word decoding and reading development also happened to be the only two that called for silent rather than oral reading. This observation is at least consistent with the aforementioned hypothesis that Hanley and colleagues offer for why English students were better at cohesive text comprehension even though Welsh students were better at reading single words.
Even the cloze procedure, one of the most popular assessment methods, is not without its skeptics. Its main weakness is arguably the integration of information across sentences. For instance, Shanahan et al. (1982) investigated the use of intersentential information in cloze testing, and the findings called the efficacy of the cloze method as an evaluation of
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intersentential integration into question. On the other hand, this experiment was conducted on a traditional cloze format, which places blanks at regular intervals. Gellert and Elbro (2013) suggest that the reliability of the cloze method can be improved by more specifically targeting
"cohesive ties," or textual elements that construct links across sentences (e.g. pronouns and conjunctions), for deletion. They succeeded in showing that this strategy can produce a cloze test which is not only more sensitive to intersentential integration but also roughly as reliable as at least one other reputable type of reading comprehension test. The key is to focus more on cohesive ties when choosing which words are deleted from the source text. In this way, filling in each blank with the correct word or phrase relies more on making connections between sentences.
English Dactylic Laxing and Vowel Reduction
This research compares two different languages (English and Spanish) and exploits common patterns of phonological stem allomorphy in both as well as the difference in how the respective orthographies handle those allomorphic patterns. While English typically maintains the same visual form of a stem across various morphological environments regardless of how the stem is pronounced in each, Spanish reliably adjusts the spelling of a stem according to how it is pronounced in any particular environment. For example, the English noun serenity (/səˈɹɛnɪtiː/ is a nominalization of the adjective serene (/səˈɹiːn/), and the Spanish noun novedad (/nobeˈdad/;
"novelty/newness") is a nominalization of the adjective nuevo (/ˈnuebo/; "new"). Both pairs of related words manifest a stem-internal sound shift, but only in the latter is it accompanied by a corresponding shift in spelling.
In English, two frequent patterns of allomorphy will be used: dactylic laxing and vowel reduction. The first is the alternation by which the stressed vowel shifts between a short monophthong and a longer counterpart with an often diphthongal quality, as in the case of divine
(/dɪˈvaɪn/) versus divinity (/dɪˈvɪnɪtiː/) or nation (/ˈneɪʃən/) versus national (/ˈnæʃənəl/). This suite of morphophonological alternations operates on the same five vowel pairs as the grapho- phonological alternations typically signaled by the silent terminal
English "long vowels" (most of which are in fact diphthongs) evolved via regular sound changes from long monophthongs that were qualitatively much more similar if not identical to their
"short" counterparts (e.g.
/ˈnæːʃən/ and /dɪˈviːn/. The longstanding lack of any systematic update to English orthography has meant that many conventional spellings reflect the same archaic pronunciations that are at least very similar if not identical to the implicit yet never surfacing forms posited in the
Chomskyan paradigm. A side effect of this is a greater degree of morphological transparency than would have otherwise been feasible. For instance, if some systematic renovation in orthography had turned
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adjective snide with the suffix -ity to form snidity, for example, there were far more attestations of /ˈsnaɪdɪtiː/ than /ˈsnɪdɪtiː/. Furthermore, according to Steinberg, Chomsky and Halle's account relies on a full-decomposition model of word recognition, which is rendered questionable by other evidence provided in the same article (Steinberg, 1973). In any case, if the phonological processes proposed by Chomsky and Halle are questionable, so too are the underlying forms that are deduced in no small part by undoing those processes.
The second pattern of alternation in English to be utilized in this work is the process by which suffix-induced stress shifts cause the exact realization of a vowel to alternate between a neutralized schwa when unstressed and a more distinctive quality when stressed, sometimes with successive syllabic nuclei even seeming to swap places, as in the pronunciation of the two orthographic
With respect to both alternations, the standard spelling of the stem does not change according to how it is pronounced in different morphological contexts. For example, the shared element
English alphabet has /ə/ as one of its possible interpretations, which greatly facilitates this constancy of written form. For instance, in addition to the switching between /æ/ and /ə/, the grapheme
/əˈtɒmɪk/). Of course, the status of schwa as an independent phoneme, rather than an allophone of at least /ʌ/ if not every other short vowel in the language, is not beyond questioning. Yet there remains some support for the phonemic independence of /ə/. First, at least if we refer strictly to phonological and not morphological criteria, its distribution is not quite complementary with /ʌ/.
Perhaps some of the best examples are prefixes such as /ʌn/ and /sʌb/, which often resist
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reduction to /ən/ and /səb/ despite not carrying stress (cf. undo, substandard). Compounds such as firetruck provide similar evidence, with the nuclear vowel of the unstressed element frequently failing to collapse into /ə/. Virtually any allophonic analysis of schwa relies on the presence or absence of stress as at least the primary if not sole environmental factor that decides its distribution, so such counter-examples, comparatively rare though they may be, constitute a challenge to such accounts.
A second argument in favor of schwa as an English phoneme in its own right comes from words like stanza and aorta, specifically the distinct phonological fates of the root-final schwa.
Lee (2006) observes that, when the noun /eɪˈɔ˞tə/ is joined to the suffix –ic (/ɪk/) to form the adjective /eɪˈɔ˞tɪk/, the stem-final schwa falls away, but when the same suffix is added to the noun /ˈstænzə/, the schwa at the end of the root retains an audible counterpart (i.e. /eɪ/) in the resulting adjective /stænˈzeɪ.ɪk/. Lee accounts for this by invoking two phonotactic prohibitionsː the illegality of a stressed schwa and the awkwardness of a hiatus between adjacent short vowels.
Combining /eɪˈɔ˞tə/ with /ɪk/ would violate both of these. Not only are /ə/ and /ɪ/ both short vowels, but English morphology also calls for any syllable preceding the suffix /ɪk/ to receive primary stress, which would mean stressing a schwa. The solution in this case is schwa deletion.
When faced with the same conundrum in forming stanzaic (/stænˈzeɪ.ɪk/), on the other hand, the phonology opts for vowel lengthening. Lee attempts to explain these two different strategies for resolving an apparently identical conflict by positing that the schwa is underlying in one stem but a surface manifestation in the other. The final vowel of stanza is assumed to be an underlying
/æ/, which is allowed to bear the stress demanded by its adjacency to the –ic suffix. So the only problem there is the hiatus in the sequence /æ.ɪ/, which is resolved by swapping lax /æ/ out for its usual tense counterpart /eɪ/. Therefore, if this analysis is correct, then at least some instances of
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schwa must be included as such in the host words' underlying representations (Lee, 2006).
Finally, assuming schwa as its own phoneme enables greater parsimony in an Optimal-Theoretic account of English stress patterns, as my own prior research demonstrates (Bontrager, 2018).
In brief, then, English exhibits two prominent patterns of phonological stem allomorphy.
The first is dactylic laxing, which causes alternation between short vowels and long (often diphthongal) counterparts with which they are each respectively associated as an outcome of historical sound shifts. The underlying forms proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) for the affected morphemes are posited as the true bases of standard spellings which are otherwise unexpected or ambiguous from a strictly phonemic standpoint. However, despite the clear diachronic precedent, the synchronic reality of such forms is dubious. The second English pattern to be used in the upcoming experiment is the much less synchronically dubious process of vowel reduction, by which the nucleus of a particular syllable within a stem shifts between /ə/ and another (usually short) quality depending on the stress pattern of the host word. This work assumes that /ə/ is best analyzed as its own phoneme in the sound system.
Spanish Vowel Breaking and Raising
Spanish has its own common patterns of stem allomorphy, which are mostly characterized by the mid vowels /e/ and /o/ breaking respectively into the diphthongs /ie/ and /ue/ when stressed. The bound root /soɲ/, for instance, occurs unaltered in both /soɲaˈdoɾ/
("dreamer") and /soˈɲamos/ ("we dream"). When it occupies a stressed position within the host word, however, it shifts to /sueɲ/, as in /ˈsueɲa/ ("he/she/it dreams") or /ˈsueɲo/ ("I dream" as a verb or "dream" as a noun). Analogously, the /neg/ in /negaˈθion/ ("denial/negation") becomes
/nieg/ in precisely the same inflectional contexts that trigger /soɲ/ to become /sueɲ/ (e.g. /ˈniego/, meaning "I deny"). A less common but very similar pattern entails simple raising of /e/ and /o/ respectively to /i/ and /u/, as in /reˈpito/ ("I repeat") versus /repetiˈθion/ ("repetition") and in 77
/doɾˈmimos/ ("we sleep") versus /duɾmiˈente/ ("sleeping/asleep"). There are at least two common verb roots with a nuclear /e/ that instantiate both alternations, diphthongizing it in some verb forms and raising it in others (e.g. /senˈtiɾ/ for the infinitive "(to) feel," /ˈsiento/ for "I feel," and /sinˈtieɾon/ for "they felt"). Although verbs and deverbal derivatives comprise the bulk of such examples, some adjectival and even a few nominal roots seem subject to these alternations as well. For instance, the adjective /ˈtieɾno/, ("tender," with a fusional gender/number agreement suffix) becomes /teɾˈnuɾa/ ("tenderness") when nominalized. Here again, stress determines which allomorph of the shared root surfaces in each word, not entirely unlike the distribution of schwa in English.
In a study of such stem allomorphy that is particularly informative to the work undertaken here, Allen and Badecker (1999) discovered that recognition of target words was inhibited by prime words with at least one homophonic (and thus homographic in Spanish) allomorph, regardless of which allomorph actually occurred in the respective primes' surface forms. For instance,
On their part, pairs of unrelated words with incidental orthographic overlap, like slim and slam, showed significant inhibition. To account for this, Allen and Badecker hypothesize that
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inhibition between pairs such as gave and give cancels out the morphological facilitation that would have otherwise been observed, resulting in no apparent net effect. The forms taught and teach, on the other hand, are much more divergent in visual form and presumably less vulnerable to overlap-induced inhibition, which allowed some morphological facilitation to emerge (Allen
& Badecker, 2002). Nonetheless, there is a potential limit to the applicability of these findings, namely that the experiment focused strictly on inflectional rather than derivational morphology, and this may not be a trivial distinction to make in priming studies (Laudanna et al., 1992).
Moreover, at least one ERP study has yielded evidence that the brain does not necessarily respond in the same way to both alternating and non-alternating primes even when dealing with inflectionally related targets (Rodriguez-Fornells et al., 2002).
In short, both English and Spanish morphophonology seem to compel some trade-off between phonological transparency and morphological transparency in spelling. For stems subject to phonological allomorphy, each can only come at some expense to the other. One cannot accurately encode the pronunciation of sueño without somewhat visually obscuring its morphological connection to soñador. Conversely, one cannot maintain the contiguous visual overlap between nation and national, which lays bare the morphological relationship between them, without letting the letter ambiguously represent both /æ/ and /eɪ/. Spanish orthography always resolves that conflict in favor of the phonological transparency, while
English orthography usually resolves it in favor of morphological transparency. Comparing these opposite solutions is the central theme of this dissertation. Which kind of transparency is more important for proficient reading in general and word recognition in particular? Much of the relevant literature attests to some advantages for phonological transparency, at least for beginning readers if not also for more experienced readers, as the preceding chapter has
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hopefully shown, but research directly comparing those advantages to the potential perks of morphological transparency are very rare if they exist at all. Therefore, the following study aims to shed some much-needed light on the question of which type of transparency provides the greater benefits for readers.
