Reading Acquisition

In the light of what we know about the supposed phonological deficit at the basis of language and reading impairments, intensive phonics instruction based on a multi-sensory approach appears to be the most effective foreign language teaching strategy for children affected by language or reading disorders. Considerations on Second Language Acquisition theories (Krashen 1982) and the role of phonology in foreign language learning allow us to hypothesise that this kind of teaching approach should be extended to all students, especially during early stages of literacy. Nowadays, more and more children are diagnosed with a language or a reading disorder during early stages of education. However, insufficient attention is paid to this condition which is all too easily overlooked, compromising students' school careers dramatically. It is unknown whether the considerable increase in the amount of diagnoses is somehow linked to the greater emotional stress that children experience in their day-today routines, or if available data on the number of cases from international associations appear more alarming simply because they are more accurate than they have ever been in the past. All the same, the rise in the number of children affected by specific learning disorders or language-related difficulties has led educators and teachers of all grades and subjects to pay more attention to these pathologies in order to elaborate new teaching methods that better suit the needs of their students. Especially in foreign language classroom, teachers feel the need to find alternative routes to involve these children in language activities that take into account their deficit, assuring them an enjoyable learning experience which is at the basis of a successful learning purpose. SeLM, 4-5/2012

Naturalness Theory (NT) is founded on the notion of naturalness and claims that when a linguistic phenomenon can be processed by humans with little effort, both sensomotorically and cognitively, it is deemed more natural compared to other, more complex phenomena. Drawing on evidence such as language change, language acquisition, and language disorders, various parameters of naturalness (e.g., biuniqueness, constructional iconicity) have been postulated, which focus on the phonological and morphological subsystems of language. This paper offers an outline of how naturalness can be extended to grapholinguistic phenomena. Comparative graphematics (cf. Weingarten 2011), extended to comparative grapholinguistics, is assessed as a method that can be used to reveal naturalness parameters which apply to both material (graphetic) and linguistic (graphematic) aspects of writing. The reduction of extrinsic symmetry across various scripts will be discussed as an example. By integrating these preliminary theoretical ideas into the framework of NT, it is demonstrated that so-called Natural Grapholinguistics could offer promising new insights as well as a tertium comparationis method for future comparative analyses of scripts and writing systems.

Writing is an eclectic phenomenon whose many facets are studied by the young interdisciplinary field of grapholinguistics. Linguistically, writing is a system of graphic marks that relate to language. Under the lens of processing, it is a method of producing and perceiving utterances with our hands, eyes, and brains. And from a communication theoretical and sociolinguistic perspective, it is an utterly personal medium that allows users not only to convey messages to others but also to associate themselves with cultures or ideologies. These perspectives must merge to become the foundation of a functional theory of grapholinguistics that aims not only to describe how writing systems are built but to explain why they are built that way. Starting with a unified framework that allows the description of all types of writing systems with comparative concepts (such as grapheme) and moving towards the incorporation of evidence from disciplines such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to arrive at explanations, this book establishes the cornerstones of such a functional theory of writing. The Nature of Writing is a collection of ideas about writing, a status report about relevant research, a discovery of desiderata, and a new perspective. It is a start, but most importantly, it is an invitation.

This study investigates phonological awareness skills of Turkish-English successive bilingual children in order to determine the predictors of success in word reading in English and Turkish. Fifty Turkish-English successive bilingual and sixteen monolingual English-speaking children participated in the study. The data were collected through multiple instruments, examining phonological awareness (PA) and word recognition in both languages. The results indicated that phonological awareness was a strong predictor of word level reading success in both Turkish and English. These data also revealed that PA followed a developmental pattern from syllables to phonemes. Additionally, both qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrated that Turkish PA exerted an impact on English word recognition in bilingual children, suggesting cross-language transfer of PA between the two languages.

