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Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective A. Utka et al. (Eds.) © 2014 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-442-8-196
How to Compute Reading Development Strategy? Evidence from Russian-Speaking Children Alexandr N. KORNEV a, 1, Ingrida BALČIŪNIENĖ b, a, Margarita G. Selezneva c and Anatolij A. Sorokin c a St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University (Russia) b Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) c BSTU «VOENMEH» named after D.F. Ustinov (Russia) Abstract. The paper deals with the automatized analysis of reading strategies in Russianspeaking children. The study 2 is based on the individual longitudinal data of 40 typically developing monolingual subjects who were at the very initial stages of reading development. The subjects were assessed three times by a set of reading tasks which included speech tokens’ repetition and letter, bigram, word, and non-word reading. During the analysis, vocal reaction time, pronunciation time, total reading time, errors’ rate, Index of simultaneity syllable recoding, and ISSG interstimuli variability were evaluated and compared within the samples and among the three assessments. Our results enabled us to divide the sample into three subgroups according to the reaction time and the pronunciation time. Moreover, two different strategies of mastering reading skills were established; they highlighted a) vocabulary-based and b) phonetic-based approaches to reading development. Keywords: Reading, children, development, strategy, reaction time, tactics, pronunciation.
1. Introduction and Theoretical Background Multiple reading development studies evidence that reading is a complex structured multilevel entity [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. When a child masters his/her reading skills, their internal structure usually changes. The changes are influenced by different determinants such as language and literacy type, teaching strategy, and individual cognitive and lexical dispositions [1, 5, 6]. In languages with deep orthography, the reading progress more pronounces in accuracy, whereas in languages with shallow orthography (such as Russian), children struggle with reading fluency problems [7, 8]. Decoding process may be managed by two different ways: by the phonological recoding (prelexical phonological recoding hypothesis) and by the direct orthographic lexical access [10]. A dual-rout model incorporates both of them [10]. It might be supposed that during the initial phases of reading development, the direct orthographic route gradually replaces the phonological recoding [5]. However, some kindergartens explore direct orthographic route (the whole-word reading strategy) during the 1 Corresponding Author: Alexandr Kornev, 194100 СПб, Литовская ул. 2 СПбГПМУ. E-mail:
[email protected]. 2 The research was carried out with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Humanities (RGNF), grant 12-06-00941.
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prealphabetical (logograph) stage [11]. In other words, children change reading strategy at different stages of reading development. It is generally agreed that children pass through several stages on their way from a letter-by-letter recoding to a whole-word decoding. On the every next stage, a child manages word recoding by processing larger sublexical units such as letter combinations or syllables [11]. Following the psycholinguistic grain size theory, the consistency of orthography in different languages influences differently the size of the grains in reading development process [7, 12]. In Russian-speaking children, during the first two years of education, the bigrams (i.e. CV/VC syllables) are the main recoding units [11, 13]. However, some kindergartens in the scope of emergent literacy start from the whole-word reading strategy which is followed by a phonological recoding. The clear advantage of the grain size theory is its focus on the size of computed phonological units. This enables continuous measure rather than dichotomous concept such as “lexical” or “prelexical” phonology [1, 8]. Besides, the usual quantitative reading measures (namely, accuracy and fluency) and a deep qualitative analysis should also be carried out. When monitoring the development of reading skills, one should take into account the size of processing units which are employed by a child in converting visual word/letter string into phonological word/phoneme/syllable [14]. Based on the number of studies in Russian-speaking children, the theory of recoding working units was developed [11, 15]. Development of reading skills seems to be influenced by the size of automatized individual recoding working units (RWU). When a child moves from a letter-by-letter recoding strategy (RWU = 1 letter/sound) to a syllable-by-syllable recoding strategy (RWU = 1 syllable), his/her (non-)word reading aloud becomes faster and more fluent. Another line of reading development analysis deals with the problem of lexical access. In a number of studies on adult readers, the moment of direct lexical access (phonological recoding) is discussed and its relation with word identification is analyzed. However, in the early stage of reading development, a child does not always access to lexicon, thus he/she reads a word as a non-word, i.e. without the identification of its semantic referents. Mastering of early lexical access strategy leads to more accurate reading. It should be emphasized here that in languages such as Russian, orphoepically appropriate pronunciation and correct stress location are considered as reliable predictors for well-formed lexical access [11, 13]. Thus when monitoring reading development, one should take into account stress pattern and some particular orphoepical features such as reduction of unstressed vowels, devoiced pronunciation of voiced consonant in final position, etc. Assessment for later reading skills should be supplied with the analysis of children’s strategies to master these skills. Different processing strategies used in reading (both by adults and children), that is serial ordered processing (SOP) [16] and parallel distributed processing (PDP) [17, 18], have been described in a number of studies. Usually, a beginner starts from serial ordered processing and moves to parallel distributed processing. In most studies, word length effect is associated with SOP [16]. All operations necessary for word decoding are completed until a voice onset and RT represent their rate and amount. This can be estimated in a word-reading task by the mean of correlation between reaction time (RT) and word length. However, in the early stage of reading development, RT approach has some limitations and thus is not so reliable as in the adult reading analysis. Children sometimes recode words on sublexical level and pronounce them syllable-by-syllable. In such a case, the voice onset time is not relevant to the lexical access time.
