Word Properties Predicting Children’s Word Recognition

Figures & data

Table 1. Means and standard deviations of accuracy (out of 100) and latency in milliseconds (max 5000) of responses to target words and pseudowords per grade.

Grade	3	4	5
Target word accuracy M(SD)	79.9 (9.07)	83.8 (8.0)	87.9 (6.78)
Target word latency M(SD)	1578 (342)	1417 (327)	1299 (265)
Pseudoword accuracy M(SD)	81.9 (14.7)	84.6 (13.9)	88.5 (10.4)
Pseudoword latency M(SD)	1951 (440)	1756 (432)	1599 (366)

Table 2. Correlations between item parameters given each grade.

	Grade 3	Grade 4	Grade 5
Grade 3	-	.95	.87
Grade 4	.91	-	.91
Grade 5	.84	.87	-

Above diagonal correlations using predicted p’s, below diagonal using item difficulty parameters from the Rasch model. All correlations are significant with p < .001.

Figure 1. Overlapping frequency distributions of the observed and simulated standardized item residuals.

Figure 2. Wright-map visualizing children’s ability parameters per grade and item difficulty parameters.

Table 3. Means, standard deviations and range of difficulty, latency (in milliseconds and corrected for mean latency of the child), and word characteristics.

	M	SD	min	max
difficulty	0.00	1.00	−1.75	3.58
latency	−3.02	268.39	−451.15	1343.99
word length	7.16	2.74	3.00	21.00
PLD 20	2.57	1.30	0.00	10.20
PLD 20 NF	2956.91	5121.65	40.90	27,193.40
betweenness	0.000302	0.000587	0.000000610	0.00491
in-degree	163.02	268.88	1.00	2271.00
clustering coefficient	0.00151	0.00120	0.0000191	0.00708
contextual diversity count	788.59	1325.44	1.00	7243.00
BasiLex frequency	796.09	1564.22	12.00	10,528.00

PLD 20 stands for the mean Levenshtein distance to the 20 nearest neighbors based on phonology. NF stands for neighborhood frequency.

Table 4. Correlations between word characteristics and item difficulty and item latency.

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
1 item difficulty
2 item latency	.76
Form related measures
3 word length	.25	.72
4 PLD 20	.38	.74	.86
5 PLD 20 NF	.19	.51	.70	.65
Meaning related measures
6 betweenness	−.38	−.43	−.26	−.30	−.23
7 in-degree	−.50	−.59	−.38	−.40	−.30	.81
8 clustering coefficient	−.48	−.55	−.33	−.36	−.26	.83	.90
Exposure related measures
9 contextual diversity	−.55	−.61	−.42	−.43	−.27	.54	.62	.63
10 BasiLex frequency	−.64	−.70	−.50	−.55	−.38	.57	.65	.67	.77

PLD 20 stands for the mean Levenshtein distance to the 20 nearest neighbors based on phonology. NF stands for neighborhood frequency. All correlations were significant with p < .001.

Table 5. SEM regression estimates.

	Estimate	Std. Error	z	p
Predicting item difficulty
form	−0.16	0.06	−2.82	.005
meaning	0.02	0.10	0.17	.866
exposure	−0.91	0.14	−6.73	<.001
R^2	.492
Predicting item latency
B	0.57	0.04	16.17	<.001
form	0.59	0.03	17.39	<.001
meaning	−0.09	0.05	−2.03	.043
exposure	0.04	0.06	0.60	.549
R^2	.898

Figure 3. SEM structure with latent variable structure, factor loadings, correlations among latent constructs, and regression estimates.

Note. PLD 20 stands for the mean Levenshtein distance to the 20 nearest neighbors based on phonology. NF stands for neighborhood frequency.