Dyslexia  is  a  specific  learning  difficulty  which
resist
s
conventional  teaching  methods
.  The  phonological
deficit  hypothesis  of dyslexia  determines  the  present  day  focus  on  phonics  targeting  the
primary  area  of
difficulties
experienced by
learners with dyslexia
–
decoding.
Phonological instruction, however, needs to
be  accompanied  by  the  development  of  comprehension  skills  and  presented  within  a  rich  language
environment
.
Verbal  memory  and  processing  difficulties,
t
ypically  associated  with  dyslexia
,
as  well  as
other
frequent
ly
co
-
occurring disorders require the adoption of
a number of additional
strategies
for the
teaching  of  reading  to
learners  with  dyslexia
.
The  paper  identifies
a  number  of
them
:
multi
-
sensory
approach
es
,
systematic (structured, cumulative and sequential) i
nstruction
,
over
-
learning, reinforcement
and  metacognition.
It  recognizes  the  need  of  time,  task  and  materials  differentiation.
The  choice  of
particular teaching methods should
take into account
both the
learner’
s  weaknesses  and
strengths
.
Such
individually  adapted
teaching
make
s
the  successful  inclusion  of  learners  with  dyslexia  possible  in  the
mainstream classroom.

El principal objetivo de este trabajo es determinar el efecto del entrenamiento de las habilidades fonológicas en la adquisición de la lectoescritura y verificar si es un efecto duradero. Se utilizó un diseño experimental con cinco grupos (N=12 por grupo), incluido el control, que recibieron distintos tipos de entrenamiento, al comienzo del primer año de escolaridad primaria. Se manipuló el tipo de tarea y la forma de llevarla a cabo. Al acabar el entrenamiento se obtuvieron efectos significativos en las medidas de lectura (principalmente en el reconocimiento de palabras) y de escritura, en el grupo entrenado en habilidades fonológicas usando materiales manipulativos. Estos efectos permanecían al final de primer curso; sin embargo, no se mantuvieron al final de 2º. Estos resultados se interpretan como muestra del papel acelerador que juega la mejora de las habilidades fonológicas en las fases iniciales del aprendizaje del lenguaje escrito. Ahora bien, dado que el efecto no se mantiene por largo tiempo, se discute la posible presencia de un efecto "hothouse" en los niños con desarrollo normal de la lectura. Palabras clave: Entrenamiento fonológico, conciencia fonológica, adquisición de la lectura, adquisición de la escritura, aprendizaje inicial del lenguaje escrito.

L’acquisition de la lecture et de l’écriture, ou littératie,
constitue vraisemblablement l’un des plus puissants instruments de transformation cognitive et cérébrale que nous acquérons au cours de notre vie. Dans cette revue, nous discutons du fait que, en plus de permettre l’acquisition de nouvelles connaissances (par l’intermédiaire de la lecture) et le stockage extérieur de l’information (via les notes manuscrites, les livres, les ordinateurs, etc.), la littératie entraîne trois grands types de changements dans les circuits cérébraux du langage. Nous illustrons le fait que l’apprentissage de l’écrit mène non seulement à une activation des aires du langage parlé par l’écrit, mais aussi à des modifications du traitement du langage parlé lui-même, et ce par deux mécanismes. En effet, la littératie améliore le codage phonologique (dans le planum temporale) et conduit, dans certaines situations d’écoute, à une activation « top-down » des représentations orthographiques (dans le cortex occipito-temporal gauche). En outre, l’acquisition de la littératie s’accompagne de changements anatomiques, notamment dans la connectivité intra- et inter-hémisphérique. Pour finir, nous discutons des implications théoriques et pratiques de
ces découvertes pour les neuropsychologues.

The unique structure of Russian orthography may influence the organization and acquisition of reading skills in Russian. The present review examines phonemic-graphemic correspondences in Russian orthography and discusses its grain-size units and possible difficulties for beginning readers and writers. Russian orthography is governed by a hierarchical, relatively regular 3-tier system of rules, complicated by numerous exceptions. Many theorists find that the key to this regularised complexity lies in Russian morphology. This review presents the perspectives of prominent Russian linguists on what linguistic units Russian orthography represents, and it evaluates and analyses their relevance for contemporary reading research.

Summer learning loss – decreased academic performance following an extended school break, typically during the period after one grade ends and before another grade starts – is a well-documented phenomenon in North America, but poorly described in sub-Saharan African contexts. In this article, we use the term 'grade-transition break' loss in lieu of 'summer' loss to refer to the period after one grade ends and before another grade starts. This study analyses data from early grade reading assessments in Malawi, estimating statistically significant average reductions of 0.38 standard deviations (SD) across several measures of reading and pre-reading skills during two grade-transition breaks. The data show the loss in reading skills during the extended breaks between grades 1 and 2 and between grades 2 and 3 in two consecutive years. The study found no gender-based differences in loss. The findings suggest a need for early grade reading interventions to develop and evaluate mitigation strategies lest significant proportions of within-year performance gains be lost over the break between academic years.

