Units of Analysis in Nonword Reading: Evidence from Children and Adults

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 73, 208 –242 (1999) Article ID jecp.1999.2502, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Units of Analysis in Nonword Reading: Evidence from Children and Adults Gordon D. A. Brown and Rachael P. Deavers University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom Four experiments examined variations in children’s (chronological age range: 5 years 7 months to 9 years 10 months) and adults’ reading strategy as a function of task demands. Experiment 1 found that less skilled readers (mean reading age: 8 years 8 months), though able to make use of rime-based spelling-to-sound correspondences (reading “by analogy”), predominantly used simple grapheme–phoneme-level correspondences in reading isolated unfamiliar items. Skilled readers (mean reading age: 11 years 6 months) were more likely to adopt an analogy strategy. Experiments 2 and 3 adopted versions of the “clue word” technique used by U. Goswami (1986, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 42, 73– 83; 1988, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40A, 239 –268) and found a much higher incidence of analogical responding by children of all ages, suggesting that reading strategy is task-dependent. Experiment 4 showed that adults’ nonword-reading strategy is determined by list composition, in that grapheme–phoneme correspondences are used more when the list context contains nonwords. It is concluded that both adults and young children exhibit considerable flexibility and task-dependence in the levels of spellingto-sound correspondence (analogies vs decoding) that they use and that grapheme– phoneme correspondences are preferred when maximum generalization to unfamiliar items is required. © 1999 Academic Press Key Words: reading; nonword; strategy; analogy; children; development.

This study is concerned with how children and adults read unfamiliar words. One widespread view is that children initially read using low-level spelling-tosound correspondence rules, such as grapheme–phoneme correspondences, and only later in development make use of mappings involving larger orthographic units such as letter clusters or orthographic rimes (e.g., Coltheart & Leahy, 1992; We thank the staff and pupils at Colwyn Bay County Primary School, St. Michael’s Church of England Preparatory School, Earls Hall Junior School, Brookhurst County Combined School, and Wyburns Primary School for their cooperation and assistance. We also thank E. Spence for help with data collection (Experiment 2), Glyn Collis for statistical advice, and Jonathan Solity for many helpful discussions. Many of the results reported here were presented by the first author to the NATO Advanced Studies Institute, Alvor, Portugal, in 1994. The research described here was partially supported by Grant F/215/AY from the Leverhulme Trust (United Kingdom). Address correspondence and reprint requests to Gordon D. A. Brown, Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]. 208 0022-0965/99 $30.00 Copyright © 1999 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Ehri, 1992; Frith, 1985; Marsh, Friedman, Desberg, & Saterdahl, 1981; Seymour & Duncan, 1997). We term this the small-units-first model. A contrasting view, the large-units-first model, emphasizes children’s early ability to “read by analogy,” that is, to make use of higher level spelling-to-sound correspondences, such as those between orthographic clusters and phonological rime units (e.g., Goswami, 1986, 1988, 1993; Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Laxon, Masterson, & Moran, 1994). This model is motivated partly by children’s relatively early ability to make use of these higher level units in the phonological domain (e.g., Treiman, 1985). A resolution of the issue carries significant educational implications. Should teaching of reading focus on spelling–sound relations at the level of graphemes and phonemes, or is a focus on letter clusters and onsets and rimes likely to prove more effective? On the one hand, computational models of reading suggest that good generalization to new, unfamiliar items will be obtained only when good links between graphemic and phonemic representations can be established (see Besner, Twilley, McCann, & Seergobin, 1990; Brown, 1997; Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996). Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest that adults are more likely to use low-level, grapheme–phoneme correspondences under conditions where there are many unfamiliar items (nonwords) to be read (Monsell, Patterson, Graham, Hughes, & Milroy, 1992). These considerations suggest that an educational focus on the relations between graphemes and phonemes might be most effective in enabling beginning readers to generalize their knowledge to as many new, unfamiliar items as possible. On the other hand, the complete English spelling-to-sound mapping system is more predictable at the level of onsets and rimes (Stanback, 1992; Treiman, Mullennix, BijeljacBabic, & Richmond-Welty, 1995), and even young children are sometimes able to “read by analogy,” that is, to make use of links between orthographic letter clusters and phonological rimes (e.g., Goswami, 1993), and it may be easier for young children to make use of their preexisting phonological knowledge about onsets and rimes than to develop phonemic representations (e.g., Goswami & Bryant, 1990). This might motivate an emphasis on onsets and rimes in the early teaching of children’s reading. The experiments that we report here aim to answer two questions. First, what spelling-to-sound units are used by children when reading unfamiliar items (nonwords) presented without additional information? Second, to what extent are children flexible and adaptive, in that they can make use of spelling–sound correspondences at different levels depending on the nature of the task and evidence confronting them? Before considering the conflicting evidence that has been taken to support either a large-units-first or a small-units-first model, we introduce a third possibility—the flexible-unit-size model. The flexible-unit-size model suggests that the size of orthographic and phonological units that children attend to, and make use

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of, in early reading will depend heavily on the informational demands of the precise task they are required to perform. Brown and Ellis (1994) suggested that beginning readers are provided with incompatible levels of representation in orthographic and phonological domains yet are required to effect a mapping between them. Thus the structure of written orthography provides an implicit structuring of words into individual letters; this level of segmentation is “given” by the input and is likely to be further encouraged by any available letter–name knowledge. However, there is ample evidence that children do not initially have available the representations of individual phonemes that would allow graphemeto-phoneme mappings to be learned readily—rather, children may come to the task of learning to read with higher level phonological units such as rimes (see Goswami & Bryant, 1990, for a review of evidence). Given the need to achieve a mapping between incompatible levels of representation, children must develop phoneme-level representations that can be mapped onto individual written letters (as emphasized by proponents of the small-units-first model), or they must develop units that represent letter clusters and hence can be mapped onto phonological rimes (as emphasized by, e.g., Goswami, 1993), or they must adopt both strategies in parallel. Recent “multiple-levels” models of skilled adult reading (e.g., Brown, 1987; Norris, 1994; Patterson & Morton, 1985; Shallice, Warrington, & McCarthy, 1983) are clearly consistent with this latter suggestion in that they suggest that skilled adult reading of single words may involve the simultaneous use of spelling-to-sound correspondences at many different levels. Thus the question of whether “small units” or “large units” are used first in reading development may be misplaced—rather, it may be the case that even young children will focus attention on, and try to make use of, whatever orthographic and phonological units are highlighted and made relevant by the nature of the specific task confronting them (Brown & Ellis, 1994). The role of instruction may also be important in determining the time course of reading development using units of different sizes (Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 1997; Seymour & Evans, 1994). This is the essence of our flexible-unit-size hypothesis. Much of the existing literature appears to be consistent with this claim, and it is to this that we now turn. Recent research has provided some support for the claim that high-level units such as phonological rimes and corresponding letter clusters may be employed before low-level units (the large-units-first hypothesis). Initial evidence came from studies of phonological representations in children (e.g., Bowey, 1994; Bowey & Francis, 1991; Kirtley, Bryant, MacLean, & Bradley, 1989; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer, 1984; Treiman, 1983, 1985; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991, 1996). Several studies of children’s word reading have suggested that even quite young children are sensitive to “consistency” (spelling-to-sound correspondence at the rime level), suggesting that rime-level units may be used quite early in the development of reading (e.g., Baron, 1979; Laxon, Masterson, & Coltheart,