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CHAPTER 4 METHODOLOGY
The study reported here attempts to illuminate the question of whether phonological transparency or morphological transparency provides greater benefits to readers. It does so by comparing morphological priming and reading comprehension scores in two languages that both have significant amounts of morphophonological alternation but crucially differ in how the orthography handles such phonological allomorphy. In Spanish, any verbal root is consistently spelled according to the pronunciation of the specific allomorph being used, which often varies according to lexical and syntactic criteria. In English, on the other hand, the common element shared by morphologically related words such as nature and natural is most often held constant in its written form even if it means that identical spellings must be pronounced differently and unpredictably. Thus, Spanish exemplifies the prioritization of phonological transparency over morphological transparency, whereas English represents the reverse. The working hypothesis is that a significantly greater amount of morphological priming and higher reading comprehension scores will be observed in English than in Spanish. If such a difference were observed, then it would lend substantial support to the notion that morphological transparency is ultimately more useful than phonological transparency in word recognition and textual comprehension. If, on the other hand, more priming and higher scores were observed in Spanish, then such results would instead falsify the hypothesis and suggest that phonological transparency is the more influential factor. A third possibility was that no significant difference would be found, in which case, the failure to support the hypothesis would suggest that the effect in question does not exist, that it is too subtle to be detected by current methods, or that proficient readers of either language access semantic lemmas more directly and automatically than previously assumed regardless of orthographic depth.
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Subjects
Native speakers of English and Spanish were recruited from the University of Florida campus and the surrounding area to participate in this investigation. Although most of the
Spanish speakers were inevitably somewhat bilingual, with at least a basic command of English, only those for whom Spanish is their only L1 and English is clearly their L2 were solicited. To ensure such eligibility, a brief questionnaire was administered to prospective Spanish-speaking participants which quantitatively assessed their exposure to other languages.
The questionnaire was scored as follows. For question #1, an affirmative answer was coded as zero while a negative answer was coded as one. For question #2, on which responses ranged from zero to 22 years, a Likert ranking was assigned to each age by sorting it into five ranges (up to five years, five to ten years, ten to 15 years, 15 to 20 years, and more than 20 years). So that younger ages of first exposure would manifest as higher bilingualism, the Likert rank decreased as the age ranges increased. For question #3, on which responses ranged from zero to 41 years, the ages of first immersion in a predominantly Anglophone environment were similarly assigned a Likert ranking by sorting them into five ranges (this time, zero to 10 years,
11 to 20 years, 21 to 30 years, 31 to 40 years, and 40 years or older). The ranking once again varied inversely with age range so that lower responses would manifest as higher scores. For question #4, on which responses ranged from zero to 16 years, a Likert ranking was once again assigned based on five ranges (one year or less, up to two years, up to four years, up to eight years, and more than eight years). This time, the Likert ranking varied directly with the responses, so that more time spent in a predominantly Anglophone environment would manifest as a higher score. For questions #5-8, the response's rank on the already built-in Likert scale was used (ranging from one to five). For questions #9-10, one was added for each additional
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language identified. The resulting numbers were summed to arrive at a composite "bilingualism" rating.
As expected, most or perhaps even all of the English-speaking subjects were effectively monolingual, but anyone among them who is natively bilingual in another language was similarly disqualified. While exact ages were not recorded, all subjects were at least 18 years old, with an upper limit of 75 stated in recruitment materials, though the oldest actual participant was most likely younger than that by nearly a decade at least. While lack of age data on the
English-speaking group prohibits comprehensive and rigorous comparison, the Spanish-speaking group appeared to vary more in age and skew older, with four members between 50 and 59 years of age and one 65 years of age. There may have been one English speaker of comparable age, but this is only a vague recollection at best. Gender was not a factor in the recruitment process, with both male and female participants being equally sought. Ultimately, seven male English speakers, 23 female English speakers, 11 male Spanish speakers, and 15 female English speakers participated, comprising a total of 56 subjects. Many were university students.
Stimuli
As stated in the previous chapter, the English stimuli exploited two major patterns of phonological allomorphy: dactylic laxing and vowel reduction. The first is the alternation by which a long tense vowel or diphthong within a stem becomes short and lax in particular morphological contexts, as when /i:/ shifts to /ɛ/ in deriving serenity from serene or when /eɪ/ shifts to /æ/ when deriving sanity from sane. The second is the process by which a stressable nucleus alternates with schwa depending on morphologically induced stress shifts, as when photograph is pronounced /ˈfoʊtəgɹæf/ as a standalone word but takes on the allomorph
/fəˈtɒgɹəf/ when blended with the suffix /iː/ to form photography (/fəˈtɒgɹəfiː/). The key feature of English for current purposes is that the spelling of the shared stem most often remains 83
constant even while its pronunciation does not, which contrasts sharply with Spanish conventions.
The corresponding Spanish stimuli use a pattern of allomorphy in the inflectional paradigms of many verbs, in which a root monophthongal mid (or, in a relative few cases, high) vowel will break into a diphthong whenever the particular inflected form renders it stressed.
Examples include the infinitive /senˈtiɾ/ and the finite form /ˈsiento/ or the past tense /enkonˈtɾe/ versus the present tense /enˈkuentɾo/. Although lexically conditioned, this is a very common and frequent pattern, and crucially, the orthography explicitly spells the root according to its surface pronunciation in any given word. For example, the verb whose infinitive is written as
English, this is the prevailing tactic for the orthographic rendering of words that instantiate phonological allomorphy. Analogous shifts can also be observed among certain adjectives and nouns, as when
English has a much more impoverished system of verbal inflection than Spanish, such that in the former, different inflected forms of the same word would rarely be a viable prime/target pair.
The English stimuli must therefore rely on derivational morphology, and consequently, the
Spanish stimuli were restricted to derivationally related pairs in order to maximize comparability.
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Stimuli consisted of four types of prime-target pairs. In the first type (AL, or alternating), each prime/target pair was derivationally related and featured one of the root vowel alternations enumerated above (e.g. define and definition). The second type (NL, or non-alternating) comprised pairs of derivationally related words that have no such allomorphy (e.g. engage and engagement). In the third (OO, or orthographic overlap), each prime was unrelated to its target but shared incidental orthographic overlap with it (e.g. reach and reality). This type may be especially important for control purposes at the suggestion of Allen and Badecker (2002), who propose that orthographic inhibition can at least partially cancel out and therefore obscure the effects of morphological facilitation. The fourth (UR, or unrelated) type simply included foil pairs which were not orthographically, morphologically, or semantically related (e.g. conscience and desk). Since all related forms were formed by suffixation, the orthographic overlap between prime and target in the third pair type was consistently anchored along the left word edge. The extent of this overlap was always at least three letters, with a mean ranging between three and four in both languages. According to the News-on-the-Web (NOW) corpora for English and
Spanish (Corpus del Español: NOW, 2019; NOW Corpus (News on the Web), 2019), average item frequency ranged from 30 to 40 per million for each stimulus type in both languages at the time of list preparation. Semantic transparency of morphological derivatives and word class were controlled for to the greatest degree possible given the other constraints on stimuli imposed by the topic of this study. The direction of derivation from prime to target (base-to-derivative versus derivative-to-base) was also recorded, with the number of each being kept as equal as possible within each pair type. While Marslen-Wilson et al. (1994) found no reliable effects of priming direction, it seems that all of their stems were monomorphemic. This is not the case in the stimuli for this study, where the simpler item in each pair was not always irreducible. In
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some trials, it was merely less morphologically complex than its partner. For example, the pair reactionary/reaction was coded as complex-to-simple, but reaction is itself a nominalization of react, of which reactionary is a hierarchically subsequent adjectivalization. Hence the stimuli used in the forthcoming work may not be entirely comparable to the stimuli used by Marslen-
Wilson and colleagues.
On each stimulus list, there were 12 prime/target pairs of each type, with half of the targets in each group being non-words. The non-word targets were generated by various instances of metathesis, phoneme substitution, and phonetic feature swapping (examples in
English include mightnare and lawk). Since I was a non-native speaker of Spanish with a limited vocabulary in that language, each Spanish non-word was tested using the online dictionary of the
Real Academia Española (Real Academia Española, 2019) in order to verify that I had not accidentally devised a real word with which I was simply unfamiliar.
Since many of the stimuli were necessarily affixed forms, there might have been a potential for word class, as signaled by unique morphological cues, to unduly bias the processing of any stimulus towards whichever stem allomorph may be particularly common among forms from that respective grammatical category. This potential was significantly greater in Spanish than in English, because while most roots in the former are bound, the latter is much more tolerant of free roots. Hence, in Spanish, virtually all stimuli inevitably ended in fusional suffixes (typically verb inflections or gender agreement markers), while many of the English stimuli were monomorphemic. Such a confounding effect seemed quite unlikely, however, for two main reasons. The relevant stem alternations, though certainly frequent, are lexically conditioned and thus do not by any means apply to every single word that meets their phonological requirements. In fact, stem-changing verbs are typically classified as irregular,
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with the regular pattern taking the pertinent suffixes with no stem allomorphy at all. For example, a finite inflected form of the verb /pɾomet-/ ("promise") is /pɾoˈmeto/, not */pɾoˈmieto/, as might be expected if it followed the model of /sent-/ > /ˈsiento/. Therefore, even if a particular inflectional suffix happens to elicit stem alternation when it attaches to certain stems, any bias towards the diphthongal stem allomorph is much more likely to come from the specific lexeme rather than the mere inflection with which it occurs.
The second main reason is that at least a couple of verbal inflections are by themselves indistinguishable from nominal suffixes. Namely, in at least one inflectional class, the first- and third-person singular present indicative verb inflections are respectively homophonous with the masculine and feminine gender agreement markers (/-o/ and /-a/, again respectively).
Nevertheless, some control for potential word-class effects were built into the experimental design via a binary trial parameter of "ambiguity." In English, a trial was classified as non- ambiguous if both words in the pair had endings of at least three letters which are at least suggestive of word class (e.g. '-ure,' '-ous,' '-ence,' '-tion'). If at least one word in the pair lacked such an ending, it was classified as ambiguous. In Spanish, the ambiguous pairs were those in which at least one item had two clearly distinct yet related meanings, each of a different word class. For instance,
In all morphologically related pairs, consonant alternations at the edges of stems (e.g. when
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sound shifts that counted for the purposes of this experiment were vowel alternations flanked by at least one homologous consonant on both sides (e.g. the /d/ and the /n/ in the example just given). The best and most direct support for the working hypothesis would be to find, first, that reaction times for the AL and NL items are significantly shorter than those for the OO and UR items, and second, that this reduction in reaction times is significantly greater for AL items in
English than it is for AL items in Spanish.
To test comprehension of text beyond the recognition of individual words, I selected two brief Spanish-language texts of approximately 500 words from online collections, one narrative and one expository, and translated them both into English. I then placed 20 blanks in each text with four options to fill each one, one of them being the word or phrase originally used and thus the correct choice. These blanks were distributed according to Gellert and Elbro's (2003) recommendations, and to the greatest extent possible, the words or phrases deleted as well as the foil options corresponded to each other across the two languages being examined.
In addition to there being two different cloze passages per language, there were also two different but independently complete lists of prime/target pairs2. Each list was matched randomly with a particular passage early in planning, so that all subjects presented with the same list were also given the same passage. Each subject was assigned randomly to one of the two available list/passage pairings.
Procedure
This experiment began with a lexical decision task for first-language English and first- language Spanish speakers. Each subject performed the task only in his/her native tongue. Via
2 While great effort was taken to avoid repeating stimuli, which mostly succeeded, two English primes ("evolution" and "confidence") for non-word targets occurred twice within the same list, while one Spanish prime ("muerdes") occured once in both lists for that language, paired with a different non-word target in each case. Furthermore, "desafiante" was a target on one Spanish list and a prime (with a non-word target) on the other.
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the E-Prime software and scripting platform, each prime was displayed for 500 ms. A 300 ms latency then followed before the target was presented. The target remained on display either until the subject responded or until a maximum of 2000 ms had passed, with cases of the latter treated as statistical outliers and omitted from data analysis unless their frequency suggests otherwise. Subject responses came in the form of pressing the P key if they thought the target formed a real word and the Q key if they thought it formed a non-word. The primes were unmasked at the recommendation of Casalis et al. (2009), who showed that unmasked priming more closely mimics natural reading. This was important because the ultimate aim of the proposed study is to gain insight into how orthographic depth (or more specifically, the degree of morphological transparency in the written forms of polymorphemic words) affects reading fluency. All words were displayed in black 18-point Times New Roman font against a white background.
