Abstract
Initial instruction emphasizing large grain units (i.e., words) showed distinct advantages over small grain instruction for English-speaking adults learning to read an artificial orthography (Brennan and Booth in Read Writ 28(7):917–938, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9555-2). The current study extends this research by training 34 English-speaking adults to read Russian Cyrillic given initial instruction emphasizing either large or small units (words or letters). Results reveal no differences on word learning, but higher accuracy on letter-phoneme matching given letter-based instruction and higher accuracy on rime-rhyme matching given word-based instruction. Differences in phonological awareness (PA) skill showed that higher PA skill resulted in higher accuracy and slower reaction times only for the adults given the instruction with the word emphasis, suggesting that adults with high PA skill given word-based instruction may engage in time intensive small grain analyses (e.g., grapheme-phoneme correspondence) even when their attention is directed to larger grain units. Overall, these results extend previous findings and reveal that word and letter-based instruction each have distinct advantages for facilitating increased sensitivity to either letters/phonemes or rimes/rhymes when adults are learning a natural second (L2) consistent alphabetic orthography.
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Acknowledgements
This project was partially funded by a graduate student research award granted to Jennifer Kiskin by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences. This study was conducted as part of a master’s thesis completed by Jennifer Kiskin under the direction of Christine Brennan at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The authors would also like to acknowledge Tina Meyers-Denman and Pui Fong Kan, both of whom served on the thesis committee for Ms. Kiskin’s thesis and provided informative feedback and suggestions related to the design of this study. We would also like to thank Samantha M. Bartolo and Priscilla Jane Kurtz Williams for their help with data collection and Annaliese Miller for her help editing the manuscript.
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Appendix
Appendix
See Fig. 3.
Russian Cyrillic orthographic stimuli. a Lowercase Russian Cyrillic letters and IPA transcription. b All words used in initial training and generalization testing, including pronunciation in IPA transcription and orthographic representation
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Brennan, C., Kiskin, J. Distinct Benefits Given Large Versus Small Grain Orthographic Instruction for English-Speaking Adults Learning to Read Russian Cyrillic. J Psycholinguist Res 49, 915–933 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09684-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-019-09684-5