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1991; Laxon et al., 1994; Treiman et al., 1995). But do children in the early stages of reading make use of their sensitivity to rhyme and the consistency of rime units to assist in reading new words? Goswami conducted an elegant series of experiments to investigate this issue. Her studies involved training the children to read a clue word (e.g., beak) which then remained in view when several target words (e.g., peak, bean, lake) were presented for the children to read. Goswami (1986) found that children read more target words correctly when they were analogous to (shared a rime with) the clue word (e.g., beak–peak), which she took to be evidence of the use of analogy. A recent version of the resulting model, the “interactive analogy model” (Goswami, 1993), proposes that children use their existing phonological knowledge about onsets and rimes to set up orthographic recognition units for words, especially when appropriate instruction is provided. These units are then used as the basis for making analogies between words sharing the same spelling sequence. Increased experience with print and exposure to reading instruction lead to an increasing awareness of phonemes, enabling more refined orthographic analogies to be made. It is possible, however, that this general methodology may under some conditions result in a particularly high incidence of analogizing, due to presentation of the clue word leading children to focus on the level of analysis (rimes) rendered most useful by the demands of the task (see Muter, Snowling, & Taylor, 1994; Savage, 1997). This would be predicted by the flexible-unit-size model and is examined directly in the present paper. Developmental increases in the use of analogy (as expected by the alternative, small-units-first hypothesis) have been found more often when such cues are not present (e.g., Bowey & Hansen, 1994; Bowey & Underwood, 1996; Coltheart & Leahy, 1992; Leslie & Calhoon, 1995). The evidence thus far seems to suggest that children, even those in the early stages of learning to read, are capable of making analogies when prompted yet find it difficult to do so spontaneously. Consistent with this, Hansen and Bowey (1992) found that while fourth-grade children can use orthographic rimes in word recognition, their use of such rime units is not yet automatized. However, recent research suggests that the rime-specific analogy effect in the clue-word studies may be the result of phonological priming (Bowey, Vaughan, & Hansen, 1998; Savage, 1997; Savage & Stuart, 1998). Savage and Stuart found significant transfer when the children only heard the clue word. Given that the children did not see the clue word, they were not making genuine orthographic analogies but were producing phonologically primed responses (see also Savage, 1997). This conclusion was supported by Bowey et al. (1998), who, after controlling for phonological priming, observed equivalent transfer for rime words and onset-vowel words. In the present paper we extend the methodology used by Coltheart and Leahy (1992). Coltheart and Leahy investigated children’s pronunciation of nonwords that would receive different pronunciations according to whether

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rime-level or grapheme-level spelling-to-sound correspondences were being used. For example, the nonword dalk will be pronounced /dælk/ if grapheme– phoneme correspondences are used but differently if rime-level correspondences are used (i.e., if it is read by analogy to words such as walk, talk, and chalk). The use of nonwords rather than words offers an advantage in a study of this type, because nonwords can tap into no preexisting orthographic representation and therefore must be read by some form of assembly strategy. The nonword dalk contains an “irregular consistent” rime, allowing the assumption that an “irregular” (i.e., rime-based) response will be produced only if rime-level correspondences are being used. The experiment also used “regular consistent” items such as dack, which will be pronounced the same way whether rime-level or grapheme-level units are used. A similar methodology was employed by Manis, Szeszulski, Howell, and Horn (1986). Coltheart and Leahy found that older children (and adults) were more affected by the consistency of the rime unit than were younger children, a finding that is apparently consistent with the small-units-first hypothesis (but see Goswami, Gombert, & De Barrera, 1998). In summary, previous studies have used different stimuli and different methodologies to determine whether children use analogies when reading. Different methodologies have led to different conclusions, as would be predicted by the flexible-unit-size model—for example, the provision of a “clue” word that shares a rime unit will be likely to focus a child’s attention on the rime-level correspondences that will be useful for performing the task, relative to lower level grapheme–phoneme correspondences that might receive relatively greater emphasis in a different task context. The role of instructional experience may also be important. In the present series of experiments we therefore examined changes in children’s and adults’ nonword-reading strategy as a function of task demands. The overall prediction, based on the flexible-unit-size hypothesis, is that nonwordreading strategy will be determined not just by developmental level of reading ability, but also by task demands. EXPERIMENT 1 Experiment 1 investigated changes in the size of orthographic and phonological units used for reading isolated nonwords as a function of reading ability, and it also provides baseline data against which to assess the effect of changing task demands in subsequent studies. The design of the study was very similar to that of Coltheart and Leahy (1992), although a different set of items was constructed for the present experiment. Children 6 –10 years of age and adults were asked to read specifically designed nonword stimuli containing regular consistent rimes, such as deld, or irregular consistent rimes, such as dalk. While regular responses should be produced for the regular items whether a large- or a small-units strategy is applied, irregular nonwords will

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receive a different pronunciation depending on the strategy employed. Use of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (small units) will elicit a regular response (e.g., /dælk), while use of analogy to a known word such as talk will elicit an irregular response (e.g., /dɔk/), indicating use of larger spelling-tosound units. The responses given to the irregular nonwords are therefore of particular interest. We do not wish to exclude the possibility that readers may use sophisticated, context-dependent grapheme–phoneme correspondence rules. Such knowledge could take the form of rules such as “i is normally pronounced /ai/ when it is followed by the consonants ld ” (e.g., wild, mild) or “oo is pronounced /υ/ when it is followed by k at the end of a word” (e.g., book, cook). If children at a given developmental point make use of sophisticated context-dependent rules such as these, their performance will be essentially equivalent to performance produced through reading “by analogy,” that is, reading by using knowledge of the pronunciations of rime units in English words. Thus although we will refer throughout to the contrasting possibilities of “reading by analogy” and “reading with simple grapheme–phoneme correspondence rules,” we will regard reading by analogy as in many respects equivalent to the use of sophisticated context-dependent grapheme–phoneme rules that take account of the orthographic rime unit within which an ambiguous grapheme occurs, and our instantiation of the small-units-first hypothesis will assume the use of very simple, context-insensitive grapheme– phoneme rules such as those that might (according to the small-units-first hypothesis) be involved in the early stages of reading development. Prior presentation of three-letter practice nonwords ensured children’s understanding of the task, as in Coltheart and Leahy (1992). Real-word stimuli containing the same regular and irregular rimes found in the nonwords were also presented to ensure children’s familiarity with the correct spellings assigned to each rime (because if the children are unfamiliar with the correct pronunciation of the rime there is no basis for analogy). Children’s comprehension of the real-word items was also tested to investigate their knowledge of these words and to ensure that the regular words were not being read correctly through the use of spelling-to-sound translation procedures alone. Method Participants Sixty children (32 boys, 28 girls) from Years 1 through 4 participated in this study. Their ages ranged from 5 years 10 months to 9 years 10 months (mean 5 8 years). The Year 3 and Year 4 children were taken from the same South East Essex junior school, while the younger children were taken from two separate infant schools. All the children had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and had no reported difficulties with reading or spelling. All children spoke fluent English as a first language and had received mixed phonic/whole language literacy

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BROWN AND DEAVERS TABLE 1 Nonwords Used in Experiments 1 and 2 “More irregular” nonwords

“More regular” nonwords

paft a dalf dalk nalm yalt jance hanch jask nast kealth jild nold polt dook boup

pirt deld durn nisk yoan jield heech jift nime klarch jiss nade pobe dace bure

a

In most Southern British dialects the a in words containing the rimes -aft, -ance, -anch, -ask, and -ast is pronounced /ɑ/ (as in car and party). These were therefore regarded as irregular rimes, as the most common pronunciation for the vowel grapheme a is /æ/.

teaching. Fifteen undergraduate students from the Psychology Department at the University of Warwick also participated in this study. Experimental Stimuli Two nonword lists were devised. One list contained 15 nonwords with irregular consistent rimes (e.g., dalk) and the other contained 15 nonwords with regular consistent rimes (e.g., deld), with stimuli controlled as tightly as possible given the constraints of the words available in English. Table 1 lists the nonword stimuli. 1 Measures of regularity for the vowel unit were taken from Venezky (1970) and rimes were defined as consistent if all monosyllabic words with a frequency of at least 1 per million (Francis & Kucera, 1982) containing that rime were pronounced in the same way. 2 We note that the 1 A small number of other items (two in each condition) were included in the experimental lists for all experiments. However, these were not included in the reported analyses. 2 Two of the irregular items were not entirely consistent by this definition (boup–group, coup; jild–child, gild), while two others (dook and paft) meet the definition only because spook and waft have Francis–Kucera frequencies of less than 1 per million. The exception words (coup, gild) are, however, low in frequency (each has a Francis–Kucera frequency of just 1 per million) and are assumed not to be in the vocabulary of children 5 to 10 years of age. These items were therefore included within the set of irregular consistent stimuli; we were unable to construct a better set of items given the constraints of the words available in English.