To supplement the insights provided by the lexical decision task, an untimed cloze test of reading comprehension was administered in each language, with each subject being randomly assigned to one of the two prepared texts in his/her native tongue. This test consisted of a printed copy of the assigned text with twenty blanks interspersed throughout, for which four words or short phrases were offered in parentheses. Each subject was instructed to circle the word or phrase he/she thought best fit in each blank. He/she could read aloud or silently as he/she wished. The advantage of this would be twofold. First, it would provide a more direct examination of how orthographic depth may correlate to overall reading ability. Second, the test scores could be tested for a correlation with the results from the previous portion of the experiment, thus providing an evaluation of morphological priming as a predictor of broader reading proficiency.
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Hypotheses and Research Questions
To summarize, the main hypothesis in the forthcoming study is that there will be significantly more morphological priming in English AL stimuli than there is in Spanish AL stimuli, suggesting a processing advantage conferred by the greater morphological transparency of English orthography. No significant cross-linguistic difference is expected in the NL stimuli, since the lack of morphophonological alternation therein renders the difference in orthographic depth moot. Meanwhile, while AL and NL pairs differ morphophonologically in both languages, only in Spanish does that difference reliably and clearly manifest itself in spelling. Based on prior literature (e.g. Allen & Badecker, 1999; Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995), if any effect is observed in the OO condition, it is expected to be inhibitory. The UR condition will serve primarily as a baseline with which to isolate the effects of interest. Another focal hypothesis is that English speakers will fare significantly better than Spanish speakers on a cloze test of reading comprehension, again suggesting that the greater morphological transparency of English orthography enhances understanding, this time of running text. Alternatively, the aims of this research are to address the following questions.
(1) In either Spanish or English, does the amount of morphological priming differ
significantly between pairs of related words subject to phonological stem allomorphy (i.e.
AL trials) and pairs of related words not subject to such alternation (i.e. NL trials)?
(2) Does the amount of morphological priming in pairs of related words with phonological
stem allomorphy differ significantly between English and Spanish? That is to say, is
there more facilitation in English AL trials than in Spanish AL trials (or vice versa)?
(3) Do English speakers and Spanish speakers differ significantly in their comprehension of
running text (as measured by a cloze test)?
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(4) How well does morphological priming between individual words, regardless of
phonological stem allomorphy (i.e. whether AL or NL), predict comprehension of
running text (as measured by a cloze test)?
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CHAPTER 5 RESULTS
Reaction Times for Lexical Decision
Data collected from 30 native English speakers and 26 native Spanish speakers were analyzed using the R statistical scripting platform. First, priming trials on which no response was recorded from the subject, comprising 25 observations, or 0.5% of the total, were removed from the data set. Among the remaining data, all trials with correctly identified real-word targets were then extracted and put through by-subject Winsorization with a threshold z-score of two standard deviations. This means that, for each subject, any reaction time greater than two standard deviations from his/her mean was deemed a within-subject outlier and altered to be less extreme, presumably making it more reflective of the person's general behavior. Each outlying reaction time was replaced by the subject's individual mean plus two standard deviations plus a number of milliseconds that started at one and increased in increments of one with its relative distance from the limit for non-outliers (the least extreme outlier became the subject's mean plus two standard deviations plus one, the second least extreme outlier became the subject's mean plus two standard deviations plus two, and so on until all outlying values had been thus edited).
The Winsorization affected 120 total observations, which was 4.7% of all data. The resulting data was then trimmed of subjects with mean reaction times further than two standard deviations from the mean in their respective languages. This resulted in the omission of data from one native English speaker and one native Spanish speaker, comprising 94 observations altogether, or
3.7% of the original Winsorized data set. The final sample size for analysis was therefore reduced to 29 English speakers and 25 Spanish speakers, providing a final total of 2,433 observations. Mean reaction times and standard deviations for correctly identified real-word targets by condition and language are as follows.
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Table 5-1. Mean Reaction Times and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) Language AL NL OO UR 597.589 608.204 656.117 626.469 English (106.65 ) (145.731) (133.6 ) (124.164) 688.91 674.931 715.53 701.832 Spanish (124.834 ) (129.888) (138.605) (109.907) AL = morphologically related with phonological stem allomorphy; NL = morphologically related without phonological stem allomorphy; OO = sharing some incidental orthographic overlap but otherwise unrelated; UR = completely unrelated
RT = Reaction Time; St. Dev. = Standard Deviation; Eng = English; Span = Spanish
Figure 5-1. Mean Reaction Times and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms)
There are already some hints of a negative effect of incidental orthographic overlap, since the OO category shows the slowest average reaction in both languages as well as a general trend for English speakers to have faster reactions than Spanish speakers. The former observation is
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consistent with the inhibition between partial homographs observed by other researchers (e.g.
Allan & Badecker, 1999; Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995).
A 2 × 4 (Language × Condition) ANOVA on these reaction times showed that the effect of language suggested in Table 7.1 is highly significant (F = 17.74, p < 0.001), but neither the main effect of condition (p = 0.22) nor its interaction with that of language (p = 0.93) reached significance. After this initial analysis, each subject's mean reaction time for the UR condition was used as a baseline from which his/her respective mean for each of the other three conditions was subtracted to obtain the priming effect. The subtraction was performed in this direction so that facilitation (i.e. a decrease in reaction time relative to the baseline) would emerge as a positive number and inhibition (i.e. an increase in reaction time relative to the baseline) would emerge as a negative number. The intent was to quantitatively isolate the respective effects of morphological and orthographic priming for more direct comparison. The results of that transformation are as follows.
Table 5-2. Mean Priming Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) Language AL NL OO 28.88 18.265 -29.648 English (52.199) (64.621) (57.712) 12.922 26.901 -13.698 Spanish (58.68) (72.847 ) (80.705)
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Figure 5-2. Mean Priming Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms)
A 2 × 3 (Language × Condition) ANOVA on this transformed data revealed only a main effect of condition (F = 8.38, p < 0.001). Tukey post hoc tests clarified that the significant difference lies between the OO condition and the other two (i.e. morphologically related) conditions (p < 0.005 in both pairwise comparisons). Crucially, the AL and NL conditions did not even come close to differing significantly from each other (p = 1), nor was there a significant interaction between language and condition (p = 0.41), the principal effect of interest. There appeared to be no significant difference between the priming effect of AL pairs and NL pairs in either language, nor did the English AL pairs appear to differ significantly from the Spanish AL pairs in this respect.
While ages were unfortunately not recorded for English-speaking subjects, the bilingualism questionnaire administered to Spanish speakers did ask how old they were at the
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time of participation. Given that one Spanish-speaking subject was unusually old at 65 years, especially since the Hispanophone group seemed to vary in age more than the overall quite young Anglophone group (though this cannot be rigorously quantified), it is possible that such advanced age being present in one group but likely not the other may have skewed the results, especially for reaction times (Salthouse, 1996). Therefore, the data was re-analyzed with observations of the 65-year-old Spanish speaker omitted. The main effect of language on raw reaction times remained highly significant (F = 17.5, p < 0.001), as did the main effect of condition on priming as calibrated to the UR condition as a baseline (F = 8, p < 0.001). Mean
Spanish reaction times were 74.2 ms longer than mean English reaction times. Post hoc tests also persisted in showing no significant difference between the AL and NL conditions (p = 1) and a very significant difference between each of those conditions and the OO condition (p <
0.005 in both cases).
Accuracy for Lexical Decision
Although it was not the main focus of this study, it seems worthwhile to report some findings on accuracy3 as well. For obvious reasons, the data set was expanded to include real- word targets with both correct and incorrect responses. Given the much more limited range of possible values (i.e. from zero to one), this data was not Winsorized or trimmed. Mean accuracy rates by condition and language are as follows.
3 It may be worth noting here that, for six English speakers, the number of stimuli in each condition was not quite equal. This was due to the miscategorization of two prime/target pairs on one of the two English stimulus lists. For those already exposed to the affected list, the relevant stimuli were relabeled according to their proper placement prior to analysis, while for all susbequent English speakers assigned to the same list, the items were replaced with words of comparable frequency (at the time of selection) fitting the originally mistaken categories. The relevant items are identified in Appendix A.
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Table 5-3. Mean Accuracy Rates and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language Language AL NL OO UR 98.333% 96.818% 94.318% 91.517% English (4.035%) (6.327%) (10.425) (9.876)% 97.65% 98.397% 86.509% 90.997% Spanish (4.628%) (3.349%) (9.136%) (15.078%)
Figure 5-3. Mean Accuracy Rates and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in %)
A 2 × 4 (Language × Condition) ANOVA of the data showed a significant main effect of condition (F = 11.58, p < 0.001) as well as a significant interaction between language and condition (F = 3.12, p = 0.03). Tukey post hoc tests specified that the effect of condition differentiated the AL and NL conditions from the OO and UR conditions (p < 0.001 for all comparisons across those two pairs, e.g. AL versus OO or NL versus UR) while making no significant distinctions within each pair (p = 1 and p = 0.98 respectively). The post hoc pairwise comparison of Spanish OO versus English OO was statistically significant (p = 0.02).
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Subsequently, as with the reaction time data, each subject's mean accuracy for UR trials was taken as a baseline and subtracted from his/her mean accuracy for each of the other conditions.
The direction of subtraction in this case ensured that a positive number would represent a boost to accuracy while a negative number would represent an impediment (though no such detrimental effects were actually found, even in the OO condition).
Table 5-4. Mean Accuracy Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language Language AL NL OO 6.816% 5.301% 2.801% English (10.466%) (10.11%) (15.453%) 13.704% 14.452% 2.564% Spanish (28.737%) (28.625%) (28.236%)
Figure 5-4. Mean Accuracy Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in %)
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Although the above hints at the possibility that morphological relatedness gives Spanish speakers more of a boost in accuracy than it gives English speakers, a 2 × 3 (Language × Condition)
ANOVA yielded no significant main effects or interactions (p > 0.1 in all cases).
As with reaction times and priming effects, the same accuracy data was re-analyzed with observations of the one senior Spanish speaker removed from consideration. With respect to raw accuracy rates, the main effect of condition (F = 11.5, p < 0.001) as well as its interaction with language (F = 3.4, p = 0.02) stayed significant, while the main effect of language approached but did not reach significance (p = 0.08). With respect to accuracy effects as calibrated to the UR condition as a baseline, a main effect of condition became significant (F = 3.12, p = 0.05). Post hoc comparisons show that the difference between the AL and NL conditions was still insignificant (p = 1), while the difference between each and the OO condition was marginal (p =
0.07 and p = 0.1 respectively). No other previously insignificant results emerged as significant.
Inhibition by Orthographic Overlap
The most interesting results may unexpectedly surround the effects of orthographic overlap rather than morphological relatedness or phonological stem allomorphy. The Tukey post hoc tests on accuracy (specifically the significant difference between English OO and Spanish
OO trials) and the corresponding graph implies that the Spanish-speaking subjects were more impacted by orthographic overlap than the English-speaking subjects, though the significance of this interaction is nullified when the data is calibrated to the UR baseline. More importantly, however, the OO condition also differed markedly from both the AL and NL conditions (neither of which differed significantly from each other) in its effect on reaction times. Not only did the effect attain statistical significance, but it was generally in the opposite direction. While the AL and NL conditions tended to expedite word recognition, the OO condition tended to retard it.
Again, this is consistent with other research that found evidence for inhibitory effects of 99
orthographic overlap. The findings of Allen and Badecker (2002) cited in Chapter 4 compel us to ask if it is possible, then, that there is in fact more morphological facilitation than the current results suggest which is simply being hidden by orthographic inhibition, either in the AL or NL condition in English and at least in the NL condition in Spanish?
Some light may be shed on this question by taking the reaction time data calibrated to the
UR baseline and calibrating it further to partial out the effects of orthographic overlap. The mean priming effect of the OO condition on each subject was subtracted from the corresponding mean(s) of both the AL and NL conditions in English and the NL condition only in Spanish.
The result of this transformation was to further isolate the effects of morphological relatedness from those of the orthographic similarity that is often an inevitable byproduct of morphological relationships. Particularly, if the mean effect of the OO condition on a particular subject is negative, as it must be in some cases given that the overall mean is negative (see Table 5.2), this will yield an increase in the apparent morphological facilitation, which suggests that there is in fact more such priming than previously measured, but that the extra priming was exhausted in compensating for the inhibitory effect of orthographic overlap. The transformed facilitation data are as follows.
