Fig 5 - uploaded by Marie-Josèphe Tainturier
Content may be subject to copyright.
Case BWN: Percentage of letters correctly produced as a function of letter position and word length.
Source publication
The visual word recognition literature suggests that complex graphemes (or digraphs) such as CK function as units. This proposal has also been put forward in recent spelling models (Houghton and Zorzi, 2003) and the study we report on here provides initial empirical support for the claim. We performed detailed analyses of the spelling performance o...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... did he spell it. BWN spelled 24% of words incorrectly and (see Table 1) his error rate for long words (8-10 letters) was significantly greater than his error rate for short words (4-6 letters), whether accuracy is calculated in terms of word errors (w 2 ¼ 539.2, p < .0001) or letter errors (w 2 ¼ 594.8, p < .0001). Furthermore, as indicated in Fig. 5 plausible spellings of the target word, with 76 of the 79 (96.2%) consisting of single letter substitutions (e.g., 'facet' ! FACIT), deletions (e.g., 'chrome' ! CROME), insertions (e.g., 'mistress' ! MISSTRESS), or transpositions (e.g., 'deuce' ! DUECE). The three remaining phonologi- cally plausible errors involved some combination of ...
Similar publications
Numerous studies have demonstrated cerebellar activity during implicit motor learning, but few have addressed its specific role. The purpose of this study was to determine if specific components (spatial or temporal) of an implicit motor-tracking task were affected by cerebellar stroke.
The authors studied the performance of individuals with unilat...
Citations
... Rather, graphemic representations are complex and multidimensional, including not only information about identities and positions of letters, but also information about letter doubling (e.g., Caramazza & Miceli, 1990;Fischer-Baum & Rapp, 2014;McCloskey et al., 1994;Tainturier & Caramazza, 1996), and the consonant/ vowel status of letters (e.g., Caramazza & Miceli, 1990;Cubelli, 1991;McCloskey et al., 1994;Miceli et al., 2004). Furthermore, several studies suggest that graphemic representations may explicitly specify a word's syllabic structure (e.g., Caramazza & Miceli, 1990), and that digraphs-letter pairs corresponding to single phonemes, such as the TH in THINK-are represented as single units rather than as two separate letters (e.g., Fischer-Baum & Rapp, 2014;Tainturier & Rapp, 2004). ...
... Evidence from several patients with deficits affecting abstract graphemic representations suggests that digraphs, like geminates, may have special representations at the graphemic level. In studies of two patients with graphemic buffer deficits (FM and BWN), Tainturier and Rapp (2004) found that digraphs (e.g., SH) were written more accurately than nondigraph letter clusters (e.g., PL), and further that digraphs were less likely than non-digraph clusters to be "broken" in the patients' written responses (e.g., one of the letters omitted, or the two letters separated). 3 Fischer-Baum and Rapp (2014) described a patient (LSS) who made frequent letter perseveration errors in spelling tasks (e.g., writing KITCHEN as KITCHEM shortly after writing SYSTEM correctly), and several findings implied that the perseverations arose at the level of abstract graphemic representations. ...
... For example, LSS might, after writing TRACK, insert the digraph CK into his next response (e.g., SOUL → SOUCK), but would not perseverate the C or K individually. These results have been interpreted by assuming that, as shown at the top of Figure 7A and 7B, digraphs are represented as single units at the graphemic level (e.g., Fischer-Baum & Rapp, 2014;Tainturier & Rapp, 2004; although see Miceli & Capasso, 2006, for the suggestion that weaker representational assumptions might suffice to account for the available evidence). In their connectionist spelling simulation, Houghton and Zorzi (2003) also assume that digraphs have unitary graphemic representations. ...
The present study explores the extent to which properties of abstract graphemic representations are maintained at the post-graphemic level of graphic motor plans, where the sequences of writing strokes for producing the letters in a word are represented. On the basis of results from a stroke patient (NGN) who has a deficit affecting the activation of graphic motor plans, we explore the post-graphemic representation of 1) consonant/vowel status of letters; 2) geminate (double) letters, such as the BB in RABBIT; and 3) digraphs, such as the SH in SHIP. Through analyses of NGN's letter substitution errors, we conclude that 1) consonant-vowel status is not represented at the level of graphic motor plans; 2) geminates have special representations at the motor-plan level, as at the graphemic level; and 3) digraphs are represented by two separate single-letter graphic motor plans, and not by unitary digraph motor plans.
