Abstract
In an opaque orthography like English, phonological coding errors are a prominent feature of dyslexia. In a transparent orthography like Spanish, reading difficulties are characterized by slower reading speed rather than reduced accuracy. In previous research, the reading speed deficit was revealed by asking children to read lists of words. However, speed in list reading sums the time required to prepare an utterance, reaction time (RT), with the time required to say it, response duration (RD). Thus, the dyslexic speed deficit in transparent orthographies could be driven by slow RTs, by slow RDs, or both. The distinction is especially important if developmental readers rely on phonological coding to achieve lexical access because the whole word would have to be encoded before it could be identified. However, while the factors that affect reading RT have been extensively investigated, no attention has been paid to RD. We studied the performance of typically developing and dyslexic Spanish children in an oral reading task. We analysed the impact of word frequency and length on reading accuracy, RT, and RD. We found that accuracy, RT, and RD were affected by word frequency and length for both control and dyslexic readers. We also observed interactions between effects of reader group—dyslexic, typically developing (TD) younger or TD older readers—and effects of lexicality, frequency, and word length. Our results show that children are capable of reading aloud using lexical and sub-lexical coding processes in a transparent orthography.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adelman, J. S., Brown, G. D. A., & Quesada, J. F. (2006). Contextual diversity not frequency determines word naming and lexical decision times. Psychological Science, 17, 814–823.
Baayen, R. H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modelling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390–412.
Baayen, R. H., Feldman, L. B., & Schreuder, R. (2006). Morphological influences on the recognition of monosyllabic monomorphemic words. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 290–313.
Balota, D. A., & Abrams, R. A. (1995). Mental chronometry: Beyond onset latencies in the lexical decision task. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 1289–1302.
Balota, D. A., Boland, J. E., & Shields, L. W. (1989). Priming in pronunciation: Beyond pattern recognition and onset latency. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 14–36.
Balota, D. A., & Yap, M. J. (2006). Attentional control and flexible lexical processing: Explorations of the magic moment of word recognition. In S. Andrews (Ed.), From inkmarks to ideas: Current issues in lexical processing (pp. 229–258). Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press.
Barca, L., Burani, C., & Arduino, L. S. (2002). Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns. Behaviour research methods, instruments and computers, 34, 424–434.
Barca, L., Burani, C., di Filippo, G., & Zoccolotti, P. (2006). Italian developmental dyslexic and proficient readers: Where are the differences? Brain and Language, 98, 347–351.
Bergmann, J., & Wimmer, H. (2008). A dual-route perspective on poor reading in a regular orthography: Evidence from phonological and orthographic lexical decisions. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 25, 653–676.
Bruck, M., Genesee, F., & Caravolas, M. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early literacy acquisition. In B. A. Blachman (Ed.), Foundations of reading acquisition and dyslexia: Implications for early intervention (pp. 145–162). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Burani, C., Arduino, L. S., & Barca, L. (2007). Frequency, not age of acquisition, affects Italian word naming. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 19, 828–866.
Burani, C., Marcolini, S., & Stella, G. (2002). How early does morpho-lexical reading develop in readers of a shallow orthography? Brain and Language, 81, 568–586.
Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108, 204–256.
Cuetos, F., & Barbón, A. (2006). Word naming in Spanish. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 18, 415–436.
Cuetos, F., Rodríguez, B., Ruano, E., & Arribas, D. (2007). PROLEC-R. Madrid: TEA Ediciones, S.A.
Davies, R., Cuetos, F., & Glez-Seijas, R.-M. (2007). Reading development and dyslexia in a transparent orthography: A survey of Spanish children. Annals of Dyslexia, 57, 179–198.
Davis, C. J., & Perea, M. (2005). BuscaPalabras: A program for deriving orthographic and phonological neighbourhood statistics and other psycholinguistic indices in Spanish. Behavior Research Methods, 37, 665–671.
De Luca, M., Barca, L., Burani, C., & Zoccolotti, P. (2008). The effect of word length and other sublexical, lexical, and semantic variables on developmental reading deficits. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, 21, 227–235.
Defior, S., Justicia, F., & Martos, F. J. (1996). The influence of lexical and sublexical variables in normal and poor Spanish readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 8, 497.
Ellis, N. C., & Hooper, M. (2001). Why learning to read is easier in Welsh than in English: Orthographic transparency effects evinced with frequency-matched tests. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 571–599.
