U. Goswami et al., CHILDRENS ORTHOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS AND LINGUISTIC TRANSPARENCY - NONSENSE WORD READING IN ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND SPANISH, Applied psycholinguistics, 19(1), 1998, pp. 19-52
Three experiments were conducted to compare the development of orthogr
aphic representations in children learning to read English, French, or
Spanish. Nonsense words that shared both orthography and phonology at
the level of the rhyme with real words (cake-dake, comic-bomic), phon
ology only (cake-daik, comic-bommick), or neither (faish, ricop) were
created for each orthography. Experiment 1 compared English and French
children's reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme orthography wi
th real words (dake) with those that did not (daik). Significant facil
itation was found for shared rhymes in English, with reduced effects i
n French. Experiment 2 compared English and French children's reading
of nonsense words that shared rhyme phonology with real words (daik) w
ith those that did not (faish). Significant facilitation for shared rh
yme phonology was found in both languages. Experiment 3 compared Engli
sh, French, and Spanish children's reading of nonsense words (dake vs.
faish) and found a significant facilitatory effect of orthographic an
d phonological familiarity for each language. The size of the familiar
ity effect, however, was much greater in the less transparent orthogra
phies (English and French). These results are interpreted in terms of
the level of phonology that is represented in the orthographic recogni
tion units being developed by children who are learning to read more a
nd less transparent orthographies.