... We also attested that longer words with more complex syllable structure were preferred over shorter words without consonant clusters when applying most non-phonological strategies. Although it might seem counterintuitive -given that there are reports to the contrary in studies with English-speaking populations, particularly those with language disorders (e.g., Tainturier & Rapp 2004)-, this finding is in line with studies on the early development of literacy, which claim that spelling is facilitated when words are similar to the word "prototype" in the language to which they are exposed (Ferreiro & Teberosky 1979). The average word length in Catalan and Spanish is considerably longer than that of English (Cutler, Norris, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2004;Lew-Williams & Saffran 2012), so three and four syllable words are quite frequent. ...
Spelling is a complex skill that requires mobilizing various levels of linguistic and orthographic representation. While there is substantial evidence of the impact of phonological skills in its development, less is known about the explanatory value of non-phonological (e.g., morphological, orthographic) strategies in conventional spelling scores. This study assessed the unique impact of non-phonological spelling strategies after accounting for a large set of linguistic and cognitive predictors, as well as contextual variables (e.g., SES) in a language with a semi-consistent orthography: Catalan. Participants were 328 eighth-grade students from low-income households. Results showed that non-phonological spelling skills explained a substantial proportion of the variance in conventional spelling, over and above the rest of predictor variables, including phonographic skills, with the final model explaining more than 80% of the variance. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.
... During the writing process, spelling accuracy implies the integration of phonological, orthographic and morphological knowledge. In fact, there is sufficient evidence that factors such as syllable structure, silent letters or digraphs, and morphology can affect the pattern of errors presented by children (Ehri, 2000;Tainturier & Rapp, 2004). Taking into account these dimensions of orthographic processing, the investigation of remedial strategies concerning children who have more difficulties in this area seems to be particularly relevant, given their possible impact on educational practices. ...
Our aim was to assess the effect of a self-correction spelling tool based on orthographic revision procedures on third-grade children’s orthographic performance. This tool consisted of grids displaying explicit contextual, phonological and morphological rules. Participants were 70 third-grade students, randomly assigned to an experimental (N = 35) and control group (N = 35). A pretest and post-test were performed a week before the training programme and two weeks after the end of it, consisting of a 76-word spelling test that referred to contextual (32 words), phonological (32 words) and morphological (12 words) rules. The experimental training programme was carried out with children in class and consisted of nine sessions in which children had to spell words dictated by an adult, who then underlined their misspellings with a specific colour (a different colour was assigned to each rule) and asked them to self-correct the misspellings using the grid. None of the words present in the pre- and post-test were used in the training programme. The same words were used in the control group, but instead of self-correcting the misspellings, children were shown the correct spelling and had to copy it three times. The post-test results showed that the experimental group decreased significantly the number of misspellings when compared with the control group, with statistically significant differences for each rule. Nevertheless, the morphological misspellings, after the intervention, were superior to the other types of misspellings. These results show the importance of inducing self-correction spelling strategies in educational contexts.
... Vowel additions seem to corroborate this conclusion from the other direction: there were more vowel additions in words with the same vowel, suggesting, possibly, that a buffer that holds several instances of a vowel may fail to retain the number of instances of this vowel (for similar discussions about double letters in the orthographic output buffer, see Caramazza & Miceli [52]; Tainturier & Rapp [53]; McCloskey et al. [54]). See Haluts et al. [55] for discussion of a neurologically plausible Potts network model of the phonological buffer and the way it accounts for various error types. ...
We report on developmental vowel dyslexia, a type of dyslexia that selectively affects the reading aloud of vowel letters. We identified this dyslexia in 55 Turkish-readers aged 9–10, and made an in-depth multiple-case analysis of the reading of 17 participants whose vowel dyslexia was relatively selective. These participants made significantly more vowel errors (vowel substitution, omission, migration, and addition) than age-matched controls, and significantly more errors in vowel letters than in consonants. Vowel harmony, a pivotal property of Turkish phonology, was intact and the majority of their vowel errors yielded harmonic responses. The transparent character of Turkish orthography indicates that vowel dyslexia is not related to ambiguity in vowel conversion. The dyslexia did not result from a deficit in the phonological-output stage, as the participants did not make vowel errors in nonword repetition or in repeating words they had read with a vowel error. The locus of the deficit was not in the orthographic-visual-analyzer either, as their same-different decision on words differing in vowels was intact, and so was their written-word comprehension. They made significantly more errors on nonwords than on words, indicating that their deficit was in vowel processing in the sublexical route. Given that their single-vowels conversion was intact, and that they showed an effect of the number of vowels, we conclude that their deficit is in a vowel-specific buffer in the sublexical route. They did not make vowel errors within suffixes, indicating that suffixes are converted as wholes in a separate sublexical sub-route. These results have theoretical implications for the dual-route model: they indicate that the sublexical route converts vowels and consonants separately, that the sublexical route includes a vowel buffer, and a separate morphological conversion route. The results also indicate that types of dyslexia can be detected in transparent languages given detailed error-analysis and dyslexia-relevant stimuli.