ABSTRACT Studies examining reading development in bilinguals have led to conflicting conclusions regarding the language in which reading development should take place first. Whereas some studies suggest that reading instruction should take place in the most proficient language first, other studies suggest that reading acquisition should take place in the most consistent orthographic system first.The present study examined two research questions: (1) the relative impact of oral proficiency and orthographic transparency in second-language reading acquisition, and (2) the influence of reading acquisition in one language on the development of reading skills in the other language.To examine these questions, we compared reading development in French-native children attending a Dutch immersion program and learning to read either in Dutch first (most consistent orthography) or in French first (least consistent orthography but native language). Following a longitudinal design, the data were gathered over different sessions spanning from Grade 1 to Grade 3. The children in immersion were presented with a series of experimental and standardised tasks examining their levels of oral proficiency as well as their reading abilities in their first and, subsequently in their second, languages of reading instruction. Their performances were compared to the ones of French and Dutch monolinguals.The results showed that by the end of Grade 2, the children instructed to read in Dutch first read in both languages as well as their monolingual peers. In contrast, the children instructed to read in French first lagged behind the other Dutch-speaking groups in Dutch reading tasks.These findings extend the notion that differences across languages in terms of orthographic transparency impact on reading development to the French-Dutch pair, and strongly support the view that there are potentially significant benefits to learn to read in the most consistent orthographic system first, even though it is the least proficient language, since it boosts phonological processes and improves subsequent reading acquisition in both languages.

Naturalness Theory (NT) is based on the notion of linguistic naturalness and postulates that linguistic phenomena that are structured in ways to make them relatively easy to process by humans physiologically, cognitively, and sociopragmatically are more natural than other, more complex phenomena. Drawing on evidence such as language change, language acquisition, and language disorders, various parameters of naturalness have been proposed. These, thus far, focus primarily on the phonological and morphological subsystems of language. This dissertation is, on the one hand, an (1) extension of NT as it offers an outline of how the notion of naturalness can be transferred to grapholinguistic phenomena. To achieve this, typologically highly diverse scripts and writing systems must be compared to identify naturalness parameters at the universal, typological, and system-specific levels for both the material (graphetic) and linguistic (graphematic) subsystems of writing. Such a comparison requires a shared descriptive and terminological framework, which is why this dissertation provides, on the other hand, an (2) outline of a descriptive grapholinguistics complete with definitions of graphetic and graphematic categories, most notably the grapheme. Through merging the theoretical tenets of NT with a systematic analysis of writing, this dissertation demonstrates that a so-called Natural Grapholinguistics offers promising new insights as well as a tertium comparationis for future comparative analyses of scripts and writing systems. The end result is a first sketch of a theory of writing that, as a theory, does not stop at the description of the structure of writing systems, but is capable of explaining why they are built the way they are.

Does literacy improve brain function? Does it also entail losses? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured brain responses to spoken and written language, visual faces, houses, tools, and checkers in adults of variable literacy (10 were illiterate, 22 became literate as adults, and 31 were literate in childhood). As literacy enhanced the left fusiform activation evoked by writing, it induced a small competition with faces at this location, but also broadly enhanced visual responses in fusiform and occipital cortex, extending to area V1. Literacy also enhanced phonological activation to speech in the planum temporale and afforded a top-down activation of orthography from spoken inputs. Most changes occurred even when literacy was acquired in adulthood, emphasizing that both childhood and adult education can profoundly refine cortical organization.

How far can acquired knowledge such as orthographic knowledge affect pre-existing abilities such as speech perception? This controversial issue was addressed by investigating the automaticity of the influence of orthographic knowledge on speech processing. Many studies demonstrated this influence in active, lexico-semantic speech processing tasks. However, it has never been observed when speech is unattended. Here, the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), an automatic index of experience-dependent auditory traces, was recorded in an unattended oddball paradigm manipulating the orthographic congruency between frequent and deviant spoken riming words. Both orthographically congruent and incongruent deviant words elicited a typical MMN over the fronto-central regions, with a stronger response in the incongruent condition. The finding showed that the orthographic dimension of spoken words influences a physiological marker of speech processing although participants were required not to attend to the auditory input. This provides evidence for an impact of acquiring a written code on speech processing.