Table 5-5. Isolated Mean Facilitation Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms) Language AL NL 58.528 47.913 English (42.483) (51.347) 12.922 40.599 Spanish (58.68) (76.407)
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Figure 5-5. Isolated Mean Facilitation Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language (in ms)
At first glance, the difference in the AL condition between English and Spanish now appears rather dramatic. Nevertheless, a 2 × 2 (Language × Condition) ANOVA on the transformed data revealed only a significant effect of language (F = 5.63, p = 0.02), though the interaction between language and condition was marginal (p = 0.09).4 If data from the elderly
Hispanophone subject is excluded, that interaction is pulled further from significance (p = 0.12).
When partialing out the effect of the OO condition from the AL and NL conditions for this analysis, the data for the Spanish AL condition was left unaltered. This was because, since
4 One Spanish AL pair, manifestación/manifiesto, has an unusually long stretch of shared segments before reaching the alternating segment. However, omitting it from anlaysis does not substantively change any prior results. The interaction of language and condition after partialling out both the UR baseline and OO effects drifts a bit further from significance (p = 0.13), while the main effect of language remains significant (p = 0.03).
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Spanish orthography adjusts spelling according to phonological stem allomorphy rather than abstracting away from it, as English does, morphologically related words with alternating stems tend to share much less orthographic overlap than comparable English words. For example, although canto (/ˈkanto/, meaning "I sing") shares four consecutive letters with the related word cantante (/kanˈtante/, meaning "singer"), just as English music shares five consecutive letters with musical (both NL pairs), Spanish muerte (/ˈmueɾte/, meaning "death") shares only one letter of overlap with mortal (/moɾˈtal/, meaning "mortal"), while English define and definition still share five consecutive letters (both AL pairs).
However, as previously noted, there is at least some evidence from Allen and Badecker
(1999) that orthographic inhibition transcends surface form. If the inflected verb form cierra
("he/she/it closes") can inhibit cerro ("hill") through the verbal stem cerr-, in which case the overlap is only underlying, than muerte may well be able to inhibit mortal in a similar way. So it is worthwhile to examine a version of the immediately preceding analysis that indeed partials out orthographic overlap from the Spanish AL condition, just as it was for the Spanish NL conditions as well as both AL and NL conditions in English.
Table 5-6. Isolated Mean Facilitation Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language with Calibration of Spanish AL (in ms) Language AL NL 58.528 47.913 English (42.483 ) (51.347) 26.619 40.599 Spanish (82.595) (76.407 )
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Figure 5-6. Isolated Mean Facilitation Effects and Standard Deviations by Condition and Language with Calibration of Spanish AL (in ms)
A subsequent ANOVA revealed that the interaction between language and condition was no longer even marginal (p = 0.32), nor was the main effect of language (p = 0.12).
Control for Ambiguity and Direction
In the preceding chapter, two control variables were introduced in hopes of addressing potential concerns about word class and morphology: ambiguity and direction In English, a non- ambiguous trial was one in which both the prime and the target ended in a sequence of three or more letters that was at least suggestive of word class (e.g. '-ure,' '-ous,' '-ence,' '-tion'). An ambiguous English trial was one in which one or both words lacked such an ending. In Spanish, an ambiguous trial was one in which at least one word had two different meanings, clearly related but of different word classes. A non-ambiguous Spanish trial was one in which neither
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word had such ambiguity. Direction was coded as simple-to-complex, in which the target was a derivative of the prime, or complex-to-simple, in which the prime was a derivative of the target.
Since roots tend to be bound in Spanish, inevitable inflectional affixes (e.g. the –o in sueño, which is either a subject agreement marker on a verb or a gender marker on a noun) were not counted. Only derivational complexity was compared. Both direction and ambiguity were only considered relevant to the AL and NL conditions.
The same reaction time data used in the previous analyses were re-analyzed using only the AL and NL word pairs with ambiguity as well as direction added as covariates, resulting in a
2 × 2 × 2 × 2 (Ambiguity × Direction × Condition × Language) ANOVA. The results showed a significant three-way Ambiguity × Direction × Language interaction (F = 8.84, p < 0.005) and a marginal three-way Direction × Condition × Language interaction (p = 0.1).
Table 5-7. Mean Reaction Times and Standard Deviations by Ambiguity, Direction, and Language in (in ms) English Direction Unamb Ambig 587.533 600.407 CS (112.411) (164.602) 620.948 600.072 SC (131.929) (149.713) Spanish Direction Unamb Ambig 714.935 650.01 CS (196.407) (136.201) 640.594 713.094 SC (132.925) (153.036) CS = complex-to-simple; SC = simple-to-complex; Unamb = unambiguous; Ambig = ambiguous
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Figure 5-7. Mean Reaction Times and Standard Deviations by Ambiguity, Direction, and Language (in ms)
Re-analyzing accuracy rates on the AL and NL trials with ambiguity and direction as additional covariates yielded a significant Direction × Language interaction (F = 4.4, p = 0.04) and a marginal Direction × Condition interaction (p = 0.07).
Table 5-8. Mean Accuracy Rates and Standard Deviations by Direction and Language Language CS SC 0.982 0.969 English (0.038) (0.061) 0.972 0.988 Spanish (0.056) (0.036)
To probe these interactions further, two supplementary analyses were carried out on the AL and
NL trials. The first one attempted to isolate the source of the three-way Ambiguity × Direction ×
Language interaction on reaction times to correctly identified real-word targets. For each subject, latencies were sorted into ambiguous and non-ambiguous categories, and within each
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category, the mean latency for simple-to-complex pairs was subtracted from the mean latency for complex-to-simple pairs. This calculation gave each subject two difference scores for direction, one for ambiguous pairs and one for unambiguous pairs. The subjects were then sorted into language groups, and a paired two-tailed t-test was executed on the two difference scores across subjects. In English, the difference was significant (t(28) = 2.167, p = 0.04), with the effect of direction being 31.9 ms greater in the ambiguous category than the unambiguous category. This difference was also significant in Spanish (t(24) = -3.642, p < 0.005), with the effect of direction being 127.45 ms less in the ambiguous category than in the unambiguous category. These findings imply that Spanish reaction times are more impacted by the interaction between ambiguity and direction than English is. In order to test the significance of this cross-linguistic variation, each subject's difference score for direction in the unambiguous category was then subtracted from its counterpart in the ambiguous category to arrive at a third difference score, measuring how much the effect of direction differs across ambiguity categories for each subject.
With the data again grouped by language, a two-tailed t-test on this third difference score revealed that the cross-linguistic variation is indeed significant (t(32.4) = 4.2, p < 0.001).5
The second supplementary analysis attempted to isolate the source of the Direction ×
Language interaction on accuracy rates for real-word targets. For each subject, trials were sorted into simple-to-complex and complex-to-simple categories, and that subject's mean accuracy for each category was calculated. The subjects were then sorted into language groups, and a paired two-tailed t-test was executed on the within-subjects accuracy means in each language. The
5 Based on how common verbs ending in -pose are, an argument could possibly be made for compose/composition being unambiguous rather than ambiguous, as it was labeled in the experiment. Recategorizing it accordingly and rerunning the potentially affected analyses produces only two noteworthy changes to the results. First, the two-way Ambiguity × Direction interaction on reaction times (p = 0.09) become marginal. Second, in the difference score analysis of English only, the difference in direction effects between ambiguity categories also becomes marginal (p = 0.06).
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difference was not significant in either language. Sorting the subject means into direction groups and then executing another two-tailed t-test on the effect of language within each group did not yield any significant results either.
Marslen-Wilson et al. (1994) notably found that, while stems and derivatives primed each other, derivatives did not prime other derivatives sharing the same base (e.g. governor did not prime government or vice-versa, even though either one primed or was primed by govern).
However, all of the examples given for an apparent lack of priming were pairs of equally derived
(and thus equally complex) words, and so the implications for the stimuli used here are not entirely clear, especially given the difference in modality. Nonetheless, there were a few English pairs used here which could, in retrospect, be considered of equal complexity (namely diplomacy/diplomatic, democratic/democracy, and religious/religion). Diplomacy and diplomatic, for example, could well be equally derived from diplomat, each with the addition of a single suffix. Excluding these items from consideration reduces the initial data pool by 1.7%
(44 total observations), and when comparing morphological priming effects with orthographic inhibition partialed out from both AL and NL stimuli in English but only NL stimuli in Spanish, the interaction between language and condition slips further from statistical significance (p =
0.12). No other analytical result hitherto reported is meaningfully altered.6 The main effect of language on reaction times (F = 17.44, p < 0.001) remains highly significant, as does the main effect of condition on priming effects (F = 8.3, p < 0.001). The main effect of condition on accuracy (F = 11.7, p < 0.001) also persists, as does its interaction with language (F = 3.1, p =
0.03).
6 The relative complexity in the pairs absent/absence and distant/distance may also be subject to similar doubt, but excluding them as well has no further meaningful impact on the results.
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When the analyses controlling for ambiguity and direction were redone with data from the one 65-year-old Spanish speaker excluded, none of the results were substantially altered.
Nonetheless, some caution may be warranted in interpreting the results of these control analyses, since at least in the case of the three-way interactions, the sample sizes of the relevant stimulus groupings within each subject after cross-referencing all covariates become very small, hovering around six per group.
Cloze Test Performance
Finally, an independent-samples t-test was carried out on cloze test scores. The averages were 90.3% in English and 87.5% in Spanish, but this difference was not statistically significant
(t(38.4) = 0.88, p = 0.39). Within each language, overall morphological facilitation was then calculated for each subject by averaging together the mean priming effects on reaction times observed in the AL and NL conditions. This was intended to provide an estimate of morphological priming regardless of the presence or absence of phonological stem allomorphy.
The lack of a statistically significant difference between AL and NL conditions justified this aggregation. The cloze scores were then linearly regressed as a function of those estimates. The fit was very poor, yielding an R2-value of less than 0.01 in both languages. None of these findings meaningfully changed when the 65-year-old Spanish speaker was omitted from a second analysis. If anything the difference in cloze scores became less significant (p = 0.58), and the linear regression fit even worse (R2 < 0.005) in both languages.
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Figure 5-8. Cloze Test Scores as a Function of Morphological Priming
Conclusions
This study's central questions were answered most directly by the analysis of reaction time differences as calibrated to the baseline of completely unrelated and dissimilar word pairs.
Although there was a main effect of condition, post hoc pairwise comparisons showed that the significant difference was not between alternating and non-alternating pairs of related words.
Instead, both types of morphological kin were together juxtaposed against pairs with incidental orthographic overlap. Moreover, there was no significant interaction between condition and language. Regarding the other two inquiries posed in this study, t-testing found no significant cross-linguistic difference in running text comprehension as measured by a cloze test, and linear regression modeling yielded a very poor correlation between overall morphological priming and cloze test performance. However, what did appear in the data was a clear inhibitory effect of
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orthographic overlap as well as a potential interaction between language and priming direction.
Such findings make clear suggestions regarding the initial hypotheses put forth in this work as well as the influence of orthographic depth on morphological priming and thus lexical access in general.
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CHAPTER 6 DISCUSSION
Morphological Priming and Reading Comprehension
These results clearly fail to support the central hypothesis that there would be more morphological priming in English than in Spanish, either in general or specifically in the AL condition. On the question of whether the degree of morphological facilitation differs substantially according to the presence or absence of phonological stem allomorphy (in either
English or Spanish), the results just reported suggest a negative answer. Neither an analysis of reaction times nor an analysis of accuracy yielded any statistically significant difference between the AL and NL conditions in either language. Furthermore, on the question of whether morphological facilitation between related words with phonological stem allomorphy differs significantly between English and Spanish, support for an affirmative answer is similarly lacking here. Neither in analyzing reaction times nor in analyzing accuracy could a statistically significant difference be found between English AL stimuli and Spanish AL stimuli, despite the difference in how the languages' respective orthographies handle the alternation in stem phonology. Turning to the comprehension of running text, no substantial effect was found in that regard either, since the difference in cloze test performance failed to reach statistical significance. Finally, overall morphological priming with respect to individual words does not appear to be a significant predictor of broader reading comprehension, as the extremely poor fit of a linear regression model shows.