Faust, M. E., Balota, D. A., Spieler, D. H., & Ferraro, F. R. (1999). Individual differences in information-processing rate and amount: Implications for group differences in response latency. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 777–799.
Forster, K. I., & Forster, J. C. (2003). DMDX: A Windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 35, 116–124.
Frith, U., Wimmer, H., & Landerl, K. (1998). Differences in phonological recoding in German- and English-speaking children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2, 31–54.
Gonzalez, J. E. J., & Valle, I. H. (2000). Word identification and reading disorders in the Spanish language. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 33, 44–60.
Goswami, U., Gombert, J. E., & de Barrera, L. F. (1998). Children’s orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 19–52.
Harm, M. W., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2004). Computing the meanings of words in reading: Cooperative division of labor between visual and phonological processes. Psychological Review, 111, 662–720.
Kawamoto, A. H., Goeltz, K., Agbayani, J. T., & Groel, K. (1998). Locus of semantic priming effects in speeded naming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 676–682.
Martínez, J. A., & García, M. E. (2004). Diccionario de frecuencias del castellano escrito en niños de 6 a 12 años (Frequency dictionary of written Spanish read by children of 6–12 years of age). Salamanca, Spain: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca.
Porpodas, C. D. (1999). Patterns of phonological and memory processing in beginning readers and spellers of Greek. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 32, 406–416.
Protopapas, A. (2007). CheckVocal: A program to facilitate checking accuracy and response time of vocal responses from DMDX. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 859–862.
Rodrigo López, M., & Jiménez González, J. E. (1999). An analysis of the word naming errors of normal readers and reading disabled children in Spanish. Journal of Research in Reading, 22, 180–197.
Sebastián, N., Martí, M. A., Carreiras, M. F., & Cuetos, F. (2000). LEXESP, Léxico informatizado del español (Computerized lexicon of Spanish). Barcelona, Spain: Edíciones de la Universitat de Barcelona.
Seidenberg, M. S., & McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. Psychological Review, 96, 523–568.
Seymour, P. H. K., Aro, M., & Erskine, J. M. (2003). Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies. British Journal of Psychology, 94, 143–174.
Share, D. L. (2008). On the Anglocentricities of current reading research and practice: The perils of overreliance on an “Outlier” orthography. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 584–615.
Valle-Arroyo, F. (2001). Imaginabilidad en Español (Imageability in Spanish). Oviedo: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo.
Wechsler, D. (1974). Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – Revised WISC-R, Manual. New York, NY: Psychological Corporation.
Wechsler, D. (1982). Escala de Inteligencia para Niños-Revision (EIWN-R) (Intelligence Scale for Children—Revision). New York, NY: Psychological Corporation.
Weekes, B. S. (1997). Differential effects of number of letters on word and pseudoword naming latency. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 510A, 439–456.
Wimmer, H. (1993). Characteristics of developmental dyslexia in a regular reading system. Applied Psycholinguistics, 14, 1–33.
Wimmer, H., & Goswami, U. (1994). The influence of orthographic consistency on reading development: Word recognition in English and German children. Cognition, 51, 91–103.
Wimmer, H., & Mayringer, H. (2002). Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties: A specific disability in regular orthographies. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 272–277.
Wimmer, H., Schurz, M., Sturm, D., Richlan, F., Klackl, J., Kronbichler, M., et al. (2010). A dual-route perspective on poor reading in a regular orthography: An fMRI study. Cortex, 46, 1284–1298.
Yap, R., & van der Leij, A. (1993). Word-processing in dyslexics—an automatic decoding deficit. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 261–279.
Zevin, J. D., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2002). Age of acquisition effects in word reading and other tasks. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 1–29.
Zoccolotti, P., De Luca, M., Di Pace, E., Gasperini, F., Judica, A., & Spinelli, D. (2005). Word length effect in early reading and in developmental dyslexia. Brain and Language, 93, 369–373.
Zoccolotti, P., De Luca, M., Di Pace, E., Judica, A., Orlandi, M., & Spinelli, D. (1999). Markers of developmental surface dyslexia in a language (Italian) with high grapheme-phoneme correspondence. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 191–216.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by grant MCI-PSI2009-09299 from the Spanish Government.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Davies, R., Rodríguez-Ferreiro, J., Suárez, P. et al. Lexical and sub-lexical effects on accuracy, reaction time and response duration: impaired and typical word and pseudoword reading in a transparent orthography. Read Writ 26, 721–738 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-012-9388-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-012-9388-1