L'acquisition de la lecture et de l'écriture, ou littératie, constitue vraisemblablement l'un des plus puissants instruments de transformation cognitive et cérébrale que nous acquérons au cours de notre vie. Dans cette revue, nous discutons du fait que, en plus de permettre l'acquisition de nouvelles connaissances (par l'intermédiaire de la lecture) et le stockage extérieur de l'information (via les notes manuscrites, les livres, les ordinateurs, etc.), la littératie entraîne trois grands types de changements dans les circuits cérébraux du langage. Nous illustrons le fait que l'apprentissage de l'écrit mène non seulement à une activation des aires du langage parlé par l'écrit, mais aussi à des modifications du traitement du langage parlé lui-même, et ce par deux mécanismes. En effet, la littératie améliore le codage phonologique (dans le planum temporale) et conduit, dans certaines situations d'écoute, à une activation « top-down » des représentations orthographiques (dans le cortex occipito-temporal gauche). En outre, l'acquisition de la littératie s'accompagne de changements anatomiques, notamment dans la connectivité intraet inter-hémisphérique. Pour finir, nous discutons des implications théoriques et pratiques de ces découvertes pour les neuropsychologues. Mots clés : littératie et langage, acquisition de l'écrit • codage phonologique • effets orthographiques sur le traitement de la parole • connectivité cérébrale

Obwohl die Schriftlinguistik ein aktuell aufstrebender Teilbereich der Sprachwissenschaft ist, bleibt eine Schrifttheorie, die die Struktur von Schriftsystemen nicht nur beschreibt, sondern auch danach strebt, sie zu erklären, bis heute ein Desideratum. In diesem Vortrag wird erläutert, wie Prämissen der linguistischen Natürlichkeitstheorie bei der Konstruktion einer erklärenden Schrifttheorie helfen können. So kann die materiell orientierte Natürliche Phonologie (Donegan & Stampe 2009), die sich mit physiologischen Prozessen beschäftigt, die die Artikulation und Perzeption gesprochener Sprache erleichtern, eine analoge Natürliche Graphetik prägen, die die materielle Ebene von Schrift sowie der damit assoziierten Schreib- und Leseprozesse behandelt. Die Prämissen der semiotisch fundierten Natürlichen Morphologie (Dressler & Kilani-Schoch 2016), welche die Eigenschaften der semiotischen Struktur sprachlicher Zeichen und deren Ein-fluss auf die kognitive Verarbeitung untersucht, können die Eckpfeiler einer Natürlichen Gra-phematik darstellen, die die Struktur schriftlicher Zeichen – u. a. Graphemen als semiotischen Verbindungen von visuellen signantia und sprachlichen signata – in den Fokus rückt.
Mit diesem natürlichkeitstheoretischen Fundament kann erklärt werden, warum Schriftsysteme so aussehen, wie sie heute aussehen. Erklärungen werden dabei weiter unterteilt in drei Bereiche: linguistische, verarbeitungstechnische und soziokulturelle. Linguistisch kann untersucht werden, wie Schriftsysteme als sekundäre, visuelle semiotische Systeme sich dem jeweiligen zugrunde liegenden Sprachsystem (als primärem semiotischen System) anpassen. Verarbeitungstechnisch gilt, was Dehaene (2009) konstatiert: Schrift ist als Erfindung zu jung, als dass Menschen sich evolutionär an sie hätten anpassen können, also war es umgekehrt – Schrift passte sich unserer Biologie und Kognition an. Drittens bleibt für Schrift als Kulturtechnik die hochrelevante soziokulturelle Dimension. Schriftsysteme sind geprägt durch die Bedürfnisse von literaten Sprachgemeinschaften. Sie erlauben es, sich als Individuum oder Gruppe sozial zu präsentieren, zu positionieren etc. Diese drei Dimensionen spiegeln sich in der diachronen Ent-wicklung von Schrift sowie ihrer synchronen Struktur wider.
In diesem Vortrag werden die Grundpfeiler einer natürlichen Schriftlinguistik sowie die drei genannten Erklärungsdimensionen anhand von Beispielen aus den diversesten Schriftsystemen – Deutsch, Chinesisch, Thailändisch, Arabisch, Koreanisch – vorgestellt und illustriert.