Summary
These findings have four main conclusions. First, English and Spanish do not differ overall in degree of morphological priming. Second, within each language, the alternating and non-alternating pairs of morphologically related words do not differ overall in degree of
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morphological priming. Third, no support was found for morphological transparency providing significant advantages in cloze test performance, and morphological priming was a very poor predictor of cloze scores. Fourth, word recognition speed seems to be more influenced by the inhibitory effects of orthographic overlap in Spanish than in English. There were also two unexpected additional findings. First, word recognition seems generally faster in English than in
Spanish, at least when comparing native Spanish speakers who spend much of their time interacting in English to native English speakers living in the same environment. Second,
Spanish appears to be more influenced by the interaction of ambiguity and direction than
English, which would be a worthy focus for future research. Particularly noteworthy is the suggestion that the effects of direction reverse cross-linguistically, while within each language, the same influence is reversed in turn by ambiguity (see Figure 5.7).
In pondering potential explanations for this, it is worth remembering that, due to differences in morphological structure between English and Spanish, namely the degree of inflectional affixation and the proportion of roots that are bound versus free, the comparability of the ambiguity parameter across the two languages is limited. In Spanish, every ambiguous pair had at least one member that definitely had two different though related meanings, each of a different word class. There was no such guarantee among the English ambiguous pairs.
Furthermore, Marslen-Wilson et al. (1994, p. 17) observed that, "if anything," the stems in their experiment primed derivatives more than derivatives primed stems, though this effect failed to reach statistical significance in their case. This seems to have been the trend here as well, at least for Spanish unambiguous stimuli. Additionally, there is also a potential role for frequency effects. Although frequency of form was controlled for in stimulus selection, frequency of meaning was not. For those words which indeed had two distinct but related meanings, those
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distinct usages may not have been equally frequent. If not, this may have biased lexical access in some cases. For example, if the nominal sense of Spanish vuelo is significantly more frequent than the verbal sense, it may not prime the deverbal derivative volador as much as, for instance, vuela, which can only be an inflected verb form. These factors, especially in combination, provide fertile ground towards a possible account for the significant interactions found in this work.
Nevertheless, ambiguity and/or direction effects are unlikely to have skewed the overall results of any Language × Condition analyses, which are the focus of the current study. The main reason for this is that great care was taken in stimulus selection to assure that, within each condition in each language, the relative proportions of each control category (ambiguous, non- ambiguous, simple-to-complex, and complex-to-simple) were at least roughly equal. In this way, any effects of ambiguity or direction could be made to essentially balance out within each category of interest (i.e. condition and language).
The most theoretically important findings are those regarding morphological priming and orthographic inhibition. As noted in Chapter 2, full decomposition is very probable in the realm of inflectional morphology, where productivity and parsimony both practically demand it.
Derivational morphology is where the answers to questions about lexical access are still not as clear. This dissertation has specifically relegated itself to derivational morphology as its focus, and the results are a strike against full listing, at least in its purest form. Full listing predicts, for instance, that contador ("accountant; storyteller") would not likely prime cuento ("I count; I narrate" as a verb, "story/tale; account" as a noun). Similarity in surface form is limited to the first segment and thus a very poor explanation for any priming. So only by parsing out the stem cont- within contador would the lemma of which cuento is an inflected form be activated and
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thus more quickly recognized. However, it would be difficult to motivate such parsing if contador already had its own holistic entry in the mental lexicon. Yet word pairs exemplified by contador/cuento showed statistically significant facilitation effects. Furthermore, analysis of pairs without any such phonological stem allomorphy, such as canto ("I sing" as a verb,
"song/chant" as a noun) and cantante (singer) may be particularly telling, since in a full listing model of lexical access, if anything, one might actually expect some inhibition rather than facilitation, much as one would expect between, for example, cantidad ("quantity") and cantante.
Exactly the contrary was observed, however, even though pairs that were actually analogous to cantidad/cantante did show a significant inhibitory effect. Nevertheless, there is still reason for skepticism of full decomposition. As previously mentioned, Marslen-Wilson et al. (1994) found that, while stems and suffixed derivatives prime each other, suffixed derivatives sharing a common stem do not appear to do so (e.g. governor failed to facilitate government even though either succeeded in facilitating or being facilitated by govern). This is not readily explained under any account in which a stem like govern must be mentally accessed in order for recognition of any derivative thereof to proceed, though on their part, the researchers in question have proposed a kind of competition between suffixes. Another reason to doubt full decomposition is highlighted by the fact that this dissertation notably excluded prefixed forms from its stimulus pool, and at least some relevant research that included them has produced results that are problematic for a strict decomposition model. One such study by Schriefers et al.
(1991) concluded with the suggestion that neither model is wholly accurate. "To summarize," they wrote, "the process of identifying morphologically complex spoken words is neither completely blind to internal structure, as suggested by a full-listing-only view, nor is it mediated by prelexical decomposition of spoken input into stems and affixes. Rather, complex words
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seem to be processed essentially in a left-to-right manner, but their identification is dependent on certain properties of their constituent morphemes. As a consequence, we assume that, in addition to full word forms, the mental lexicon also contains information about the constituents of morphologically complex words and that this information is used in word identification." The results of the study reported here are certainly compatible with such a hybrid model and further suggest that, whatever the exact structure of lexical processing, phonological stem allomorphy does not substantially affect it. Perhaps the most unique suggestion of the work put forth here is the use of orthographic depth as a focal variable to potentially confirm that graphological stem allomorphy has no such impact either. If valid, this conclusion may have implications for how orthographic input processing compares to phonological input processing as well as how they relate to each other.
Finally, the findings from this investigation remain neutral with regards to the relative merits of a deep orthography versus a shallow orthography. They do seem to falsify the hypothesis that a deep orthography provides an advantage in word recognition or broader reading comprehension, but by themselves, they do not attest to any particular advantage of a shallow orthography, at least for adult readers. Hence, one possible way in which a deep orthography could be argued to compensate for the slower acquisition rates evidenced in Chapter 2 is dealt an empirical blow. That is to say that the extra effort and time taken to master a deep orthography in childhood does not seem to yield extra efficient reading ability in adulthood, or at least if it does, the benefit does not appear to take the form of enhanced sensitivity to the morphological connections between related words. Experienced English readers appear to recognize words and comprehend cohesive texts with roughly the same proficiency as Spanish readers. What remains to be seen is whether the apparent ability to easily abstract away from stem allomorphy in related
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surface forms and access underlying morphological ties, regardless of whether or not such surface variation is given explicit orthographic representation, is a late or early development. If morphological awareness provides considerable benefits for the acquisition of literacy and vocabulary, as the literature surveyed in Chapter 2 generally suggests, then it stands to reason that the morphological transparency of the orthography being acquired could well influence the learning process. In the same chapter, I observed that the unique challenges of using a deep orthography are likely, "superable with age and experience." Perhaps the same is true of the arguable challenges of a shallow orthography, namely the obscuring of morphological relationships between words with alternating stems. The hypothesized cross-linguistic difference in morphological priming effects that this experiment failed to find in adults may yet exist in children, only to be diluted into indetectability as readers of both deep and shallow orthographies eventually overcome their own respective challenges and arrive at a comparable average level of proficiency, even though the rate of learning and/or particular difficulties at any given time along the way may have been different. Repeating an experiment similar to this one with child subjects would be an excellent first step in investigating that possibility.
Limitations
While certainly suggested, none of these inferences are conclusively established by this study. The current failure to reject the null hypothesis with respect to the effect of orthographic depth on morphological priming and text comprehension may well indicate a genuine lack of effect, but alternatively, the testing techniques may be insufficiently sensitive or otherwise limited in their ability to detect an effect which might yet exist. In particular, aside from the rather limited sample size (which the COVID-19 pandemic may have restricted further in the later stages of experimentation) as well as the methodological challenges of cross-linguistic research and consequent limitations discussed in Chapter 3, one must also consider the fact that, 116
while most or all of the English-speaking subjects were effectively monolingual (though one reported having studied Spanish for seven years and another reported an ability to understand
Haitian Creole), the environment in which this experiment was conducted all but guaranteed that most or all of the Spanish-speakers would be at least somewhat bilingual, with some command of English as an L2 and likely spending much of their time communicating therein at the time of their participation. In fact, two Spanish speakers reported having had at least one Anglophone parent. Care was taken to solicit only Spanish-speakers whose bilingualism was sequential and for whom English was thus a true second language rather than a parallel first language, but this potential confound could not be eliminated entirely and therefore remains cause for caution in interpreting these results.
Nevertheless, at least with respect to bilingualism as a potential confound regarding the
Spanish speakers, some alleviation of concern may be possible. The questionnaire administered to every Spanish speaker prior to beginning the experiment serves as a means to provide some additional control. The bilingualism scores ranged from 12 to 33 with a mean of 18.6 and a standard deviation of 4.82. Linearly regressing overall morphological priming (as calculated for the previous regression) and cloze scores each as a function of bilingualism rating yielded very low R2 values of 0.053 and 0.013 respectively. This implies that bilingualism is not useful in predicting morphological facilitation or cloze scores, which at least implies a very weak effect.
It should be noted, however, that a few questionnaire responses were unexpectedly difficult to interpret, and the fidelity of the interpretation used for analytical purposes is therefore questionable.
In any case, more similar research needs to be carried out before any firm conclusions can be reached. While much of the relevant literature touches upon the right themes and even
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parallels some key aspects of the work reported here, there is relatively little that targets this specific question so directly and with comparable or better methods. Replication is thus especially important in furthering the goals of this research. I would particularly recommend that interested researchers with the necessary resources attempt to replicate or emulate this study in environments that enable better control for bilingualism, in particular the relative frequency of
L1 versus L2 usage. Enhanced control for age may also be advisable, since as an informal observation, the Spanish speakers tested here seemed to vary in age more widely than the
English speakers did, most of whom were quite young. In addition to hopefully encouraging further investigation of how morphological transparency in spelling affects reading proficiency and/or literacy acquisition, the experiment detailed here appears to provide some supplementary evidence for the inhibitory effects of orthographic overlap suggested by at least a few other studies (e.g. Allen & Badecker, 2002; Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995). Continued exploration of the key questions addressed in this experiment and/or the more unexpected results thereof, particularly with some methodological enhancements, may not only strengthen or qualify the findings reported here but also provide additional insight into how morphological transparency interacts with orthographic inhibition, priming direction, and/or lexical ambiguity.