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measure of regularity is a simple one that takes no account of the context of surrounding consonants. If more complex or context-sensitive rule systems were used, many of the “irregular” items would qualify as “regular.” However, given the desirability of matching items on other criteria (such as number of spelling-to-sound friends; see below), constraints of the available items in the language mean that it is impossible to construct lists of matched consistent items that are straightforwardly “regular” or “irregular.” The best that can be achieved is to construct items that are “more regular” and “less regular.” As the aim is to look for evidence for interactions between developmental level, task context, and item type, the exact definition of regularity is not crucial provided that the irregular items are clearly less regular than the control, regular items. To ensure this was the case, we examined the conditional probability of the vowel being pronounced in the way it appears in the “irregular” word (Berndt, Reggia, & Mitchum, 1987). There was a statistically significant difference between the conditional probabilities for the vowels in the “more irregular” items (mean 5 0.13) and for those in the “more regular” items (mean 5 0.57, t(58) 5 5.2, p , .001). It therefore seems safe to conclude that the item sets do indeed differ in regularity and that any interactions between item set and task context will reflect the regularity difference. We will refer to them as “regular” and “irregular” for simplicity. The nonwords were matched pairwise on number of friends (i.e., the number of consistently pronounced words sharing the same rime unit) and the summed frequency of these friends (Francis & Kucera, 1982). As adults at least are sensitive to number of spelling-to-sound friends in the reading of single words (Brown, 1987; Brown & Watson, 1994), and analogies are made more readily from common orthographic rimes than from rare orthographic rimes (see Bowey & Hansen, 1994; Treiman, Goswami, & Bruck, 1990), it was felt to be important to control for this variable (Goswami et al., 1998). 3 The items were also matched on number of letters, initial consonant, and positional bigram frequency (Solso & Juel, 1980). Descriptive statistics are listed in Table 2. Paired t tests indicated that there were no significant differences between the regular and irregular items on any of the measures (p . .10 in all cases). Two lists of words sharing the same rime units as the nonwords were compiled (and are listed in Table 3). Thus there were 15 irregular consistent words (e.g., talk) and 15 regular consistent words (e.g., held); the same qualifications regarding the definition of “regularity” apply as for the nonwords described above. The regular and irregular words were matched on frequency (Carroll, Davies, & 3

We note that the regular and irregular rimes used in the Coltheart and Leahy (1992) study’s nonwords differed from each other in terms of the number of friends (i.e., the number of consistently pronounced monosyllabic words containing that orthographic rime). The difference was both large (13.5 friends for their regular nonwords, on average, compared with 6.1 friends for the irregular nonwords) and statistically significant ( p , .001). We are indebted to Usha Goswami for bringing this to our attention.

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BROWN AND DEAVERS TABLE 2 Descriptive Statistics for the Stimuli Used in Experiments 1 and 2 Nonwords

Stimuli

Number of friends

Summed frequency of friends

Words

Positional bigram frequency

Positional bigram frequency

Frequency

Regular rimes (e.g., deld ) 4.67 (2.26) 433.33 (551.76) 4027.33 (2560.51) 4260.40 (2930.66) 112.73 (111.94) Irregular rimes (e.g., dalf ) 4.40 (2.44) 384.07 (435.17) 4067.00 (2060.84) 5815.47 (3289.48) 123.27 (108.44)

Note. Values are means, with SDs in parentheses.

Richman, 1971; Francis & Kucera, 1982) and positional bigram frequency (Solso & Juel, 1980). The highest frequency item in each “rime family” was chosen, as far as was possible consistent with achieving pairwise matching. Table 2 lists the descriptive statistics for the word stimuli. Paired t tests found no significant differences between the regular and the irregular words on any of the measures ( p . .10 in all cases). Procedure The children completed the reading tasks individually in a single experimental session lasting approximately 15–20 min. They were initially asked to read a

TABLE 3 Words Used in Experiments 1 and 2 “More irregular” nonwords

“More regular” nonwords

craft half talk palm salt dance branch mask fast health child cold bolt book group

skirt held turn disk loan field speech gift crime march miss spade globe space sure

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number of three-letter nonwords taken from Coltheart and Leahy (1992). The children were told that the stimuli were nonsense words that the experimenter had made up and were asked to try to read them. These practice items provided an indication of the child’s reading ability and of the child’s basic knowledge of grapheme–phoneme correspondences and also served to introduce participants to the task of nonword reading. If the child accurately read the five randomly selected practice nonwords, the experimenter proceeded to the next task. If the child showed any signs of difficulty, the experimenter assisted with the pronunciation and continued to present practice items until confident the child was ready to proceed. The children were then presented with the 30 regular and irregular nonwords. They were told that these were more nonsense words made up by the experimenter and they were asked to read them aloud. The nonwords were presented in one of two random orders and the responses were noted by the experimenter. Once this task was complete, the children were asked to read the 30 words from which the nonwords were derived. All the stimuli were printed on plain cards (13 3 5 cm) in bold, black ink and their presentation was participant paced. When the children had read all the experimental stimuli they were asked to indicate whether they knew the meanings of the words presented by providing a definition or a sentence containing an appropriate usage of the word. Finally, the British Ability Scales test of single-word reading (Elliott, Murray, & Pearson, 1983) was administered. The adult participants also completed the tasks for reading in one experimental session lasting approximately 10 –15 min. They were asked to read a sample of practice nonwords, followed by the 30 nonword stimuli and 30 real-word analogs. Responses given were noted down by the experimenter. The participants were asked to indicate if they were unfamiliar with the meanings of any of the real-word items. Results The children were divided into two groups on the basis of reading age as measured by the British Ability Scales test of reading. The “skilled readers” group had a mean reading age of 11 years 6 months (SD 5 14 months). The “less skilled readers” group had a mean reading age of 8 years 8 months (SD 5 9 months). 4 The construction of the groups in this way had the consequence that even the less skilled readers were well past the earliest stages of reading; insufficient responses were available from the very earliest readers to enable reliable analyses of their performance alone when word comprehension level was taken into account as described below. 4 It was felt appropriate to divide the participants into groups according to reading age rather than chronological age, as the focus of interest is changes in nonword reading strategy as a function of changes in reading development level rather than chronological age per se. Other analyses were undertaken using chronological age as the basis for group construction and led to similar but noisier results.

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Following Coltheart and Leahy (1992), the main focus of the analysis concerns the pronunciations assigned by the different participant groups to the regular and irregular nonwords. If the children at an earlier point in reading development rely entirely on small units of spelling-to-sound correspondence (context-insensitive GPCs) when reading the nonwords, they should produce many GPC responses for the two types of nonword and few rime-based analogy responses for the irregular nonwords. If, on the other hand, they are primarily reliant on large units (rimes) or on GPCs that are sensitive to the context of large units, they should produce a high incidence of analogy responses for the irregular nonwords and few, if any, GPC responses for these items. Comparison of the responses given to the irregular items between the two groups of children and the adults will indicate whether there is a change in the size of unit employed for nonword reading as a function of reading level. First, however, we examined the children’s ability to read and define the words from which the critical nonwords were derived (it was assumed that the adults would be familiar with all the words). Word Reading Children cannot be expected to use an analogical procedure to read an unfamiliar item if they do not have in their vocabularies a known word that shares a rime unit with the new item, and on the basis of which an analogy can be drawn. While it was not feasible to examine participants’ ability to read every word that could be used to form an analogy, some indication may be given by the participant’s ability to read a high-frequency word within the rime family from which the nonword was created (e.g., talk for the nonword dalk). These are the data we collected. Such data will of course be most informative for the irregular words used to create the irregular consistent items, such as dalk, because the other (regular) items could be read correctly by application of simple graphemeto-phoneme rules even if the word was not already known to the participant. Word-reading accuracy was generally high, as the mean percentages presented in Table 4 indicate. The apparent effects of group and regularity were confirmed by analyses. More regular words were read correctly according to by-participant analyses, F(1, 72) 5 31.81, p , .0001, and by-item analyses, F(1, 28) 5 7.48, p , .05. The tendency for more words to be read correctly by the older participants was significant both by participants, F(2, 72) 5 17.01, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 56) 5 25.53, p , .0001. A second measure of the children’s familiarity with the words used was given by the results from the test of comprehension. The children performed well on this task, providing accurate definitions or appropriate sentences for the majority of the words used. Analyses confirmed a main effect of group by participants, F(1, 58) 5 12.7, p , .0001, and by items, F(1, 28) 5 25.14, p , .01. The tendency for the skilled readers to know significantly more of the irregular words than did the less skilled readers resulted in an interaction between group and

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NONWORD READING TABLE 4 Mean Percentage of Regular and Irregular Words Correctly Read and Correctly Defined by Participants in Experiment 1

Participants Less skilled readers More skilled readers Adults

% Regular words correctly read

% Regular words correctly defined

% Irregular words correctly read

% Irregular words correctly defined

92.80 (8.57)

90.13 (9.79)