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The aim of our study was to test a hypothesis that children use different reading strategies during the early stage of reading development, and these differences can be proved by computable measures. To ensure greater reliability, we attempted to trace these differences throughout the 1st year of education; all groups were assessed three times a year with a 3-month interval.
2. Methodology The subjects for our study were recruited from a total of 120 1 st graders by the means of the Screening test for reading assessment [19]. From those (N = 60) whose reading skills in autumn were below the whole-word reading, 40 subjects (mean age 7 years 2 months) were randomly (but seeking for a gender balance) selected for the study. All of them were monolingual native speakers of Russian. Experiment design. The experiment consisted of three replicated assessments in October, January, and April. During individual assessment, after a training session, five experimental tasks were presented: a) speech tokens’ repetition (STR), b) letter reading (LR), c) bigram reading (BR), d) word reading (WR), and e) non-word reading (NWR). For each of the subjects an informed consent was obtained. Stimuli. A) for the STR task, 21 speech stimuli (7 syllables and 13 words relevant to some of stimuli for the reading tasks) were presented; b) for the LR task, 9 single letters (4 vowels and 4 consonants) were presented; c) for the BR task, 13 bigrams (CV, VC) were presented; d) for the WR task, 20 2-/3-syllable words (mean length 5 letters; word incidence rate 2-480 ipm) were presented; and e) for the NWR task, 13 2-/3syllable non-words (mean length 5 letters) were presented. Procedure. Each of the sessions started with the STR task followed by the reading tasks. The STR task was presented in a self-paced mode and registered by a headset connected with notebook. In the reading tasks, after the training session, visual stimuli were successively presented on the monitor (type size 70) in a self-paced mode. The subjects had to read all the stimuli aloud; the responses were recorded and transcribed for the analysis. Analysis. The Program for Reading Acquisition Strategy Assessment (PRASA) was developed by Alexandr N. Kornev, Margarita G. Selezneva, and Anatolij A. Sorokin [20] as the main tool for automatic analysis. The PRASA automatically calculates individual vocal reaction time (RT) for letter, bigram, word and non-word stimuli and spoken response duration (pronunciation time) as well as the means for group of stimuli and intertrials’ standard deviations for group of responses. Besides that, it estimates the Index of simultaneity of syllable recoding (ISSR). ISSR has been developed in our previous studies to evaluate the strategy of recoding bigrams (CV, VC) into speech syllables [11, 19]. We expected that time required for processing two letters in a bigram and integrating them into syllable according to orthography rules depends on the reader’s strategy. If a reader uses sequential strategy, vocal RT for bigram reading will be equal to the sum of the RT for separate recognition of each letter (C and V), i.e. RTbigr = RTc + RTv. If a reader processes bigram simultaneously, the vocal RT will be the same as for single letter. Thus the formula for calculating is as following: ISSR = RTbigr / (RTc + RTv). For simultaneous processing, ISSR < 0.5; for sequential processing, ISSR = 1.0. ISSR variation between 0.5 and 1.0 was recognized as mixed or intermediate strategy.
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A deeper phonetic analysis was carried out by the means of the PRAAT 5.2.16 and the GoldWave. Reading recordings were transcribed by three experts; all of them were native Russian speakers. After that, intertranscribers’ agreement was achieved. Measures. Vocal RT was the time between the stimulus onset and the onset of the vocal response. Pronunciation time (PT) was the time between the vocal onset and the end of the child’s utterance. Total reading time (TRT) was defined as the time between the stimulus onset and the end of the child’s utterance. Therefore, the vocal RT and the PT were added up to constitute the reading time measure. Errors’ rate was also estimated, as well as RT intertrial standard deviation, Index of simultaneity syllable recoding (ISSR), and ISSG interstimuli variability (standard deviation). During the experiment, throughout the three evaluations, the developmental changes of all measures for each subject were estimated.
