ERIC Number: EJ876205
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2010-Apr
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0022-0965
EISSN: N/A
Reading Development in Agglutinative Languages: Evidence from Beginning, Intermediate, and Adult Basque Readers
Acha, Joana; Laka, Itziar; Perea, Manuel
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, v105 n4 p359-375 Apr 2010
Do typological properties of language, such as agglutination (i.e., the morphological process of adding affixes to the lexeme of a word), have an impact on the development of visual word recognition? To answer this question, we carried out an experiment in which beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers (n = 32 each, average age = 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively) needed to read correctly versus incorrectly inflected words embedded in sentences. Half of the targets contained high-frequency stems, and the other half contained low-frequency stems. To each stem, four inflections of different lengths were attached (-"a", -"ari", -"aren", and -"arentzat", i.e., inflectional sequences). To test whether the process of word recognition was modulated by the knowledge of word structure in the language, half of the participants' native language was Basque and the other half's native language was Spanish. Children showed robust effects of frequency and length of inflection that diminished with age. In addition, the effect of length of inflection was modulated by the frequency of the stem and by the native language. Taken together, these results suggest that word recognition develops from a decoding strategy to a direct lexical access strategy and that this process is modulated by children's knowledge of the inflectional structure of words from the beginning of their reading experience. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)
Descriptors: Children, Adults, Age Differences, Sentences, Age, Word Recognition, Uncommonly Taught Languages, Language Classification, Foreign Countries, Morphemes, Reading Processes, Spanish, Native Speakers
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Spain
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A