Washington University in St. Louis / Psychology / Brett Kessler

Treiman, Rebecca, Brett Kessler, Jason D. Zevin, Suzanne Bick, & Melissa Davis. 2006. Influence of consonantal context on the reading of vowels: Evidence from children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 93(1). 1–24. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2005.06.008

Abstract

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset (Treiman, Kessler, & Bick, 2003). We presented the nonwords used by Treiman et al. to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school students to determine when these contextual influences emerge. According to some theories of reading development, early decoding is characterized by context-free links from graphemes to phonemes. However, we found that even children reading at the first-grade level (6 year olds) were to some extent influenced by a vowel’s context. The effect of context on vowel pronunciation increased in strength up to about the fifth-grade reading level (ages 8–9), and sensitivity to coda-to-vowel associations emerged no earlier than sensitivity to onset-to-vowel associations. A connectionist model of reading reproduced this general pattern of increasing contextual effects as a function of training.

Downloads

• Published paper, Elsevier Science Direct.
• Prepublication paper, submission format. PDF.
• Proportion of plausible pronunciations generated by the model at each of 91 training points, averaged over 15 runs of the model, combining stimuli by case and condition. Plausible is here defined as being either the critical (conditioned) or typical pronunciation of the vowel; it excludes unusual pronunciations.
• Proportion of critical pronunciations, relative to all plausible pronunciations, generated by the model at each of 91 training points, averaged over 15 runs of the model, combining stimuli by case and condition.
• Trial-level data. This is a huge file (13 megabytes): it contains a line of data giving the connectionist model's output (pronunciation and SSE) for each of 158 stimuli at each of 91 training points for each of 15 runs of the model (= 215,670 trials).
• Words used in training and testing the model.
• Programs that implement the model. These should work on a wide range of Linux computers, but are only recommended for the hardy.
• Source files needed to compile the computer implementation of the model. Of interest to programmers only.

APA citation:

Treiman, R., Kessler, B., Zevin, J. D., Bick, S., & Davis, M. (2006). Influence of consonantal context on the reading of vowels: Evidence from children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 93, 1–24. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2005.06.008

Last change 2009-08-04T14:34:12-0500