78.90 (16.79)

88.43 (12.87)

99.77 (1.28) 100.00 (0.00)

94.80 (4.81) —

96.20 (8.98) 91.60 (14.93)

98.37 (3.01) —

Note. SDs are in parentheses.

word type by participants, F(1, 58) 5 10.09, p , .01, and by items, F(1, 28) 5 7.9, p , .01. No other effects approached significance. Thus these initial analyses demonstrated, unsurprisingly, that the less skilled readers were not as familiar as the better reading children (or adults) with the correct pronunciations and meanings of the real-word analogs. As successful use of a rime-based strategy is dependent on knowledge of the correct pronunciation of an analogous word, these children might produce fewer rime-based responses simply because they are unfamiliar with the rime units used. For this reason the following analysis of the nonword data controlled for the number of words read correctly and the number of words known (this was done in both the participant and item analyses). Thus only items where the child demonstrated familiarity with the rime unit were included in the analyses (the regular and irregular nonwords remained matched for summed frequency of lexical friends after these exclusions). We now turn to the analysis of major interest: analysis of responses to the critical nonwords. Classification of Responses to Nonwords Responses given to the nonwords were classified as GPC responses if the pronunciation given to the vowel represented the common pronunciation for the given vowel grapheme (according to the Venezky, 1970, norms) and all the consonants were accurately pronounced. Responses were classified as analogy responses if the pronunciation given to the rime was identical to that of the analogous word and thus contained an irregular pronunciation of the vowel. The irregular consistent nonwords will receive a different pronunciation depending on the strategy employed for reading. An analogy (large-units) strategy will elicit a response that rhymes with the analogous word (e.g., reading dalk to rhyme with talk), while a small-units (GPC) strategy will produce a GPC response (e.g., /dælk/). The regular consistent nonwords will receive a GPC

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TABLE 5 Mean Percentage of GPC and Analogy Responses Given to the Two Types of Nonwords by Participants in Experiment 1—After Controlling for Number of Words Known and Read Correctly Regular nonwords

Participants

% GPC responses

Irregular nonwords

% Analogy responses

% “Other” responses

% GPC responses

% Analogy responses

% “Other” responses

0.00

24.00 (18.58)

50.37 (15.84)

38.73 (17.88)

11.00 (11.38)

0.00 0.00

6.73 (8.62) 3.07 (5.44)

44.20 (14.88) 41.40 (18.11)

52.77 (16.18) 57.93 (17.02)

3.03 (6.92) 0.67 (2.58)

Less skilled readers 76.07 (18.53) More skilled readers 93.27 (8.62) Adults 96.93 (5.44)

Note. SDs are in parentheses.

pronunciation whether the child reads the item by analogy to a known word, for example, held, or by applying low-level spelling-to-sound correspondence rules. All remaining responses were classified as “other” responses. Nonword Reading The nonword-reading data were analyzed using a three-way (3 3 2 3 3) multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with group as a between-participants factor with three levels, and nonword-type and response-type as withinparticipants factors with two (regular, irregular) and three (GPC, analogy, “other”) levels, respectively. A MANOVA was computed as each participant’s responses add up to a constant (100) for each nonword type. (This fixed-sum constraint means that the data cannot meet the sphericity assumption of a within-participants ANOVA.) The level of significance was set at p , .05 for both the by-participant and the by-item analyses. Table 5 lists the mean responses given to the two types of nonwords. The adults appear to produce more analogy responses for the irregular nonwords than do the younger children, indicating greater use of a large-units strategy by the adults. The less skilled readers produced more GPC responses for the irregular items than did the skilled readers and the adults, suggesting relatively greater use of a small-units strategy. The MANOVA produced a main effect of response type by participants, F(2, 71) 5 362.83, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 27) 5 180.80, p , .0001, indicating that not all responses were equally likely. Overall, significantly more GPC than analogy responses were produced, with even fewer “other” responses. Accuracy for the experimental nonwords was generally high, with the incidence of responses classified as “other” being generally low. The response type 3 nonword type interaction reached significance by participants, F(2, 71) 5 286.37, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 27) 5 53.47, p ,

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.0001. Significantly more GPC and “other” responses were given to the regular nonwords than to the irregular nonwords. “Other” responses for the regular items were largely a result of the children’s failure to apply the “final e-lengthening rule” consistently (five of the regular items contained rimes ending in silent e). The response type 3 group interaction also reached significance by participants, F(4, 142) 5 11.45, p , .0001, and by items, F(4, 25) 5 12.29, p , .0001. Reliable group differences were found for “other” responses only. More importantly, the three-way response type 3 nonword type 3 group interaction reached significance by participants, F(4, 142) 5 7.35, p , .0001, and by items, F(4, 25) 5 3.57, p , .05. Post hoc analysis revealed that the less skilled readers produced significantly fewer analogy responses for the irregular nonwords than did the better reading children and the adults. The less skilled readers also produced significantly fewer GPC responses for the regular nonwords than did the young skilled readers and adults. Thus analysis of the responses given to the irregular items confirmed that less skilled readers employ a qualitatively different strategy for reading unfamiliar nonwords than do older, better reading children and adults. The fact that the better reading children and adults produced significantly more analogy responses to the irregular nonwords than did the less skilled readers suggests that they make significantly greater use of large-units strategies for reading the unfamiliar items. The less skilled readers did, however, produce significantly more “other” responses than the better reading children and adults. It was therefore necessary to examine whether group differences in analogy responses are evident when taken as a proportion of all GPC 1 analogy responses (i.e., when “other” responses were excluded). The proportion of responses of each type (GPC vs analogy) given to the irregular nonwords was calculated for each group. Figure 1 displays the results and indicates a clear interaction. The proportion of GPC responses appears to decrease from the younger children to the adults, while the proportion of analogy responses increases. A one-way ANOVA with proportion of analogy responses as the dependent variable produced a significant effect of group in the by-participant analysis, F(2, 72) 5 5.20, MSE 5 0.03, p , .01, which just missed significance in the by-item analysis, F(2, 28) 5 3.34, MSE 5 0.03, p 5.051. Post hoc analysis revealed that the young skilled readers and adults produced significantly more analogy responses than did the less skilled readers. The difference between the skilled readers and the adults was nonsignificant. The results therefore are consistent with those of Coltheart and Leahy (1992) in that even after controlling for the number of words read correctly (as was done throughout), young children do not use a rime-based, analogy strategy (or GPCs sensitive to rime-level context) to the same extent as more skilled readers. 5 5

Further analyses, not reported here, found a qualitatively similar pattern of results even when familiarity with the high-frequency analogous words was not controlled.

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FIG. 1. The proportion of GPC 1 analogy responses given to the irregular nonwords by children and adults in Experiment 1.

Discussion The earlier readers made use of both rime-level and grapheme-level correspondences, as evidenced by the incidence of both GPC and analogy responses for the critical irregular consistent nonwords. However, the younger children produced significantly fewer analogy responses than the older children and adults, suggesting that they did not make use of this strategy to the same extent as the older readers. The results therefore suggest that although rime-level units may be acquired relatively early, and used even in the reading of isolated nonwords, more extensive use of an analogy strategy is not made until children are more experienced with print. The results therefore appear to support the general qualitative pattern of development described by Coltheart and Leahy (1992). We note that, consistent with Bowey and Underwood (1996), the current study found the extent of analogizing to be substantially greater than did Coltheart and Leahy. The children in Coltheart and Leahy’s study produced on average 18% rime-based responses for the irregular nonwords. This contrasts with an average of 46% for the children in the current study. A similar trend was observed for the adult participants: the undergraduates in Coltheart and Leahy’s study produced 28% rime-based responses compared to 58% produced by the adults tested here. The higher incidence of rime-based responses produced in the current study may be attributable to the different set of nonwords used or to the age of the youngest participants used in the different studies. Because several of

