Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:57:04.854Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

DIFFERENCES IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION BETWEEN L1 AND L2 SPEAKERS

THE IMPACT OF LENGTH, FREQUENCY, AND ORTHOGRAPHIC NEIGHBORHOOD SIZE IN GERMAN CHILDREN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2017

Pauline Schröter*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
Sascha Schroeder
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Pauline Schröter, Institute for Educational Quality Improvement, Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

Investigating the impact of linguistic characteristics on visual word recognition in children, we studied whether differences in native (L1) and second language (L2) processing already emerge at the beginning of reading development. German elementary school students in grades 2 to 6 completed a battery of standardized tests and a lexical decision task (LDT). Though L1 speakers outperformed L2 speakers on German skills, groups did not differ in their overall performance on the LDT. However, results from mixed-effect models revealed greater effects for word frequency and length in L2 over L1 speakers, indicating qualitative differences in the sensitivity to linguistic information between groups. This distinction persisted across all grades and after controlling for differences in vocabulary size and reading fluency. Findings extend evidence provided for adult L2 processing, suggesting that varying language exposure shapes the development of the word-recognition system already in the early stages of reading development.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Andrews, S. (1989). Frequency and neighborhood effects on lexical access: Activation or search? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 802814.Google Scholar
Andrews, S. (1992). Frequency and neighborhood effects on lexical access: Lexical similarity or orthographic redundancy? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 234254.Google Scholar
Andrews, S. (1997). The effect of orthographic similarity on lexical retrieval: Resolving neighborhood conflicts. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4, 439461.10.3758/BF03214334CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, S., & Hersch, J. (2010). Lexical precision in skilled readers: Individual differences in masked neighbor priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139, 299318.10.1037/a0018366CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Auer, M., Gruber, G., Mayringer, H., & Wimmer, H. (2005). Salzburger Lese-Screening für die Klassenstufen 5–8 (SLS 5–8). Bern, Switzerland: Verlag Hans Huber.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390412.10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2013). Lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using “Eigen” and S4. R package (Versions 1.0–4) (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/index.html/).Google Scholar
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., Luk, G., Peets, K. F., & Yang, S. (2010). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 525531.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brysbaert, M., Lagrou, E., & Stevens, M. (2016). Visual word recognition in a second language: A test of the lexical entrenchment hypothesis with lexical decision times. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 119.Google Scholar
Brysbaert, M., Buchmeier, M., Conrad, M., Jacobs, A. M., Bölte, J., & Böhl, A. (2011). The word frequency effect. Experimental Psychology, 58, 412424.10.1027/1618-3169/a000123CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Castles, A., Davis, C., Cavalot, P., & Forster, K. (2007). Tracking the acquisition of orthographic skills in developing readers: Masked priming effects. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 97, 165182.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coltheart, M., Davelaar, E., Jonasson, T., & Besner, D. (1977). Access to the internal lexicon. In Dornic, S. (Ed.), Attention and performance IV (pp. 535555). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
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, 204256.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cop, U., Keuleers, E., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2015). Frequency effects in monolingual and bilingual natural reading. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 22, 12161234CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Bruin, A., Treccani, B., & Della Sala, S. (2014). Cognitive advantage in bilingualism: An example of publication bias? Psychological Science, 26, 99107.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Groot, A. M. B., Borgwaldt, S., Bos, M., & van den Eijnden, E. (2002). Lexical decision and word naming in bilinguals: Language effects and task effects. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 91124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diependaele, K., Lemhöfer, K., & Brysbaert, M. (2013). The word frequency effect in first- and second-language word recognition: A lexical entrenchment account. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 843863.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dijkstra, T., & Van Heuven, W. J. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5, 175197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., & Acenas, L.-A. R. (2004). What is a TOT? Cognate and translation effects on tip-of-the-tongue states in Spanish–English and Tagalog–English bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 246269.Google ScholarPubMed
Gollan, T. H., & Silverberg, N. B. (2001). Tip-of-the-tongue states in Hebrew–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 6383.10.1017/S136672890100013XCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., & Werner, G. A. (2002). Semantic and letter fluency in Spanish-English bilinguals. Neuropsychology, 16, 562576.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Sera, C., & Sandoval, T. C. (2008). More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 787814.10.1016/j.jml.2007.07.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Fennema-Notestine, C., & Morris, S. K. (2005). Bilingualism affects picture naming but not picture classification. Memory and Cognition, 33, 12201234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grainger, J. (1990). Word frequency and neighborhood frequency effects in lexical decision and naming. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 228244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hothorn, T., Bretz, F., Westfall, P., Heiberger, R. M., & Schuetzenmeister, A. (2014). Multcomp: Simultaneous inference in general parametric models. R package (Version 1.0–3) (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/multcomp/index.html/).Google Scholar