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APPENDIX A PRIMING STIMULI
Table A-1. English List #1 Prime Target Condition Lexical Status Ambiguous Direction compose composition AL Word Yes S-C precision precise AL Word Yes C-S gene genetic AL Word Yes S-C define definition AL Word Yes S-C dramatic drama AL Word Yes C-S obscenity obscene AL Word Yes C-S confidence santafy AL NONCE Yes N/A microscope slackroom AL NONCE Yes N/A sane batle AL NONCE Yes N/A modern ritew AL NONCE Yes N/A wide andiguous AL NONCE Yes N/A atomic taughler AL NONCE Yes N/A accidental accident AL Word No C-S ecology ecological AL Word No S-C supplement supplementary AL Word No S-C reduce reduction AL Word No S-C residential residence AL Word No C-S democratic democracy AL Word No C-S theology paber AL NONCE No N/A contrary surce AL NONCE No N/A astronomical droup AL NONCE No N/A photography brecnant AL NONCE No N/A speculate shoto AL NONCE No N/A recognition seilure AL NONCE No N/A navy naval NL Word Yes S-C music musical NL Word Yes S-C except exception NL Word Yes S-C comparison compare NL Word Yes C-S collection collect NL Word Yes C-S engagement engage NL Word Yes C-S forget nelife NL NONCE Yes N/A inform mightnare NL NONCE Yes N/A humorous lawk NL NONCE Yes N/A glory reedrein NL NONCE Yes N/A reject woter NL NONCE Yes N/A betray eretheal NL NONCE Yes N/A
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Table A-1. Continued Prime Target Condition Lexical Status Ambiguous Direction conscious consciousness NL Word No S-C structural structure NL Word No C-S proportional proportion NL Word No C-S traditional tradition NL Word No C-S reactionary reaction NL Word No C-S mission missionarya NL Word No S-C fluent yamor NL NONCE No N/A delusional krind NL NONCE No N/A evolution sopa NL NONCE No N/A inspiration wech NL NONCE No N/A mathematical sked NL NONCE No N/A seriously locleague NL NONCE No N/A pollb polite OO Word N/A N/A complain compliant OO Word N/A N/A reach reality OO Word N/A N/A nut nutrition OO Word N/A N/A substance substitute OO Word N/A N/A narrow narrate OO Word N/A N/A solemn sole OO Word N/A N/A reluctant reliable OO Word N/A N/A temperament temporary OO Word N/A N/A expert expense OO Word N/A N/A profane professor OO Word N/A N/A river rival OO Word N/A N/A Christian Chridney OO NONCE N/A N/A serene sert OO NONCE N/A N/A Bible Biblet OO NONCE N/A N/A confrontational confard OO NONCE N/A N/A confide contuck OO NONCE N/A N/A efficient effil OO NONCE N/A N/A recover recop OO NONCE N/A N/A discrete dispray OO NONCE N/A N/A hypocrite hyponize OO NONCE N/A N/A confidence conscrale OO NONCE N/A N/A consistent conspeck OO NONCE N/A N/A broad broan OO NONCE N/A N/A direction grandfather UR Word N/A N/A treason reject UR Word N/A N/A abduct cake UR Word N/A N/A
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Table A-1. Continued Prime Target Condition Lexical Status Ambiguous Direction conscience desk UR Word N/A N/A treachery survive UR Word N/A N/A meter shoot UR Word N/A N/A tower inane UR Word N/A N/A expose medium UR Word N/A N/A adventure library UR Word N/A N/A racing guide UR Word N/A N/A impose draft UR Word N/A N/A patient leg UR Word N/A N/A presume vell UR NONCE N/A N/A hesitant nidder UR NONCE N/A N/A drink peygoard UR NONCE N/A N/A conspire rafe UR NONCE N/A N/A correct jinure UR NONCE N/A N/A recognize pornounce UR NONCE N/A N/A friend thap UR NONCE N/A N/A abdomen reg UR NONCE N/A N/A racist cabon UR NONCE N/A N/A regional swin UR NONCE N/A N/A evolution pedray UR NONCE N/A N/A instrument spon UR NONCE N/A N/A C-S = Complex-to-Simple; S-C = Simple-to-Complex; N/A = not applicable; a replaced the miscategorized pair division/divide, which was recoded as ambiguous AL going in the C-S direction for the six subjects exposed to this list prior to detection of the error; b replaced the mismatched prime emotional, with the original pair being recoded as UR for the six subjects exposed to this list prior to detection of the error
Table A-2. English List #2 Prime Target Condition Lexical Status Ambiguous Direction mortality mortal AL Word Yes C-S fatal fatality AL Word Yes S-C sufficient suffice AL Word Yes C-S wisdom wise AL Word Yes C-S crime criminal AL Word Yes S-C reside resident AL Word Yes S-C divine erengency AL NONCE Yes N/A derivative frent AL NONCE Yes N/A satirical pestock AL NONCE Yes N/A revision feadhone AL NONCE Yes N/A clean grafe AL NONCE Yes N/A historical lant AL NONCE Yes N/A
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Table A-2. Continued Prime Target Condition Lexical Status Ambiguous Direction preference preferential AL Word No S-C sentimental sentiment AL Word No C-S diplomacy diplomatic AL Word No S-C considerate consideration AL Word No S-C essential essence AL Word No C-S corporation corporate AL Word No C-S philosophy secrue AL NONCE No N/A nature chine AL NONCE No N/A diagnosis reho AL NONCE No N/A complementary plake AL NONCE No N/A biological vursive AL NONCE No N/A produce vonelty AL NONCE No N/A accept acceptance NL Word Yes S-C transformative transform NL Word Yes C-S swift swiftly NL Word Yes S-C expose exposure NL Word Yes S-C adulthood adult NL Word Yes C-S faithful faith NL Word Yes C-S absurd talitude NL NONCE Yes N/A creepily reat NL NONCE Yes N/A invent rooch NL NONCE Yes N/A perform tigue NL NONCE Yes N/A reflection rappit NL NONCE Yes N/A complete pimunity NL NONCE Yes N/A fictional fiction NL Word No C-S permanent permanently NL Word No S-C revolutionary revolution NL Word No C-S absent absence NL Word No S-C distant distance NL Word No S-C religious religion NL Word No C-S description naift NL NONCE No N/A redundancy dilchood NL NONCE No N/A confrontation runge NL NONCE No N/A ethical gucks NL NONCE No N/A emotion napstoke NL NONCE No N/A politics edivence NL NONCE No N/A corner corps OO Word N/A N/A creek creepy OO Word N/A N/A invention inventory OO Word N/A N/A
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Table A-2. Continued Prime Target Condition Lexical Status Ambiguous Direction perfume performer OO Word N/A N/A refrain reflect OO Word N/A N/A completely compound OO Word N/A N/A revise revival OO Word N/A N/A redundant reduce OO Word N/A N/A crimson crime OO Word N/A N/A ethics ethereal OO Word N/A N/A absolute absurdity OO Word N/A N/A cultural cult OO Word N/A N/A rescue rescitory OO NONCE N/A N/A derive derige OO NONCE N/A N/A satire satic OO NONCE N/A N/A descriptive deslict OO NONCE N/A N/A nice nickly OO NONCE N/A N/A invest invemp OO NONCE N/A N/A milk milt OO NONCE N/A N/A coincidence coige OO NONCE N/A N/A diagnostic diasophy OO NONCE N/A N/A complement comper OO NONCE N/A N/A biology biode OO NONCE N/A N/A emotional emone OO NONCE N/A N/A novelty studio UR Word N/A N/A divinity insult UR Word N/A N/A shine library UR Word N/A N/A hero comedy UR Word N/A N/A brake knight UR Word N/A N/A begin survive UR Word N/A N/A crave rare UR Word N/A N/A rant window UR Word N/A N/A emergency rabbit UR Word N/A N/A friend clock UR Word N/A N/A despot foster UR Word N/A N/A headphone bone UR Word N/A N/A capstone munarecil UR NONCE N/A N/A natural drashety UR NONCE N/A N/A faint pontrehension UR NONCE N/A N/A childhood coggel UR NONCE N/A N/A lunch slavation UR NONCE N/A N/A dusk jerect UR NONCE N/A N/A
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Table A-2. Continued Prime Target Condition Lexical Status Ambiguous Direction impunity skepression UR NONCE N/A N/A rabbit chysipian UR NONCE N/A N/A latitude klim UR NONCE N/A N/A tear picken UR NONCE N/A N/A root nightling UR NONCE N/A N/A guide dook UR NONCE N/A N/A C-S = Complex-to-Simple; S-C = Simple-to-Complex; N/A = not applicable
Table A-3. Spanish List #1 Target Prime Prime Meaning Target Con. Amb. Dir. Meaning I rent out, I arrendamiento rental, leasing arriendo AL Yes C-S lease; rent I seat, I lay settlement, asiento asentamiento AL Yes S-C (down); seat settling vuelo I fly; flight volador flying AL Yes S-C I hibernate; I winter (adj.), invierno spend winter; invernal AL Yes S-C wintry winter dreamer, I dream; dream soñador sueño AL Yes C-S visionary (n.) I count; I accountant; contador cuento tell/narrate; AL Yes C-S storyteller story/tale esfuerzo I strive; effort arzal NONCE AL Yes N/A he/she/it apuesta bets/wagers; llazgo NONCE AL Yes N/A bet/wager (n.) despierto I awaken; awake dalmición NONCE AL Yes N/A he/she/it hangs; cuelga sefuerzo NONCE AL Yes N/A hanging sembrador sower rueste NONCE AL Yes N/A jugador player irsa NONCE AL Yes N/A land, ground, ground (adj.), tierra terrestre AL No S-C earth terrestrial sky-blue; celeste heavenly, cielo sky, heaven AL No C-S celestial repiten they repeat repetición repetition AL No S-C demostración demonstration demuestro I demonstrate AL No C-S pierde he/she/it loses pérdida loss AL No S-C pensamiento thought piensa he/she/it thinks AL No C-S
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Table A-3. Continued Target Prime Prime Meaning Target Con. Amb. Dir. Meaning cuelas you (sg.) strain egornullezco NONCE AL No N/A sorprendente surprising encoleces NONCE AL No N/A envolvente wrapping secribir NONCE AL No N/A bueno good natiguo NONCE AL No N/A ceguera blindness espidarar NONCE AL No N/A muevo I move ipel NONCE AL No N/A businessman/b comercio I deal; commerce comerciante NL Yes S-C usinesswoman I vote/vow; voto votación voting NL Yes S-C vote/vow he/she/it blames; culpa culpable guilty NL Yes S-C blame, guilt ongoing, I progress; progresivo progressive, progreso NL Yes C-S progress continual odioso hateful, odious odio I hate; hatred NL Yes C-S I try/attempt; intención intention intento NL Yes C-S attempt/try (n.) he/she/it mixes; mezcla fenasto NONCE NL Yes N/A mix, mixture hechicero sorcerer nero NONCE NL Yes N/A I please/charm; I enchant; charm, encanto sauca NONCE NL Yes N/A beauty; enchantment cuidado care, caution sezobo NONCE NL Yes N/A he/she/it hunts; caza estego NONCE NL Yes N/A hunt, hunting good for the pagador money, prompt icual NONCE NL Yes N/A to pay borrador eraser borras you (sg.) erase NL No C-S colored, color color colorado NL No S-C colorful vendedor seller/salesperson vendes you (sg.) sell NL No C-S they liberate/set liberan liberación liberation NL No S-C free celebración celebration celebran they celebrate NL No C-S reconocen they recognize reconocimiento recognition NL No S-C
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Table A-3. Continued Target Prime Prime Meaning Target Con. Amb. Dir. Meaning you (sg.) manejas manage; you acareper NONCE NL No N/A (sg.) drive teme he/she/it fears nigreso NONCE NL No N/A compro I buy trigar NONCE NL No N/A amante lover danar NONCE NL No N/A they colocan gesuro NONCE NL No N/A place/arrange formo I form celtado NONCE NL No N/A presión pressure, strain prefecto prefect OO N/A N/A reforzamiento reinforcement reformar (to) reform OO N/A N/A escondo I hide escoger (to) choose OO N/A N/A I trip/stumble; tropiezo tropical tropical OO N/A N/A trip/stumble (that) it may nieto grandson nieve snow; snow OO N/A N/A (n.) (that) I/he/she/it may embark; I impregnate; embarque loading, embarazo OO N/A N/A pregnancy embarcation; shipping you (sg.) vender (to) sell vences defeat/vanquis OO N/A N/A h/overcome sobbing, llanto weeping, tears, llamo I call OO N/A N/A sobs (to) turn in, entrada entrance entregar OO N/A N/A (to) hand over average/mean prometen they promise promedio OO N/A N/A (n.) confesión confession confianza confidence OO N/A N/A verdad truth verde green OO N/A N/A impiden they impede impieza NONCE OO N/A N/A I squeeze; aprieto predicament, aprida NONCE OO N/A N/A squeeze descent, bajada bajedo NONCE OO N/A N/A downward slope desafiante challenging desaño NONCE OO N/A N/A