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the “irregular” items that were used in the present study could potentially be pronounced correctly using context-sensitive grapheme–phoneme rules, the results may overestimate the use of pure analogy. We note, however, that the use of analogy and the use of sophisticated context-sensitive grapheme–phoneme rules (for example, rules that take into account the rime context in which the grapheme occurs) can in any case be regarded as essentially equivalent. The difference between the present results and those of Coltheart and Leahy in terms of absolute level of apparent “analogizing” therefore seems unlikely to be of significance, and here and throughout we focus more theoretical attention on the interaction between nonword type and other variables (such as participant ability or task context). In terms of the models we outlined in the Introduction, the results do not provide unequivocal support for either the small-units-first model or the largeunits-first model. Even the youngest children in our study were able to use rime-level units in reading, although they did not do so to the same extent as older children and adults. The developmental tendency to make increasing use of an analogy strategy, or for constant use of an analogy strategy to be increasingly evident in the data, may reflect the general developmental increase in the size of children’s vocabularies with time. If an analogy strategy is applied consistently throughout development (Goswami, 1992), the results of its application will be increasingly successful as the size of the database (in this case, vocabulary) over which analogies may be drawn increases. An alternative explanation is that children are flexible in the strategy they use, and will use a rime-level analogy approach if it is likely to lead them to the correct response (cf. Goswami, 1988). This would be consistent with the flexibleunit-size model outlined earlier. In this context, we note that although the children in the present study showed some evidence of reading nonwords by analogy to irregular words, the current study failed to replicate the incidence of analogizing demonstrated by Goswami in her series of studies. The use of revised stimuli was therefore insufficient to produce comparable levels of analogical responding. One possibility is that the children received different types of literacy instruction. An alternative possibility, consistent with the flexible-unit-size approach, is that Goswami’s results are partially attributable to the procedure she employed (see also Muter et al., 1994; Savage, 1997; Savage & Stuart, 1998). To test this possibility, a second study was conducted in which the same nonword stimuli as used in Experiment 1 were presented using a version of the clue-word technique developed by Goswami (1986). EXPERIMENT 2 The aim of this experiment was to investigate the effects of task context on the incidence of analogical responses. We therefore examined the reading of the same nonwords that were used in Experiment 1 by a second group of children, who were given clue words to help them read the nonword items. The aim was

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to employ a procedure similar to that used by Goswami (e.g., 1986, 1988), to examine whether the differences in task context could account for the higher level of analogy-type responses found in such studies. Method Participants Forty children (20 boys, 20 girls) from Years 1, 2, and 3 of a local Warwickshire school participated in this study. Their ages ranged from 5 years 7 months to 8 years 3 months (mean 5 7 years 1 month). All children had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and had no specific reading or spelling difficulties. All children spoke fluent English as a first language and had received mixed phonic/ whole language literacy teaching. Children were selected for participation by their respective teachers. Experimental Stimuli The 30 real-word stimuli used in Experiment 1 were presented as clue words and the 30 nonwords devised for Experiment 1 were presented as target nonwords. Procedure All children were seen individually for a single testing session lasting approximately 30 min. When the children entered the room they were given instructions relating to the task, informing them that they would first be given a word which they would be asked to read. They were told that this word might help them to read the nonword that they would be given later. No explicit instructions as to how the clue word might help them were given. The clue word remained in view while the children were presented with the corresponding nonword. All children received a number of practice trials to familiarize them with the task and with nonword reading. The experimenter presented the child with the clue word and asked the child to read it. If the child was unable to do this, or if the child read the word incorrectly, the experimenter read the word aloud and asked the child to repeat the word. Once the clue word had been read correctly the experimenter presented the child with the target nonword and asked the child to provide a suitable pronunciation. Responses given were recorded by the experimenter. All the stimuli were printed on plain cards (13 3 5 cm) in bold, black ink and their presentation was experimenter paced. At the end of the session the British Ability Scales test of single-word reading (Elliott et al., 1983) was administered. Results The children were divided into two equal-sized groups on the basis of reading age as measured by the British Ability Scales test for reading. The first group, the

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NONWORD READING TABLE 6 Mean Percentage of GPC and Analogy Responses Given to the Two Types of Nonwords by Children in Experiment 2 Regular nonwords

Participants Less skilled readers More skilled readers

Irregular nonwords

% GPC responses

% Analogy responses

% “Other” responses

% GPC responses

% Analogy responses

% “Other” responses

85.35 (11.89)

0.00

14.65 (11.89)

8.30 (7.88)

84.25 (12.15)

6.95 (8.40)

94.70 (6.61)

0.00

5.30 (6.61)

4.88 (4.47)

91.55 (8.36)

3.58 (6.31)

Note. SDs are in parentheses.

“less skilled readers,” had a mean reading age of 6 years 10 months (SD 5 7 months). The second group, the “skilled readers,” had a mean reading age of 8 years 10 months (SD 5 12 months). Responses were scored as GPC or analogy according to the same criteria adopted in Experiment 1. All remaining responses were classified as “other.” The mean responses for each item type are shown in Table 6. The incidence of analogy responses for irregular items is extremely high for both groups, indicating substantial use of a large-units strategy. Correspondingly few GPC responses for these items were given. The data were analyzed using a three-way (response type 3 group 3 nonword type) MANOVA, with percentage of responses given as the dependent variable. The response type 3 nonword type interaction was significant by participants, F(2, 37) 5 1420.17, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 27) 5 940.07, p , .0001. Post hoc analysis revealed that significantly more GPC responses were given to the regular nonwords than to the irregular nonwords. In addition to a main effect of response type, the response type 3 group interaction reached significance by participants, F(2, 37) 5 3.81, p , .05, and by items, F(2, 27) 5 5.37, p , .05. Group differences were significant for the “other” responses only; the less skilled readers produced significantly more “other” responses than did the skilled readers. The three-way response type 3 group 3 item type interaction reached significance in the by-participant analysis, F(2, 37) 5 5.67, p , .01, but just missed significance by items (p 5 .072). The failure to find reliable group differences in the percentage of GPC or analogy responses given to the irregular nonwords was confirmed in a subsequent analysis examining the proportion of GPC 1 analogy responses that were GPC or rime-based analogy. A one-way ANOVA with proportion of analogy responses as the dependent variable failed to produce a significant effect of group by participants or by items. This analysis demonstrates that children at different levels of reading ability produce a high incidence of analogy-based responses for the irregular items when

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presented with a clue word prior to the single target nonword. The percentage of GPC responses given to the regular items was equivalent to the percentage of analogy responses given to the irregular items, suggesting that the children were using analogy to read the regular items as well. Discussion These results replicate Goswami’s (1986, 1988) findings and support the claim that the clue word serves as a visual reminder for the use of analogy. The role of the clue word as a prompt to use analogy was previously demonstrated by Muter et al. (1994; see also Savage, 1997), who found that when the clue word was removed before presentation of the target items, the incidence of analogy, though still significant, was substantially smaller than when the clue word remained in view. The current study failed to find reliable group differences in the proportion of GPC and analogy responses given to the irregular items relative to the total number of GPC 1 analogy responses. This is also consistent with Goswami’s (1986) finding that analogy was independent of reading ability. This finding contrasts with the view that the use of analogy is restricted to the later stages of development (e.g., Marsh, Desberg, & Cooper, 1977; Marsh et al., 1981). The percentages of analogical responses found in this study are even greater than those reported by Goswami (1986, 1988). In this study children were presented with a single target item for each clue word, whereas the children in Goswami’s studies were presented with multiple target words. It could be argued that the more salient the rime-level information provided by the task, the more likely children are to make use of this information. An alternative explanation, given the results of Bowey et al. (1998), is that phonological priming effects are greater when only one nonword is paired with each clue word. Experiment 3 was designed to examine whether presentation of multiple target items weakens the bias toward an analogy strategy by reducing the salience of the clue word. EXPERIMENT 3 Experiment 3 was designed to investigate whether children would still produce a high incidence of analogous responses for the irregular nonwords when each clue word was paired with a number of target items of which only one shared a common rime unit. The procedure employed followed that used by Goswami (1986) more closely than did Experiment 2. Method Participants Thirty children (19 girls, 11 boys) from Years 1 and 3 of a South East Essex primary school took part in this study. Their ages ranged from 5 years 10 months to 8 years 4 months (mean 5 7 years 2 months). They all spoke fluent English

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NONWORD READING TABLE 7 Nonwords Used in Experiment 3 Rime nonwords

Onset 1 vowel nonwords

Common-letter nonwords

Control nonwords

paft dalf dalk nalm yalt jance hanch jask nast kealth jild nold polt dook boup

crand hank tarm paff sark dalve bramp mang fazz heach ching goft bomp boon groud

frack flawk kact glam talp nadge crawn smab stant theash fich lond trob koost brout

vime tegg pung hosh fren brock smill chig weck stidge gluff vect hink neld sneed

as a first language and had no reported difficulties with reading or spelling. All children had received mixed phonic/whole language literacy teaching. Experimental Stimuli The 15 irregular words used in Experiments 1 and 2 were presented as clue words. For each clue word four nonwords were devised. One shared a common rime unit with the clue word, one shared a common beginning sequence (onset 1 vowel), one shared three common but nonsequential letters, and one, a control item, shared no common sequence with the clue word. Thus there were 15 rime nonwords (e.g., dalk), 15 onset 1 vowel nonwords (e.g., tarm), 15 common-letter nonwords (e.g., kact), and 15 control nonwords (e.g., pung). The 15 rime nonwords were the same irregular consistent nonwords used in Experiments 1 and 2. The items are listed in Table 7. We note that the items are imperfectly matched, in that the different nonword types were differentially similar (orthographically) to the clue word. However, this does not affect the main comparison of interest, which concerns whether the responses to the rime nonwords change simply as a result of the presence of other targets. Procedure The procedure employed was similar to that used in Experiment 2, except that after each clue word was introduced the children were asked to read all four target nonwords. In each case the clue word remained in view while the corresponding nonwords were presented, but the children were not periodically

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reminded of its pronunciation (this is a difference from Goswami’s procedure; see Savage & Stuart, 1998). The order in which the nonwords were presented for each clue word varied, although the rime nonwords were always in the second, third, or fourth position (the first position was not used in order to avoid immediate repetition). Each child received the items in the same order. The British Ability Scales test of single-word reading (Elliott et al., 1983) was administered at the end of the session. Results The children were divided into two groups on the basis of reading age as measured by the British Ability Scales test of reading. The less skilled readers had a mean reading age of 7 years 1 month (SD 5 8 months), while the skilled readers had a mean reading age of 9 years 5 months (SD 5 17 months). Classification of Responses Rime nonwords. The responses given to these items were classified according to the criteria used for the items in Experiments 1 and 2. Onset 1 vowel nonwords. Responses given to these items were recorded as GPC responses if the pronunciation given to the vowel represented the most common pronunciation for the given vowel grapheme and the consonants were accurately pronounced, for example, /bun/ for boon. A response was recorded as an analogy response if the pronunciation given to the beginning sequence was identical to that of the clue word, for example, /bυn/ for boon by analogy to book. As far as possible all onset 1 vowel nonwords contained consistent rimes corresponding to a GPC pronunciation. Thus the use of small units (GPCs) or large units (rimes) will elicit a GPC response. Common-letter nonwords. Responses were regarded as GPC responses if the pronunciation given to the vowel represented the most common pronunciation and all consonants were accurately pronounced, for example, /kust/ for koost. A response was recorded as an analogy response if the pronunciation given to the vowel was identical to that of the clue word, for example, /kυst/ for koost by analogy to book. As far as possible all common-letter nonwords contained consistent rimes corresponding to a GPC pronunciation. Thus the use of either small units (simple GPCs) or large units (rimes) will elicit a GPC response. Control nonwords. Responses were regarded as GPC responses if the pronunciation given to the vowel represented the most common pronunciation and all consonants were accurately pronounced, for example, /n«ld/ for neld. As far as possible all control nonwords contained consistently spelled rimes corresponding to a regular spelling. If the clue word provides a sufficient prompt for the use of a rime-based analogy strategy, there should be a high incidence of analogy responses given to the rime nonwords.

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NONWORD READING TABLE 8 Mean Percentage of Responses Given to Four Types of Nonwords by Children in Experiment 3 % GPC responses

% Analog responses

% “Other” responses

Less skilled readers Rime nonwords Onset 1 vowel nonwords Common-letter nonwords Control nonwords

28.91 (23.37) 49.67 (24.32) 45.80 (24.47) 46.67 (28.16)

40.91 (10.62) 9.40 (5.94) 4.00 (6.53) 0.00

30.18 (20.13) 40.80 (24.47) 50.20 (28.41) 53.33 (28.16)

More skilled readers Rime nonwords Onset 1 vowel nonwords Common-letter nonwords Control nonwords

31.47 (12.77) 88.00 (10.39) 75.60 (13.26) 89.40 (8.26)

63.07 (12.16) 9.27 (8.25) 8.47 (7.29) 0.00

5.47 (4.49) 2.73 (5.57) 15.93 (13.87) 10.60 (8.26)

Note. SDs are in parentheses.

Analysis of Responses The data were analyzed using a three-way (3 3 2 3 4) multivariate analysis of variance with group as a between-participants factor and response type (GPC, analogy, “other”) and nonword type (rime, onset 1 vowel, common letter, control) as within-participants factors. Of primary interest is the significance of the three-way response type 3 group 3 nonword type interaction, as this will indicate whether the two groups of children make equivalent use of an analogy strategy to read the different nonword types. The mean percentages of GPC, analogy, and “other” responses given to the four types of nonword are listed in Table 8. Children in both groups produced considerably more analogy responses for the rime nonwords than for the other types of nonwords. The MANOVA produced a main effect of response by participants, F(2, 27) 5 175.10, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 55) 5 72.23, p , .0001. Significantly more GPC responses than analogy and “other” responses were produced. The difference between analogy and “other” responses was nonsignificant. The response type 3 nonword type interaction reached significance by participants, F(6, 23) 5 100.55, p , .0001, and by-items, F(6, 110) 5 15.81, p , .0001. Significantly more analogy responses were given to the rime nonwords than to the onset 1 vowel, common-letter, and control nonwords. However, we did not examine this interaction further, due to the differential orthographic overlap between the clue word and the different nonword types. The response type 3 group interaction also reached significance by participants, F(2, 27) 5 21.14, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 55) 5 102.51, p , .0001. The less skilled readers produced significantly fewer GPC and analogy responses and significantly more “other” responses than did the skilled readers.

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BROWN AND DEAVERS TABLE 9 Mean Percentage of Responses Given to Irregular Nonwords by Matched Subgroups of Children in Experiments 1–3

Experiment

% GPC responses

% Analogy responses

% “Other” responses

Experiment 1 (children presented with nonwords in isolation)

47.18 (15.05)

39.55 (19.11)

13.27 (12.93)

Experiment 2 (children presented with clue word and single target)

3.98 (3.78)

92.78 (7.15)

3.25 (6.09)

Experiment 3 (children presented with clue word and multiple targets)

34.76 (16.81)

54.26 (17.37)

10.99 (13.64)

Note. SDs are in parentheses.

Finally, the response type 3 group 3 nonword type interaction also reached significance by participants, F(6, 23) 5 7.53, p , .0001, and by items, F(6, 110) 5 6.733, p , .0001. The skilled readers produced significantly more analogy responses than did the less skilled readers for the rime nonwords alone. The results indicate that despite being provided with the basis for analogy in the form of a clue word, the younger children did not make use of a rime-based analogy strategy to the same extent as the older children. However, as the less skilled readers also produced significantly more “other” responses than the skilled readers, a subsequent analysis was conducted in which the proportion of GPC 1 analogy responses that were either GPC or analogy based was examined. A one-way ANOVA with proportion of analogy responses given to the rime nonwords as the dependent variable failed to produce a significant effect of group either by participants or by items. In order to examine whether the presentation of multiple targets for each clue word significantly reduced the use of a rime-based analogy strategy for reading, a direct comparison between two groups of 22 children from Experiments 1 (no clue word) and 2 (clue word; one nonword) and a subgroup of 22 children from Experiment 3 (clue word; four nonwords) was undertaken. The three groups of children were matched on chronological and reading ages. The mean chronological ages were 7 years 1 month, 7 years 4 months, and 7 years 3 months for children from Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively. All three groups had a mean reading age of 8 years 8 months. The mean percentages of responses given to the irregular nonwords are listed in Table 9. It is evident that while the children in Experiment 3 produced more analogy responses than the children in Experiment 1, they failed to match the high level produced by the children in Experiment 2. A two-way MANOVA was conducted on the responses given to the irregular (rime) nonwords with task (isolation, clue–single target, clue–multiple targets) a

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between-participants factor and with response type (GPC, analogy, “other”) a within-participants factor. In addition to a main effect of response type, a response type 3 task interaction was found by participants, F(4, 124) 5 26.86, p , .0001, and by items, F(4, 11) 5 38.33, p , .0001. Children presented with the nonwords in isolation produced significantly more GPC responses than children in either clue-word condition. The children presented with multiple targets (Experiment 3) produced significantly more GPC responses than the children presented with single targets for each clue word (Experiment 2). Children presented with the clue words produced significantly more analogy responses than those presented with the items in isolation. Children presented with a single target item produced significantly more analogy responses than those presented with multiple targets. Finally, children presented with the clue word and a single target produced significantly fewer “other” responses than either of the other two groups. As GPC responses indicate the use of small units of spelling-to-sound correspondence, the results demonstrate that a small-units strategy predominates when items are presented in isolation. In contrast, children presented with the basis for analogy in the form of a clue word appear to be more reliant on a large-units strategy for reading. These children produced significantly more analogy responses, indicative of the use of a rime-based strategy. However, the salience of the clue word appears important: the more salient the clue word, the more likely the child is to use it as the basis for analogy. These findings were confirmed in a subsequent analysis examining the number of GPC and analogy responses (as a proportion of GPC 1 analogy responses) given to the irregular nonwords. Figure 2 displays the data and demonstrates a clear response by task interaction. A one-way ANOVA with percentage of analogy responses as the dependent variable produced a significant main effect of task by participants, F(2, 63) 5 62.15, MSE 5 0.024, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 28) 5 38.46, MSE 5 0.025, p , .0001. Post hoc analysis revealed that the group of children from Experiment 2 produced significantly more analogy responses than the children from Experiment 3, who in turn produced significantly more analogy responses than the children from Experiment 1. Discussion The results from Experiment 3, in combination with the results of the cross-task comparison, demonstrated that the size of phonological unit used for reading is indeed influenced by task demands. Presentation of a clue word prior to the target nonword significantly biases children to adopt a large-units strategy for reading. Reliable task differences were found in the proportion of analogy responses given to the irregular consistent nonwords between children presented with clue words and those presented with the items in isolation. However, children are significantly less likely to use the clue word as a basis for analogy if the salience of the clue is reduced by the presentation of multiple targets (as in Experiment 3). Nevertheless, there is

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FIG. 2. The proportion of GPC 1 analogy responses produced for the irregular nonwords by children in Experiments 1–3.

still a clear effect of the clue word biasing children toward the use of an analogy strategy. Although these results are consistent with the flexible-unit-size model, phonological priming effects may provide an alternative explanation for these findings (e.g., Bowey et al., 1998; Savage, 1997; Savage & Stuart, 1998). It is possible that phonological priming effects will be greater when there is a single target nonword than when there are multiple target nonwords. To summarize, the results suggest that children will make use of spelling-tosound information at either a rime level or a grapheme–phoneme level, depending on which source of information is made most useful and salient by the nature of the particular task confronting them. It is, therefore, clearly misleading to cast the debate in terms of a simple comparison between the small-units-first and the large-units-first model. A further question is whether the flexible-unit-size model also provides a good account of the reading of ambiguous nonwords by skilled adults. We examined this issue in the final experiment, in an attempt to generalize the evidence for the flexible-unit-size model by using a different task context manipulation. EXPERIMENT 4 The aim of this experiment was to investigate the effects of a different task context manipulation on adults’ reading of the same nonword stimuli as were used in Experiments 1 and 2.

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There is already some evidence that adults can exhibit flexibility in the reading strategy they adopt (e.g., Peereman & Content, 1995). Monsell et al. (1992) found that exception words such as have (cf. gave, cave, rave, etc.) were named more slowly when they were presented in the context of a list containing nonwords rather than additional exception words. There was also a greater tendency for participants to make regularization errors in the nonword context. This was taken as evidence that participants are able to exert strategic control over their use of low-level sublexical spelling-to-sound processes—such processing is assumed to be necessary when nonwords must be named but leads to slower and less accurate performance on naming exception words. When only exception words must be named, greater weight can be given to lexical routines for the derivation of word pronunciations, and the lexical strategy will lead to better performance on exception words. In Experiment 4 of the present study, we investigated the possibility that a manipulation similar to that employed by Monsell et al. could be used to bias the level of spelling-to-sound translation routines used in naming irregular consistent nonwords. Multiple-levels models of single-word reading sometimes assume that spelling-to-sound translation may take place at many different levels, with the lowest level involving graphemes and phonemes and the highest level involving wholeword, lexical translation routines. A lexical reading strategy can, in such models, simply be seen as a spelling-to-sound correspondence operating at the wholeword level rather than at a grapheme level or a rime level (e.g., Brown, 1987). Thus in such models there can be a “continuum of levels” rather than a simple distinction between lexical and sublexical mechanisms of spelling-to-sound translation. The use of simple, context-independent grapheme–phoneme-level correspondences in reading would represent one end of the continuum, while use of rime-level correspondences would be close to the other end. In Experiment 4, we therefore required skilled adult readers to read the ambiguous nonword stimuli used in Experiments 1 and 2 in lists which were otherwise composed of (a) other nonwords, (b) exception words, or (c) the irregular consistent words from which the target nonwords were derived. It was assumed that the use of high-level spelling-to-sound correspondences such as those based on rime units might be encouraged by the presence of exception words in the list to be read (because words with exceptional pronunciations cannot be read correctly using grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, and so participants will be operating at the “large-units” end of the continuum of levels). Use of this strategy would be evidenced by high levels of rime-based analogy responses to the irregular consistent nonwords such as dalk. When the list is composed solely of nonwords, participants are more likely to be biased toward the “small-units” end of the continuum of levels of spellingto-sound translation referred to above. This would lead to a higher proportion of regular (grapheme–phoneme-based) responses to the dalk-type items. When the list contains the words from which the nonwords were derived, the use of analogy strategies should be especially facilitated. Because the nonwords provide a very

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direct measure of the size of spelling-to-sound correspondence used to read them, use of this methodology may provide a sensitive measure of the effects of list context on reading strategy. In terms of the theoretical models outlined at the beginning of this paper, the question is whether the flexible-unit-size model will appropriately characterize skilled adult reading or whether adults, given their larger vocabularies, will be likely to use a rime-based analogy strategy irrespective of task context. Method Participants Forty-five undergraduates from the University of Warwick (18 male, 27 female) participated in this study. They were paid £1.00 for participation. Participants were screened so that only those with an accent which led to an irregular pronunciation for words such as branch and mask (i.e., /brɑnT/, /mɑsk/) took part. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions. Thus there were 15 participants within each condition. Experimental Stimuli The 30 critical nonword stimuli (15 regular, 15 irregular) devised for Experiment 1 were presented within one of three list contexts. List A (nonword list) contained an additional 30 nonwords (e.g., frad, brait) selected from a variety of sources. None of these additional items shared a common rime with the critical nonwords. Presentation of the 60 nonword items followed one of two randomized orders. List B (exception-word list) contained 30 low-frequency exception words (e.g., gauge, warn). The mean Francis–Kucera frequency of the items was 10.08 (range , 1 to 37). Again presentation of the 60 items followed one of two randomized orders. List C ( prime list) contained 30 high-frequency words from which the critical nonwords were derived (e.g., fast, miss) and 3 filler items (which did not share a common rime with the nonwords). Each prime preceded the corresponding nonword by 3 items. Presentation of the 63 items followed one of two predetermined orders. Table 10 lists the additional items used in the nonword and the exception-word lists. Procedure Participants were seen individually for a single testing session lasting approximately 10 min. They were told that they would be asked to read a number of items, some of which would be nonwords. Participants given List A (nonword list) were told that all the items were nonwords, while those given Lists B and C (exception-word list and prime list) were told that the list contained a mixture of real words and nonwords. The items were printed on cards (13 3 5 cm) in bold, black ink. Responses given were recorded by the experimenter.