Ivanova, I., & Costa, A. (2008). Does bilingualism hamper lexical access in speech production? Acta Psychologica, 127, 277288.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keuleers, E., & Brysbaert, M. (2010). Wuggy: A multilingual pseudoword generator. Behavior Research Methods, 42, 627633.10.3758/BRM.42.3.627CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keuleers, E., Lacey, P., Rastle, K., & Brysbaert, M. (2011). The British Lexicon Project: Lexical decision data for 28,730 monosyllabic and disyllabic English words. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 287304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinoshita, S. (2015). Visual word recognition in the Bayesian reader framework. In Pollatsek, A. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of reading (pp. 6376). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuperman, V., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2013). Reassessing word frequency as a determinant of word recognition for skilled and unskilled readers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39, 802823.Google ScholarPubMed
Lemhöfer, K., Dijkstra, T., Schriefers, H., Baayen, R. H., Grainger, J., & Zwitserlood, P. (2008). Native language influences on word recognition in a second language: A megastudy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 12.Google Scholar
Marinus, E., Nation, K., & de Jong, P. F. (2015). Density and length in the neighborhood: Explaining cross-linguistic differences in learning to read in English and Dutch. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 139, 127147.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mayringer, H., & Wimmer, H. (2003). Salzburger Lese-Screening für die Klassenstufen 1–4 (SLS 1–4). Bern, Switzerland: Verlag Hans Huber.Google Scholar
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: I. An account of basic findings. Psychological Review, 88, 375407.Google Scholar
Monsell, S. (1991). The nature and locus of word frequency effects in reading. In Besner, D. & Humphreys, G. W. (Eds.), Basic processes in reading: Visual word recognition (pp. 148197). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Morton, J. (1969). Interactions of information in word recognition. Psychological Review, 76, 165178.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K. (2005). The distributed characteristic in bilingual learning. In Cohen, J., McAlister, K. T., Rolstad, K., & MacSwan, J. (Eds.), ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 17441749). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K., Pearson, B. Z., & Cobo-Lewis, A. B. (2007). Profile effects in early bilingual language and literacy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 191230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pearson, B. Z. (2007). Social factors in childhood bilingualism in the United States. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 399410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perfetti, C. A. (1992). The representation problem in reading acquisition. In Gough, P. B., Ehri, L. C., & Treiman, R. (Eds.), Reading acquisition (pp. 145174). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Perfetti, C. A. (2007). Reading ability: Lexical quality to comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 11, 357383.10.1080/10888430701530730CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ransdell, S. E., & Fischler, I. (1987). Memory in a monolingual mode: When are bilinguals at a disadvantage? Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 392405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rau, A. K., Moll, K., Snowling, M. J., & Landerl, K. (2015). Effects of orthographic consistency on eye movement behavior: German and English children and adults process the same words differently. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 130, 92105.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rogers, C. L., Lister, J. J., Febo, D. M., Besing, J. M., & Abrams, H. B. (2006). Effects of bilingualism, noise, and reverberation on speech perception by listeners with normal hearing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 465485.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosselli, M., et al. . (2000). Verbal fluency and repetition skills in healthy older Spanish-English bilinguals. Applied Neuropsychology, 7, 1724.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schmalz, X., Robidoux, S., Castles, A., Coltheart, M., & Marinus, E. (2017). German and English bodies: No evidence for cross-linguistic differences in preferred grain size. Collabra: Psychology, 3, 5.Google Scholar
Schroeder, S., Würzner, K.-M., Heister, J., Geyken, A., & Kliegl, R. (2015). ChildLex: A lexical database of German read by children. Behavior Research Methods, 47, 10851094.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schröter, P., & Schroeder, S. (2017). The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan. Behavior Research Methods, 121. doi:10.3758/s13428-016-0851-9.Google ScholarPubMed
Thordardottir, E. (2011). The relationship between bilingual exposure and vocabulary development. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15, 426445.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Wijnendaele, I., & Brysbaert, M. (2002). Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Phonological priming from the second to the first language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 28, 616627.Google ScholarPubMed
Verhoeven, L., & Vermeer, A. (2005). Het Ongelijk van Netelenbos? Toetsing van Kleuters en hun Prestaties op de Cito Eindtoets Basisonderwijs. Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen, 74, 123133.Google Scholar
Weiß, R. H. (2006). Grundintelligenztest Skala 2 (CFT 20-R) mit Wortschatztest (WS) und Zahlenfolgentest (ZF). Hogrefe: Verlag für Psychologie.Google Scholar
Yarkoni, T., Balota, D., & Yap, M. (2008). Moving beyond Coltheart’s N: A new measure of orthographic similarity. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 15, 971979.10.3758/PBR.15.5.971CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., Jacobs, A. M., & Braun, M. (2001). Identical words are read differently in different languages. Psychological Science, 12, 379384.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed