Abstract
The present study investigated whether orthographic depth can increase the bias towards multi-letter processing in two reading-related skills: visual attention span (VAS) and rapid automatized naming (RAN). VAS (i.e., the number of visual elements that can be processed at once in a multi-element array) was tested with a visual 1-back task and RAN was measured in a serial letter naming task that introduced a novel manipulation (some letter sequences formed frequent words). Spanish-Basque and French-Basque bilingual children were tested at early (30 children in 1st and 2nd grade), and more advanced (24 children in 3rd, 4th and 5th grade) stages of reading acquisition to investigate whether they would be differently biased towards multi-letter processing due to reading in two shallow (Spanish, Basque), or a deep and a shallow (French, Basque) orthography. The French-Basque bilinguals, who read in a deep orthography, were expected to rely on larger orthographic units in reading and thus to be more biased towards multi-letter processing in both tasks. This was expected to be reflected by: (a) a uniform distribution of attention across letter strings in the VAS task, and (b) a greater interference of the embedded words on letter-by-letter naming in RAN, leading to longer naming times. The expected group differences were observed in the more advanced readers, with French-Basque bilinguals showing a wider distribution of VAS across letter strings and longer naming times in RAN.
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Notes
The assumption of normality was violated in two of the sub-conditions and could not be corrected by transforming the data. Therefore all post hoc comparisons were also performed using the Mann–Whitney U and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and adjusting for multiple comparisons. The pattern of significance remained the same so the parametric ANOVA and post hoc comparisons are presented for simplicity.
While the information necessary to answer this question was available for the sample of this study, the results were not conclusive due to the small variability of reading experience in Basque for the French-Basque bilinguals.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge financial support from the Basque Government (PRE_2015_2_0049 to A.A, PI_2015_1_25 to C.M, PRE_2015_2_0247 to S.S), the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG-295362 to M.C.), the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI20153653383P to M.L., PSI20153673533R to M. C, PSI2014-54500 to C. M. and SEV-2015-490 awarded to the BCBL through the “Severo Ochoa Program for Centers/Units of Excellence in R&D”) and the FP7/2007-2013 Cooperation grant agreement (613465-AThEME). We would also like to thank all the children, their families and schools for their participation.
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Antzaka, A., Martin, C., Caffarra, S. et al. The effect of orthographic depth on letter string processing: the case of visual attention span and rapid automatized naming. Read Writ 31, 583–605 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9799-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9799-0