3. Results Statistical ANOVA analysis evidenced that over the whole experiment period, error rate in all the tasks decreased (i.e. reading accuracy increased) significantly greater as compared to the growth of reading fluency in bigrams, words and non-words. The mean of phonological errors (sound substitutions, omissions or additions) in the WR task decreased from 0.23 errors per word in the 1 st assessment to 0.07 errors per word in the 3rd one. It should be noted that it is very important to locate the word stress properly when reading in Russian [13]. The stress errors (its absence or wrong location) were very frequent: from 0.86 errors per word in the 1 st assessment to 0.54 errors in the 3rd one. The reading fluency developed even more slowly in our participants. A significant progress was revealed in letter-reading (on the level of tendency) and bigram-reading tasks between the 1st and the 2nd assessments (respectively, F = 3.4, P < 0.067; and F = 8.7, P < 0.004) and between the 1st and the 3rd assessments (respectively, F = 6.11, P < 0.016; and F = 11.5, P < 0.001). The reading vocal RT decrease and the ISSR reduction were also observed. This evidences that in reading bigrams, some children start with successive mode of recoding and move to its simultaneous processing. However, the majority of children did not achieve automatic syllable reading by the time of the 3rd assessment. In order to analyze word reading strategy, the RT individual variables in WR task were compared with the mean RT in the BR task. Consequently, word reading PT was compared with PT in the STR task (in repeating the same words). It was proposed that the value of RT and PT are dependent on the mode and speed of word processing [21]. According to the results of WR and the STR tasks (vocal responses’ timing features), the sample was divided into 3 subgroups. 1) Some of the subjects demonstrated long RT but their short PT was close to that in the STR task (e.g., RT =1.39 sec., PT = 0.54 sec.). It might be recognized as long word processing followed by lexical access and then pronunciation. In the majority of such cases, children pronounce words orphoepically correctly and with proper stress location. 2) Some other subjects demonstrated small RT and PT (e.g., 0.78 and 0.85 sec. respectively) in orphoepically correct reading. They can be recognized as the most succeeding pupils. 3) The rest of the subjects demonstrated long RT and PT. Many of them had not mastered recoding skills to the 3rd assessment and thus used some tricks, for example, the so called double reading or prolonged pronunciation, to cope with this problem.
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Additional information about the applied word reading strategy was obtained by the means of correlation analysis. Although it is often claimed that word length influences the vocal RT value [22], our data does not correspond to this evidence. One of the possible explanations of discordance between our results and those presented in other studies is that the majority of the latter have been dealing with elder children (the 2nd graders and elder) whose reading skills were presumably more mature. In our subjects, only total reading time (TRT = RT + PT) significantly correlated with (non-) word length (respectively mean R = 0.72 and R = 0.79). In the 3rd assessment, these correlations slightly decreased. The complex pattern analysis of individual variables and the phonetic features of syllable/word reading evidenced that different subjects tended to use different strategies in mastering syllable and word reading. However, lexically-based strategies were quite rare during the analyzed stage of reading development: even after 9 months of education (i.e. in the 3rd assessment) a majority of the subjects still read words in the same way as non-words, i.e. orphoepically inappropriately and without a stress.
4. Conclusions and Discussion First, it should be emphasized that the term “reading” refers to both linguistic and procedural processes. The latter is extremely essential when analyzing the development of reading. Sometimes similar results in mastering reading are obtained by different means. In the reading models based on information processing approach, the real reading development process may be oversimplified [4, 8]. This means that additionally to the group studies in reading development, we need individual evaluation of both WHAT children have learned and HOW they do this. In our study, we tried to use evidence based approach to individual strategies’ evaluation. The results supported our expectations about individual differences in strategy and tactics of mastering reading skills. It should be noted that this activity is quite effortful for many children. Although some children from the very beginning manage to relate the reading process with speech and semantics, many others initially learn reading as a special skill and do not relate it to natural speech processing. Moreover, during the early stage of reading development, some children do not maintain lexical access in single words’ reading. Statistical analysis revealed two different types of strategies used for mastering reading during its initial stage: i.e. 1) vocabulary-based type and 2) phonetic-based type. Children who used the first strategy tried to identify the lexical meaning of the target word before pronouncing it (already in the 1st assessment). Sometimes they responded with large latency or made the second trial but still pronounced the target word correctly (i.e. according to its orphoepic rules and stress position). This strategy might be related to the so called orthographical quasi-synthetic strategy. Usually, the responses had short RT and PT or long RT and short PT. Children who used the second strategy during the initial stage, focused on the connection between the letter string and the articulation motor programming. This may be recognized as the so called quasiorthographical strategy. It should be emphasized once again that both of the strategies are typical for the initial stages of reading development and each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes it is difficult but still very important to disentangle these different cognitive approaches in reading development, especially for practical purposes such as prevention of reading disorders. Thus the next phase of our study will
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deal with the same subjects during their second year at school in order to find some reliable markers for the differentiation between vocabulary-based vs. phonetic-based reading development.
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