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NONWORD READING TABLE 10 Additional Nonwords and Exception Words Used in Experiment 4 List A

List B

frad brait scort goom dake fich dode pume spoo chank pice korp dort loze trest brone heeb hink barl sheb gaks chig rond blash neak fide grend glud hosh vect

tomb dwarf gauge dove wand worm wolf plait ward brooch bowl hood wasp draught shoe quart deaf aunt climb sweat pint push soul swamp plough warn swan fete wool monk

Results Responses were recorded as GPC or analogy responses according to the same criteria adopted in Experiment 1. The data were analyzed using a three-way MANOVA with list type (nonwords, exception words, primes) a between-participants variable and with response type (GPC, analogy, “other”) and nonword type (regular, irregular) as within-participants variables. If list context does affect the strategy adopted for reading the unfamiliar items, the incidence of GPC and analogy responses given to the irregular nonwords should vary according to list type. More GPC responses should be produced for the irregular items in the nonword list, while more analogy responses should be produced for these items in the exception-

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BROWN AND DEAVERS TABLE 11 Mean Percentage of Responses Given by Adults to Regular and Irregular Nonwords Presented in Different List Contexts Regular nonwords

List

% GPC responses

List A (nonwords) 96.33 (7.19) List B (exception words) 97.73 (4.13) List C (primes) 100.00 (0.00)

% Analogy % “Other” responses responses

Irregular nonwords % GPC responses

% Analogy responses

% “Other” responses

0.00

3.67 (7.19) 64.00 (8.64)

35.13 (9.57)

0.93 (2.46)

0.00 0.00

2.27 (4.13) 38.33 (13.25) 59.93 (13.36) 1.87 (3.20) 0.00 32.07 (14.68) 67.07 (15.54) 0.93 (2.46)

word and prime lists. The result of the three-way response type 3 nonword type 3 list type interaction is therefore of interest. The mean percentages of responses given to the nonword items are listed in Table 11. It is clear that while participants given the nonword list produced more GPC responses than analogy responses for the irregular items, the pattern of performance is reversed for the remaining two groups of participants, who produced more analogy responses than GPC responses. The MANOVA produced a significant main effect of response type by participants, F(2, 41) 5 2476.63, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 27) 5 3312.53, p , .0001, indicating that not all responses were equally likely. Significantly more GPC responses were produced than analogy responses, which in turn were more frequent than “other” responses. The response type 3 nonword type interaction was also significant by participants, F(2, 41) 5 374.87, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 27) 5 23.47, p , .0001. Significantly more GPC responses were given to the regular items, while significantly more analogy responses were given to the irregular items. The response type 3 list type interaction reached significance by participants, F(4, 82) 5 10.21, p , .0001, and by items, F(4, 25) 5 10.53, p , .0001. Significantly more GPC responses were produced by participants given the nonword list (List A) than by those given the exception-word list (List B) and the prime list (List C). The latter two groups produced significantly more analogy responses than the nonword group. More importantly, the response type 3 list type 3 nonword type interaction also reached significance by participants, F(4, 82) 5 10.95, p , .0001, and by items, F(4, 25) 5 8.374, p , .0001. Significant differences were found for the irregular items only. The nonword group produced significantly more GPC responses for the irregular items than did the exceptionword and prime groups, who produced significantly more analogy responses for these items than did the nonword group. The difference between the exceptionword group and the prime-word group failed to reach significance for either type of response.

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FIG. 3. The proportion of GPC 1 analogy responses given by adults to the irregular nonwords presented within different list contexts.

Thus the nonword list did indeed encourage the use of small units, as significantly more GPC responses were produced in this condition than in either of the others, indicating particular use of a rule-based strategy. The inclusion of exception or prime words within the list encouraged greater use of large units, as significantly more analogy responses were produced for items in this list than for those in the nonword list. These results were confirmed in a subsequent analysis examining the proportion of GPC and analogy responses given to the irregular items relative to the total number of GPC 1 analogy responses given (see Fig. 3). A one-way ANOVA with proportion of analogy responses as the dependent variable produced a significant effect of list type by participants, F(2, 42) 5 26.58, MSE 5 0.016, p , .0001, and by items, F(2, 58) 5 13.89, MSE 5 0.016, p , .0001. Post hoc analysis indicated that the exception-word group and the prime-word group produced significantly more analogy responses than the nonword group. Discussion The results indicate that the context within which the nonwords were presented had a significant effect on the size of unit employed by the adult participants. When the critical nonwords were presented within a pure nonword list, participants were significantly more likely to produce a GPC response than an analogy response for the irregular items. This is consistent with the hypothesis that

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presentation of a pure nonword list will encourage the use of small units of spelling-to-sound correspondence. These results are consistent with those of Monsell et al. (1992) in that they provide clear evidence that the strategies skilled adult readers employ vary with list context. However, the current study examined differences in the pronunciation given to nonword items for which a nonlexical strategy must be employed. The list context effects found in this study therefore demonstrate that the size of nonlexical units (large or small) adults employ for reading are task dependent, and these results thereby extend the findings obtained in the Monsell et al. (1992) study. The results exclude the possibility that adults, as a result of their larger vocabularies, invariably use a rime-level strategy for reading. Their choice of strategy appears to adapt according to the information provided/context in the task. The flexible-unit-size hypothesis outlined for children thus appears to provide an appropriate characterization of adults’ as well as children’s reading of nonwords. GENERAL DISCUSSION We can now relate the results as a whole to the different models of reading development that were summarized in the Introduction. The mixed pattern of results in the empirical literature, coupled with a consideration of the nature of the task facing children as they begin reading, led us to consider the possibility that children may be flexible and adaptive and may use whatever levels of spelling-to-sound correspondence are made relevant by the demands of the specific task facing them (Brown & Ellis, 1994). This is the flexible-unit-size hypothesis. Experiment 2 found clear evidence for the flexible-unit-size hypothesis, in that children of all ages tested were substantially more likely to use rime-level correspondences in reading the same ambiguous nonwords as were used in Experiment 1 when a clue word was provided to them (Goswami, 1986, 1988, 1993). Experiment 3 found a similar trend when children were required to read several different nonwords on the basis of a single clue word, and Experiment 4 found that the level of spelling-to-sound correspondences used by adults is also highly task dependent. The methodology we have used does not permit testing of children in the very earliest stages of reading with the same set of items that are used for older children. But within the age range we have examined, the results of the present studies are clearly consistent with the suggestion that both adults and children may exert strategic control over the levels of spelling-to-sound correspondence that they use in reading unfamiliar items. Even the youngest children we tested proved highly sensitive to the informational demands of the task. It is therefore inappropriate to frame the theoretical debate in terms of a competition between the small-units-first hypothesis and the large-units-first hypothesis. Rather, chil-

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dren may be biased by the informational demands of the task, and the levels of translation that are highlighted by task demands, toward the use of either higher level (rime-based) or lower level (grapheme–phoneme-based) spelling-to-sound correspondences. This is in accordance with the flexible-unit-size model. However, it is also possible that the task-dependent shift toward a rime-based level of reading is based on simple priming of the higher level units. Recent research suggests that, in the clue-word studies, children may not always be making genuine orthographic analogies (Bowey et al., 1998; Savage, 1997; Savage & Stuart, 1998; cf. Goswami, 1990). Given the possibility that the rime analogy effect in the clue-word studies reflects phonological priming, the results of Experiment 1 may provide a more reliable account of young children’s analogy use. Furthermore, analogy use in the absence of specific prompts is more representative of a naturalistic reading task in which children are rarely provided with appropriate clue words. Consistent with previous research, Experiment 1 found that younger children were more reliant on GPCs to read unfamiliar words (Bowey & Underwood, 1996; Coltheart & Leahy, 1992), indicating that this is their favored strategy. Early reading instruction is also likely to play an important role in the level of phonological units employed (Duncan et al., 1997; Seymour & Evans, 1994). Children may be more likely to focus on lower levels of representation if early reading instruction places an emphasis on small units (GPCs). The schools involved in the current studies reported instructional approaches which combined phonics and whole language teaching with little or no rime-based instruction. It is possible therefore that such early experiences have influenced the level of phonological unit employed, irrespective of the order in which these skills have developed (Deavers & Solity, 1998). In terms of models of reading, the results are most readily accommodated by multiple-levels models of reading, in which parallel mappings between orthographic and phonological domains occur at many different levels (e.g., Brown, 1987; Norris, 1994; Shallice et al., 1983; see Brown, 1997, for discussion). In terms of the task facing children as they begin to learn to read, the development of alternative strategies may reflect optimal behavior on the part of the reading mechanism (Brown, 1998). The English spelling-to-sound mapping system is most predictable at the level of rimes (Treiman et al., 1995) but, set against this, the use of lower level spelling-to-sound contingencies such as grapheme-tophoneme correspondences may enable easier generalization to unfamiliar items (Brown, 1997; Plaut et al., 1996). Furthermore, there are many fewer graphemelevel correspondences than rime-level correspondences to be learned. Despite the greater availability of rime-level phonological representations at the earliest stages of reading, at least at an epilinguistic level (Gombert, 1992; see Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 1998, for discussion), the greater generalization to unfamiliar words enabled by the use of small units of spelling-to-sound correspondence may explain why children appear to approach isolated nonword reading with the use

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