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Table A-3. Continued Target Prime Prime Meaning Target Con. Amb. Dir. Meaning puerta door puerne NONCE OO N/A N/A enviar (to) send envico NONCE OO N/A N/A he/she/it tracks; huella track (i.e. huete NONCE OO N/A N/A footprint) molino mill molbe NONCE OO N/A N/A dieta diet dielo NONCE OO N/A N/A I disembark; desembarco desempre NONCE OO N/A N/A disembarcation media mind medar NONCE OO N/A N/A droga drug droca NONCE OO N/A N/A cantidad quantity énfasis emphasis UR N/A N/A corner; niegan they deny rincón UR N/A N/A hideout, retreat water heater, calentador boiler; heating, moderno modern UR N/A N/A warming poderoso powerful cena dinner/supper UR N/A N/A he/she/it filósofo philosopher copia copies; copy UR N/A N/A (n.) sorprendente surprising correr (to) run UR N/A N/A he/she/it aprueba freno I brake; brake UR N/A N/A approves puerto port comenzar (to) begin/start UR N/A N/A costoso costly luna moon UR N/A N/A Navidad Christmas bandera flag UR N/A N/A they want; they quieren miedo fear UR N/A N/A love traducción translation emergencia emergency UR N/A N/A I weld/sodder; sueldo purnonciar NONCE UR N/A N/A salary comprensión comprehension nierpa NONCE UR N/A N/A squeeze, hug, apretón neca NONCE UR N/A N/A handshake dependiente depending (adj.) hipera NONCE UR N/A N/A muerdes you (sg.) bite persión NONCE UR N/A N/A soledad loneliness duelso NONCE UR N/A N/A hielo I freeze; ice groda NONCE UR N/A N/A alivio I relieve; relief raticionar NONCE UR N/A N/A
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Table A-3. Continued Target Prime Prime Meaning Target Con. Amb. Dir. Meaning libro I get rid of; book enelco NONCE UR N/A N/A forzoso forceful quesivar NONCE UR N/A N/A noticias news pémase NONCE UR N/A N/A papel paper; role lifósofo NONCE UR N/A N/A Con. = Condition; Amb. = Ambiguous; Dir. = Direction; C-S = Complex-to-Simple; S-C = Simple-to-Complex; N/A = not applicable
Table A-4. Spanish List #2 Prime Prime Meaning Target Target Meaning Con. Amb. Dir. I express/ protest/ reveal/exhibit; demonstration; manifiesto manifestación AL Yes S-C clear, evident manifestation, (m.) appearance I blind, I block ciego off; I dazzle; ceguera blindness AL Yes S-C blind (m.) he/she/it rolls; rodante rolling rueda AL Yes C-S wheel reminder; I remember; recordatorio commemorative recuerdo AL Yes C-S memory card he/she/it test, testing tries/tests; prueba probador (adj.); fitting AL Yes S-C he/she/it proves; room test; proof I encourage; I alentador encouraging aliento breathe; AL Yes C-S encouragement I reinforce; refuerzo reinforcement, aduya NONCE AL Yes N/A support (that) I/he/she/it caliente may heat/warm gepar NONCE AL Yes N/A (up); hot, warm he/she/it apuesta bets/wagers; tred NONCE AL Yes N/A bet/wager (n.) dental dental horguima NONCE AL Yes N/A (that) I/he/she/it may close; cierre huseo NONCE AL Yes N/A closing, closure, shutting down
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Table A-4. Continued Prime Prime Meaning Target Target Meaning Con. Amb. Dir. renovable renewable cherazar NONCE AL Yes N/A scholarly; escuela school escolar AL Yes S-C schoolchild he/she/it aprueba aprobación approval AL No S-C approves duele he/she/it hurts dolor sorrow/ache AL No S-C cierto true/certain certeza certainty AL No S-C movimiento movement muevo I move AL No C-S sentimental sentimental sentimiento feeling AL No C-S shame; vergüenza setudiar NONCE AL No N/A embarrassment moribundo moribund vonedad NONCE AL No N/A negación negation guefo NONCE AL No N/A cocinero cook (n.) maluerzo NONCE AL No N/A love, attachment, querencia ráglima NONCE AL No N/A fondness, affection he/she/it mide bratalenguas NONCE AL No N/A measures I sing; canto cantante singer NL Yes S-C song/chant I challenge; desafío desafiante challenging NL Yes S-C challenge I announce/ anuncio anunciante advertising (adj.) NL Yes S-C herald/advertise he/she/it amenazador threatening amenaza NL Yes C-S threatens; threat I negotiate/do negocio business; store, negociación negotiation NL Yes S-C business I murder/assassina murder, asesinato asesino te; killer, NL Yes C-S assasination murderer, assassin he/she/it asks; pregunta leval NONCE NL Yes N/A question embarazada pregnant moquedia NONCE NL Yes N/A programación programming chone NONCE NL Yes N/A
lleno I fill; full hereo NONCE NL Yes N/A
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Table A-4. Continued Prime Prime Meaning Target Target Meaning Con. Amb. Dir. noticeable, notable obvious, cotubre NONCE NL Yes N/A prominent guardián guardian recrero NONCE NL Yes N/A revelación revelation revela he/she/it reveals NL No C-S troublemaker; you (sg.) provocador provocas NL No C-S agitator provoke he/she/it enfrentamiento confrontation enfrenta NL No C-S confronts/faces niño small child niñez childhood NL No S-C buyer, comprador compro I buy NL No C-S purchaser mente mind mental mental NL No S-C
comida food helto NONCE NL No N/A he/she/it traduce nectral NONCE NL No N/A translates descubren they discover didliopeca NONCE NL No N/A rompe he/she/it breaks aguir NONCE NL No N/A comentar (to) comment nocejo NONCE NL No N/A you (sg.) sorprendes béstopa NONCE NL No N/A surprise entra he/she/it enters entrenar (to) train OO N/A N/A verdadero true verano summer OO N/A N/A deporte sport dependiente depending (adj.) OO N/A N/A sirena mermaid sirves you (sg.) serve OO N/A N/A learned, educated, high- he/she/it blames; culto culpa OO N/A N/A brow; worship; blame, guilt cult siguiente following (adj.) siglo century OO N/A N/A duele he/she/it hurts dueño owner OO N/A N/A sordo deaf sorpresa surprise OO N/A N/A I stitching, hechizo bewitch/enchant hechura OO N/A N/A tailoring, making /curse; spell (n.) goodness, bondad boniato sweet potato OO N/A N/A kindness ciervo buck (deer) ciencia hundred OO N/A N/A
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Table A-4. Continued Prime Prime Meaning Target Target Meaning Con. Amb. Dir. present, current actualidad actuar (to) act OO N/A N/A time shameful, vergonzoso verda NONCE OO N/A N/A disgraceful envuelves you (sg.) wrap envuello NONCE OO N/A N/A charming, encantador encansa NONCE OO N/A N/A delightful cuidadoso careful cuidre NONCE OO N/A N/A cazador hunter caziena NONCE OO N/A N/A pago I pay; payment paguero NONCE OO N/A N/A mano hand manez NONCE OO N/A N/A fearsome, temible temir NONCE OO N/A N/A frightening computadora computer compe NONCE OO N/A N/A ama he/she/it loves amace NONCE OO N/A N/A placing/laying/ colocación coloval NONCE OO N/A N/A arrangement formación formation forna NONCE OO N/A N/A he/she/ it niñez childhood tienta tries/tempts; UR N/A N/A trial, test he/she/it complains/ groans/moans; queja brillar (to) shine UR N/A N/A complaint; grudge, resentment despedida farewell raro rare; weird, odd UR N/A N/A
llamada call (n.) marinero sailor UR N/A N/A médico medical; doctor cuerpo body UR N/A N/A nevada snowfall fomentar (to) foster UR N/A N/A tierno tender (m.) guiar (to) guide UR N/A N/A seco I dry; dry hotel hotel UR N/A N/A cuestan they cost amigo friend UR N/A N/A returned; vuelto llave key UR N/A N/A change (money) I squeeze; I have lunch; aprieto predicament, almuerzo UR N/A N/A lunch squeeze
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Table A-4. Continued Prime Prime Meaning Target Target Meaning Con. Amb. Dir. alimento I feed/nourish héroe hero UR N/A N/A infierno Hell obuela NONCE UR N/A N/A I reinforce; refuerzo reinforcement, desnavecer NONCE UR N/A N/A support expresión expression jelor NONCE UR N/A N/A dependo I depend mofentar NONCE UR N/A N/A muerdes you (sg.) bite laro NONCE UR N/A N/A I disembark; desembarco llabrir NONCE UR N/A N/A disembarcation ice cream heladera achonecer NONCE UR N/A N/A vendor amor love mizen NONCE UR N/A N/A teclado keyboard aufídono NONCE UR N/A N/A he/she/it helps; ayuda guerbo NONCE UR N/A N/A help he/she/it guarda guards/keeps; medocracia NONCE UR N/A N/A guard he/she/it notes/observes; nota boservivir NONCE UR N/A N/A note, mark, memo, grade Con. = Condition; Amb. = Ambiguous; Dir. = Direction; C-S = Complex-to-Simple; S-C = Simple-to-Complex; N/A = not applicable
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APPENDIX B CLOZE TEXTS
Deleted words are underlined with foil options following in italics and enclosed within parentheses.
True Love, adapted from Tales with Soul by Rosario Gómez
A famous teacher found himself before a group of young college students who were against marriage. The kids argued that romanticism constitutes a couple's real foundation and that it is preferable to end a relationship when that wanes (grows, stays, dances) instead of entering the empty monotony of marriage. The teacher told them that he respected their opinion, but he related the following:
My parents were married (employed, educated, alone) for fifty-five years. One morning, my mom was descending the stairs to prepare breakfast (lunch, wine, clothes) for my dad and suffered a heart attack. My father reached her (him, them, us), lifted her up as best he could and, almost dragging her, put her into the truck. Racing at full speed (contentedly, leisurely, cleverly) without respecting the traffic lights, he drove all the way to the hospital (school, store, movie theater). When he arrived, unfortunately, she had already passed away.
During the funeral (walk, encounter, discovery), my father did not speak, his gaze was lost, and he barely cried. That night, his children met with him (her, them, others). In an environment of pain and nostalgia, we remembered lovely anecdotes. He asked my theologian brother to tell him where Mom was at that moment. My brother began to speak of life after death and conjectured about where and how she would be.
My father listened (spoke, cried, ran) with great attention. He suddenly requested, "Take me to the cemetary (office, house, field)!"
"Dad," we responded, "it's eleven o'clock at night! We can't go to the cemetary now."
He raised his voice and, with a glassy (happy, surprised, bored) look, said, "Don't argue with me (with her, with them, with us), please. Don't argue with the man who's just lost his wife of fifty- five years!"
A moment of respectful silence (anger, pride, realism) ensued. We argued (chatted, sobbed, worked) no more. We went to the cemetary, asked permission from the guard, and arrived with a flashlight at the headstone (yard, door, land). My father caressed it (her, them, us), prayed, and said to his children, who were moved watching the scene, "They were fifty-five good years. You know? Nobody can talk about real love if they have no idea of what it is to share a life with a woman like this." He paused and wiped his face (thighs, arms, back). "We were together during that crisis, during my job change. We made the move when we sold the house and relocated to a different city. We shared happiness at seeing our children finish their careers, cried (celebrated, ran, rested) side-by-side at the passing of our loved ones, prayed together in the waiting rooms of some hospitals, supported each other in sorrow, hugged each other every Christmas, and forgave
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our mistakes. Kids, now she's left, and I'm content. Do you know why? Because (What's more, Therefore, Then) she went before me, she didn't have to live through the agony and grief of burying me, of ending up alone after my passing. It'll be me who goes through that, and I thank God. I love her (him, them, you) so much that I wouldn't have wanted her to suffer."
When my father stopped speaking, my siblings and I had our faces soaked in tears. We hugged him, and he consoled us. "Everything's fine, kids. We can go home. It's been a good day."
Amor Verdadero, adaptado de Cuentos con Alma por Rosario Gómez
Un famoso maestro se encontró frente a un grupo de jóvenes universitarios que estaban en contra del matrimonio. Los muchachos argumentaban que el romanticismo constituye el verdadero sustento de las parejas y que es preferible acabar con la relación cuando ésta se apaga (crece, se queda, baila) en lugar de entrar a la hueca monotonía del matrimonio. El maestro les dijo que respetaba su opinión, pero les relató lo siguiente:
Mis padres vivieron cincuenta y cinco años casados (empleados, educados, solos). Una mañana, mi mamá bajaba las escaleras para prepararle a papá el desayuno (almuerzo, vino, cinturón) y sufrió un infarto. Mi padre la (lo, las, nos) alcanzó, la levantó como pudo y, casi a rastras, la subió a la camioneta. A toda velocidad (Contentamente, sin prisa, listamente), saltándose sin respetar los semáforos, condujo hasta el hospital (la escuela, la tienda, el cine). Cuando llegó, por desgracia, ya había fallecido.