Dehaene, Stanislas (2009): Reading in the brain: the new science of how we read. London: Penguin.
Donegan, Patricia & David Stampe (2009): Hypotheses of Natural Phonology. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45.1: 1-31. DOI: 10.2478/v10010-009-0002-x
Dressler, Wolfgang U. & Marianne Kilani-Schoch (2016): Natural Morphology. In Andrew Hippisley & Gregory Stump (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology, 356-389. Cambridge: CUP.

The ability to recognize 2 mirror images as the same picture across left-right inversions exists early on in humans and other primates. In order to learn to read, however, one must discriminate the left-right orientation of letters and distinguish, for instance, b from d. We therefore reasoned that literacy may entail a loss of mirror invariance. To evaluate this hypothesis, we asked adult literates, illiterates, and ex-illiterates to perform a speeded same-different task with letter strings, false fonts, and pictures regardless of their orientation (i.e., they had to respond "same" to mirror pairs such as "iblo oldi"). Literates presented clear difficulties with mirror invariance. This "mirror cost" effect was strongest with letter strings, but crucially, it was also observed with false fonts and even with pictures. In contrast, illiterates did not present any cost for mirror pairs. Interestingly, subjects who learned to read as adults also exhibited a mirror cost, suggesting that modest reading practice, late in life, can suffice to break mirror invariance.

Until at least the end of adolescence, children articulate speech differently than adults. While this discrepancy is often attributed to the maturation of the speech motor system, we sought to demonstrate that the development of spoken language fluency is shaped by complex interactions across motor and cognitive domains. In this study, we specifically tested for a relationship between reading proficiency and coarticulatory organization, a fundamental correlate of spoken language fluency, used for both reading aloud and conversational speech. We conducted reading assessments and ultrasoundbased kinematic measurements of intersegmental coarticulation in a group of 32 German children. In German, a language which supports rather consistent grapheme-to-phoneme relationships, reading aloud uses similar phoneme to speech motor gesture correspondences as well as coarticulatory mechanisms as conversational speech. Using general additive modeling we found that better readers exhibited lower degrees of intersegmental coarticulation than poorer readers. This study therefore provides evidence that reading proficiency interacts with coarticulatory patterns in beginning readers. It suggests that in addition to maturational factors, interactions between speech motor ability and other co-developing skills must be considered to fully account for spoken language fluency.

In this essay, we shall try to make some considerations about the procedures for determining the students reading levels, text readability and their limitations, as well as estimating the difficulty of the reading tasks, for selecting material appropriate to the students´ reading abilities, and for understanding problems in both teaching and reading. We shall conclude that ability to read and learn from texts does not only depend on student´s reading level and motivation (which does) but also on the difficulty of the text and the instructions given by the teacher.

Early prediction of difficulty with learning to read is central to the development of instructional efforts aimed at preventing reading failure. Phonological awareness seems to be such an early predictor. In a previous study (Speidel and Power, 1987) with end-of-kindergarten children of Hawaiian ancestry, who speak a creole of English, familiarity with standard English was an excellent predictor of end-of-first-grade reading success, short- term memory a moderate predictor, while phonological awareness was useless as a predictor, since few children were able to complete the task.

The present study looks at the development of phonological awareness in Hawaiian first grade students and its relationship to end-of-first grade reading achievement. The findings a) supported the earlier observation that phonological awareness develops relatively late in Hawaiian children, b) showed that phonological awareness is an excellent predictor of reading success among Hawaiian children, and c) suggested that the use of "thoughtful" phonics instruction together with whole language activities fosters the development of both phonological awareness and reading achievement.

Writing was invented too recently to have influenced the human genome. Consequently, reading acquisition must rely on partial recycling of pre-existing brain systems. Prior fMRI evidence showed that in literates a left-hemispheric visual region increases its activation to written strings relative to illiterates and reduces its response to faces. Increasing literacy also leads to a stronger right-hemispheric lateralization for faces. Here, we evaluated whether this reorganization of the brain’s face system has behavioral consequences for the processing of non-linguistic visual stimuli. Three groups of adult illiterates, ex-illiterates and literates were tested with the sequential composite face paradigm that evaluates the automaticity with which faces are processed as wholes. Illiterates were consistently more holistic than participants with reading experience in dealing with faces. A second experiment replicated this effect with both faces and houses. Brain reorganization induced by literacy seems to reduce the influence of automatic holistic processing of faces and houses by enabling the use of a more analytic and flexible processing strategy, at least when holistic processing is detrimental to the task.