Abstract
Finnish ABC books present words with hyphens inserted at syllable boundaries. Syllabification by hyphens is abandoned in the 2nd grade for bisyllabic words, but continues for words with three or more syllables. The current eye movement study investigated how and to what extent syllable hyphens in bisyllabic (kah-vi ‘cof-fee’) and multisyllabic words (haa-ruk-ka ‘fork’, ap-pel-sii-ni ‘orange’) affect eye movement behavior and reading speed of Finnish 1st and 2nd graders. Experiment 1 showed that 2nd graders had longer gaze durations, needed more fixations and had longer selective regression path durations for hyphenated than concatenated words. This implies that hyphenated words were difficult to process when first encountered, but also hard to integrate with prior sentence context. The effects were modified by number of syllables and reading skill. That is, the hyphenation effects were larger for multisyllabic than bisyllabic words and larger for more than less proficient readers. Experiment 2 showed the same hyphenation effect for 1st graders reading long multisyllabic words, even with a hyphen that was smaller in size and hence visually less salient. We argue that syllable hyphens prevent reasonably proficient readers from using the most efficient processing route for bi- and multisyllabic words and discuss the possible implications of the results for early Finnish reading instruction.
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Notes
In support of this statement, only 0.1 % of the 70,000 words in the reverse dictionary of modern standard Finnish are monosyllabic (Tuomi, 1980).
A similar slowing down of hyphenation was found by Häikiö, Bertram, and Hyönä (2011) at the morpheme level. They found that compounds with a hyphen at the constituent boundary (e.g., ulko-ovi = ‘front door’) elicited longer reading times for proficient 2nd graders, 4th graders and 6th graders than concatenated compounds (e.g., sivuovi = ‘side door’).
Both of these variables had high correlations with word frequency, so we used their residuals in the models.
Note that exactly the same pattern of results was found for the go-past time, which is the sum of all fixations after entering the target word before exiting it to the right (in Fig. 2 the summed duration of Fixations #3 to #6). For this measure the hyphenation effect was 36 ms for short words and 194 ms for long words.
We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
Furthermore, the present results relate to reading of monomorphemic, uninflected words. Since, for example, any Finnish noun can appear in approximately 2,000 possible orthographic forms (Karlsson & Koskenniemi, 1985), most of which have never been encountered before, hyphenation may support the decoding of these typically long morphologically complex words in the early stages of reading development.
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Acknowledgments
This study was financially supported by the Finnish Graduate School of Psychology, Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse [Oskar Öflund Foundation] and Suomen Kulttuurirahaston Varsinais-Suomen rahasto [Finnish Culture Foundation, Varsinais-Suomi Regional Fund] to the first author and the Academy of Finland (Grant 118404) to the second author. We would like to thank Petar Milin for an advice on an earlier version of this paper.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
Final models for each measure in the Experiment 1 with fixed effects presented for each measure separately. If an interaction was significant, its main effects are reported as well. Please note that in this case the main effects are not independently interpretable in the lmer() output. Also note that due to the transformations the directions of the effects are reversed. An effect is significant when |t| > 2.
Appendix 2
Final models for each measure in the Experiment 2a with fixed effects presented for each measure separately. If an interaction was significant, its main effects are reported as well. Please note that in this case the main effects are not independently interpretable in the lmer() output. Also note that due to the transformations the directions of the effects are reversed for First Fixation Duration. An effect is significant when |t| > 2.
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Häikiö, T., Bertram, R. & Hyönä, J. The hyphen as a syllabification cue in reading bisyllabic and multisyllabic words among Finnish 1st and 2nd graders. Read Writ 29, 159–182 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9584-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9584-x