The role of syllables in word recognition among beginning Finnish readers: Evidence from eye movements during reading

Abstract

The eye movements of Finnish first and second graders were monitored as they read sentences where polysyllabic words were either hyphenated at syllable boundaries, alternatingly coloured (every second syllable black, every second red) or had no explicit syllable boundary cues (e.g., ta-lo vs. talo vs. talo = “house”). The results showed that hyphenation at syllable boundaries slows down reading of first and second graders even though syllabification by hyphens is very common in Finnish reading instruction, as all first-grade textbooks include hyphens at syllable boundaries. When hyphens were positioned within a syllable (t-alo vs. ta-lo), beginning readers were even more disrupted. Alternate colouring did not affect reading speed, no matter whether colours signalled syllable structure or not. The results show that beginning Finnish readers prefer to process polysyllabic words via syllables rather than letter by letter. At the same time they imply that hyphenation encourages sequential syllable processing, which slows down the reading of children, who are already capable of parallel syllable processing or recognising words directly via the whole-word route.

Keywords :

• Beginning reading
• Eye movements
• Reading development
• Syllables
• Word recognition

This work was supported by Suomen Kulttuurirahasto (Finnish Culture Foundation); Suomen Kulttuurirahaston Varsinais-Suomen Rahasto (Finnish Culture Foundation, Varsinais-Suomi Regional Fund); Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse (Oskar Öflund Foundation) to the first author.

Notes

¹ In Finnish, a syllable boundary is always (1) before the last letter of a consonant cluster or (2) between two different vowels that do not constitute a diphthong.

² It can be argued that faster reading does not necessarily correlate with more proficient reading. However, in the Häikiö et al. (2011) study as well as—to foreshadow the present results—in the present study, reading skill (measured by a standardised reading test) was connected to faster reading speed.

³ We acknowledge that a newspaper corpus is not ideal for indexing word frequencies for children. However, as we had no access to a children's corpus, we used it as an approximation. Moreover, we collected AoA-ratings to make sure that all the target words were familiar to the participants.

⁴ A bigram trough (Seidenberg, 1987; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) is a letter pair of lower frequency than the preceding and following bigram. We assessed the effect of bigram trough and its interaction with explicit syllable boundary cues. To this end, we constructed a trough ratio using the formula {[(preceding bigram frequency + following bigram frequency)/2]/bigram frequency at first syllable boundary}. Thus, words without a trough had a ratio below 1 and words with a trough a ratio above 1.

⁵ Open bigram coding is not the only possible mechanism for extracting the relative position of letters in words (for an alternative coding scheme, see Gomez, Ratcliff, & Perea, 2008).