Durante el funeral (paseo, encuentro, descubrimiento), mi padre no habló, su mirada estaba perdida, y casi no lloró. Esa noche, sus hijos nos reunimos con él (ella, ellos, otros). En un ambiente de dolor y de nostalgia, recordamos hermosas anécdotas. Él pidió a mi hermano teólogo que le dijera dónde estaría mamá en ese momento. Mi hermano comenzó a hablar de la vida después de la muerte y conjeturó cómo y dónde estaría ella.
Mi padre escuchaba (hablaba, lloraba, corría) con gran atención. De pronto pidió, "Llévenme al cementerio (a la oficina, a la casa, al campo)!"
"Papá," respondimos, "¡son las once de la noche! No podemos ir al cementerio ahora."
Alzó la voz y, con una mirada vidriosa (feliz, sorprendida, aburrida), dijo, "No discutan conmigo (con ella, con ellos, con nosotros), por favor. No discutan con el hombre que acaba de perder a la que fue su esposa por cincuenta y cinco años."
Se produjo un momento de respetuoso silencio (enojo, orgullo, realismo). No discutimos (charlamos, sollozamos, trabajamos) más. Fuimos al cementerio, pedimos permiso al velador, y con una linterna llegamos a la lápida (hierba, puerta, tierra). Mi padre la (lo, las, nos) acarició, rezó, y nos dijo a sus hijos que veíamos la escena conmovidos, "Fueron cincuenta y cinco buenos años...¿Saben? Nadie puede hablar del amor verdadero si no tiene idea de lo que es compartir la vida con una mujer así." Hizo una pausa y se limpió la cara (el muslo, los brazos, la espalda). "Ella y yo estuvimos juntos en aquella crisis, en mi cambio de empleo," continuó. "Hicimos la mudanza cuando vendimos la casa y nos trasladamos de ciudad. Compartimos la alegría de ver a nuestros hijos terminar sus carreras, lloramos (celebramos, corrimos, nos descansamos) uno al 134
lado del otro la partida de nuestros seres queridos, rezamos juntos en la sala de espera de algunos hospitales, nos apoyamos en el dolor, nos abrazamos en cada Navidad, y perdonamos nuestros errores. Hijos, ahora se ha ido y estoy contento. ¿Saben por qué? Porque (Es más, Por eso, Entonces) se fue antes que yo, no tuvo que vivir la agonía y el dolor de enterrarme, de quedarse sola después de mi partida. Seré yo quien pase por eso, y le doy gracias a Dios. La (lo, las, los) amo tanto que no me hubiera gustado que sufriera."
Cuando mi padre terminó de hablar, mis hermanos y yo teníamos el rostro empapado de lágrimas. Lo abrazamos y el nos consoló. "Todo está bien, hijos. Podemos irnos a casa. Ha sido un buen día."
Psychology by Ingrid Nakagawa Mendoza
It was Wilhelm Wundt, who was one of the most important scholars of the 19th century, who contributed in a very significant way to the establishment of psychology as an independent science. In Leipzig (Germany), he (she, it, they) founded the first institute of psychology in the world. Experimental psychology as a scientific (simple, strict, forgotten) discipline began with the studies of the German physician Gustav Theodor Fechner, whose work Elements of Psychophysics (1860) utilized experimental (theoretical, special, recovered) data to test the relation between physical and sensory scales. That relation had a logarithmic mathematical formulation, known as Fechner's Law, considered one of the basic laws of perception. Years later (earlier, ago, since) in 1879, Wundt, a German psychologist, founded the first psychological (neurological, forensic, chemical) laboratory. Wundt (Freud, Einstein, Skinner) taught subjects to give detailed descriptions of sensations (introspectively experienced) that a series of systematically controled stimuli provoked in them. The psychologist also (instead, nevertheless, yet) measured the reaction times in tests of variable complexity, trying to identify internal psychic components and discover the laws that ruled their combinations. Wundt and his (her, its, their) conception of psychology dominated the field, at least in the academic realm, until the beginnings of the 20th century, when (where, as, because) introspective methods, or the very consideration of internal psychic phenomena as an object of scientific study, were deprecated (accepted, explored, sought), incapable of clarifying phenomena such as thought without imagery. His rivals rebelled against Wundt's rules. His (her, its, their) compatriot Hermann Ebbinghaus directed a monumental investigation of memory that involved the learning of long series of nonsense syllables, setting a precedent for future (lost, older, younger) generations of psychologists specialized in learning. These professionals pursued similar objectives to equip psychology, traditionally an object of philosophical speculation, with scientific rigor. They therefore (still, nonetheless, first) began to do laboratory experiments with animals, a tendency that methodologically and conceptually guided the American Edward Lee Thorndike.
Later, the Amerian J. B. Watson, founder of behaviorism, defined psychology (neurology, physics, medicine) as the science of behavior (thoughts, feelings, cells) (external, observable) and not of the mind (heart, stomach, planets), a consideration that excluded internal psychic phenomena as an object of study and introspective methods as a technique for studying them. However (Furthermore, Instead, Finally), introspection continued to be studied from other standpoints such as that of Gestalt, which began in Germany as the study of perception and was later extended to other fields such as problem solving, learning, creativity, and even social dynamics (especially the microsociology of small groups, with industrial and therapeutic applications). Faced with the associationism inherent to Wundt's (Jung's, Edison's, Poe's) approach or that of the behaviorists 135
(realists, cognitivists, researchers), Gestalt's psychology highlighted the importance of comprehensive configurations of stimuli, their internal relationships and those with the context (figure-background relationships), as well as their active organization. As a consequence, experimental psychology already encompassed since its beginnings a considerable diversity of methods, interests, and points of view that have enabled it to find a multitude of practical applications in industry, education, and therapy, among others. Today, the same concerns towards psychophysics, perception, memory, and learning persist, but (and, or, while) the questions disappear with new physiological approaches and the use of statistical procedures to design experiments and analyze data.
Psicología por Ingrid Nakagawa Mendoza
Fue Wilhelm Wundt, quien fue uno de los eruditos más importantes del siglo XIX, contribuyó de manera muy significativa a establecer la psicología como una ciencia independiente. En Leipzig (Alemania), fundó (fundaron, fundará, fundaba) el primer instituto de psicología en el mundo. La psicología experimental como disciplina científica (simple, estricta, olvidada) comenzó con los estudios del físico alemán Gustav Theodor Fechner, cuya obra Elementos de Psicofísica (1860) utilizaba datos experimentales (teoréticos, especiales, recuperados) para probar la relación entre magnitudes físicas y sensoriales. Esa relación tenía una formulación matemática logarítmica, conocida como la Ley de Fechner, considerada una de las leyes básicas de la percepción. Años después (antes, de edad, pasados) en 1879, Wundt, psicólogo alemán, fundó el primer laboratorio psicológico (neurológico, forense, químico). Wundt (Freud, Einstein, Skinner) enseñaba a los sujetos a describir detalladamente las sensaciones (introspectivamente experimentadas) que provocaban en ellos una serie de estímulos sistemáticamente controlados. El psicólogo también (no obstante, en lugar, aún) medía los tiempos de reacción en tests de complejidad variable, intentando identificar los componentes psíquicos internos y descubrir las leyes que regían sus combinaciones. Wundt y su (nuestra, aquella, una) concepción de la psicología dominaron este campo, al menos en el ámbito académico, hasta los inicios del siglo XX, cuando (donde, como, porque) los métodos introspectivos, o el hecho mismo de considerar los fenómenos psíquicos internos como objeto de estudio científico, fueron desestimados (aceptados, explorados, buscados), incapaces de aclarar fenómenos como el del pensamiento sin imágenes. Sus rivales se rebelaron contra las reglas de Wundt. Su (Nuestro, Este, El) compatriota Hermann Ebbinghaus dirigió una monumental investigación sobre la memoria que implicaba el aprendizaje de largas series de sílabas sin sentido, sentando un precedente para las generaciones futuras (perdidas, mayores, menores) de psicólogos especializados en el aprendizaje. Estos profesionales perseguían objetivos similares para dotar a la psicología, tradicionalmente objeto de las especulaciones filosóficas, de rigor científico. Por eso (aún, no obstante, primero) comenzaron a hacer experimentos de laboratorio con animales, tendencia que orientó metodológica y conceptualmente el estadounidense Edward Lee Thorndike.
Más tarde, el estadounidense J. B. Watson, fundador del conductismo, definió la psicología (neurología, física, medicina) como ciencia del comportamiento (de los pensamientos, de los sentimientos, de las células) (externo, observable) y no de la mente (del corazón, del estómago, de las planetas), consideración que excluía a los fenómenos psíquicos internos como objeto de estudio y a los métodos introspectivos como técnica para estudiarlos. Sin embargo (Además, En lugar, Finalmente), la introspección continuó estudiándose desde otros enfoques como el de la Gestalt, que comenzó en Alemania como estudio de la percepción y después se extendió a otros 136
campos como la resolución de problemas, el aprendizaje, la creatividad e incluso las dinámicas sociales (en especial la microsociología de grupos pequeños, con aplicaciones industriales y terapéuticas). Frente al asociacionismo inherente al enfoque de Wundt (Jung, Edison, Poe) o el de los conductistas (realistas, cognitivistas, investigadores), la psicología de la Gestalt destacaba la importancia de las configuraciones globales de estímulos, sus relaciones internas y con el contexto (relaciones figura-fondo), así como su organización activa. En consecuencia, la psicología experimental englobaba ya desde sus inicios una considerable diversidad de métodos, intereses y puntos de vista que le han permitido encontrar multitud de aplicaciones prácticas en la industria, la educación y la terapia, entre otras áreas. Hoy persisten las mismas inquietudes hacia la psicofísica, la percepción, la memoria y el aprendizaje, pero (y, o, mientras) los interrogantes desaparecen con nuevos enfoques fisiológicos y el uso de procedimientos estadísticos para diseñar experimentos y analizar datos.
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APPENDIX C BILINGUALISM QUESTIONNAIRE (ENGLISH TRANSLATION)
Age: ______Most Recent TOEFL Score: ______Country of Origin: ______
1) Was Spanish the main language used in your pre-collegiate education?
2) How old were you at your earliest exposure to English as a subject of learning?
3) How old were you when you first came to live in a mostly English-speaking environment?
4) How long have you resided in a mostly English-speaking environment?
5) During your pre-collegiate education, approximately how much time did you spend learning English in school?
0-7 hrs/wk 8-14 hrs/wk 15-21 hrs/wk 22-28 hrs/wk 29-35 hrs/wk
6) During the same period, approximately how much time did you spend practicing your English outside of school hours?
0-7 hrs/wk 8-14 hrs/wk 15-21 hrs/wk 22-28 hrs/wk 29-35 hrs/wk
7) Approximately how much time do you currently spend interacting in English?
0-7 hrs/wk 8-14 hrs/wk 15-21 hrs/wk 22-28 hrs/wk 29-35 hrs/wk
8) On average, how would you rate your confidence in reading and writing English? very low low medium high very high
9) What other language(s), if any, do you speak?
10) What other language(s), if any, do/did your parents speak?
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Gregory H. Bontrager's interest in human languages began in high school, from which he graduated with college credits in both Spanish and French via Advanced Placement testing. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish from Florida Gulf Coast University in 2010, his
Master of Arts degree in linguistics from the University of Florida in 2015, and his doctorate in linguistics from the University of Florida in 2020. Besides Spanish and French, Bontrager has studied four semesters of German and two semesters of Mandarin Chinese. Through self- instruction, he has also acquired a solid foundational knowlededge of Italian, Latin, classical
Greek, and Old English.
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