... By investigating the word writing process, the storage and processes of the orthographic, phonological and semantic information of words in the lexicon can be deciphered. Studies in alphabetic orthographies documented the use of sublexical units such as digraphs (Tainturier & Rapp, 2004), syllables (Caramazza & Miceli, 1990), and morphemes (Schiller, Greenhall, Shelton, & Caramazza, 2001) as functional writing units. Similarly, psycholinguistic studies in nonalphabetic orthographies, such as Chinese, also documented the use of sublexical units as functional writing units, with some cross-linguistic differences (e.g., Law & Leung, 2000). ...
Studies have shown that logographemes and radicals, subcharacter units in Chinese characters, are represented in the orthographic lexicon and are functional processing units in the writing of Chinese characters. Nevertheless, there is no consensus regarding how characters should be segmented into logographemes and radicals. This article reports handwriting data for a list of 209 Chinese characters (95 nonphonetic compounds and 114 phonetic compounds) in a copying task. To validate the constituent logographemes and radicals of the target Chinese characters, comparisons among between-radical interstroke intervals (ISIs), between-logographeme ISIs, and within-logographeme ISIs, as well as their interactions with orthographic factors including character frequency, stroke number, and configuration, were conducted using factorial analyses. The results showed that the ISI comparison method is effective in validating the constituent logographemes and radicals in Chinese characters. On the basis of this list of 209 stimuli, another 1,227 Chinese characters that share the same set of radicals with the stimuli were further identified. Their constituent logographemes were deduced accordingly. Altogether, the over 1,000 Chinese characters with validated constituent logographemes will serve as a powerful reference for future psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research. Future potential applications are discussed.
... Ces derniers résultats ne sont pas répliqués par Tainturier et Rapp (2004) chez leurs deux patients, FM et BWN, qui produisent significativement moins d'erreurs quand les mots, appariés en longueur et en fréquence, comportent, dans la même position, un digraphe (ex. MORPHINE) plutôt qu'un groupe de lettres (ex. ...
abstract
Various mental operations are required to convert a spoken word into a sequence of handwritten letters. One of them, the graphemic buffer is an orthographic working memory store which keeps active the orthographic representations issued from lexical and nonlexical routes for as long as required to produce the letters in different output modalities (retrieving graphic stroke sequences for writing, finding the correct letter on the keyboard for typing, or saying the letter name for oral spelling).
In this paper, the graphemic buffer will be first located in a basic architecture of spelling and the main characteristics of their impairements will be summarised. Particular attention will be paid to the contribution of data issued from disorders of the graphemic buffer to our knowledge of the structure of the orthographic representations. Lastly, some guidelines will be provided to the clinicians to identify an impairment at this level of processing. We will outline the most relevant spelling tasks to choose, the linguistic variables to control and the quantitative and qualitative analyses to realise.
Key words: graphemic buffer, dysgraphia, spelling, cognitive neu- ropsychology, assessement.
... The only sublexical structure used in the proposed model is the individual letter. However, there is strong evidence that compound graphemes play a role in both spelling (Fischer-Baum & Rapp, 2014;Shen, Damian, & Stadthagen-Gonzalez, 2013;Tainturier & Rapp, 2004), and reading (Havelka & Frankish, 2010;Lupker, Acha, Davis, & Perea, 2012;Marinus & de Jong, 2010;Perry et al., 2007;Rastle & Coltheart, 1998;Rey, Jacobs, Schmidt-Weigand, & Ziegler, 1998;Rey, Ziegler, & Jacobs, 2000). They have also proved essential to good performance in some models of phonological reading/spelling (Houghton & Zorzi, 2003;Perry et al., 2007;Plaut et al., 1996). ...
There is strong evidence that reading and spelling in alphabetical scripts depend on a shared representation (common-coding). However, computational models usually treat the two skills separately, producing a wide variety of proposals as to how the identity and position of letters is represented. This article treats reading and spelling in terms of the common-coding hypothesis for perception-action coupling. Empirical evidence for common representations in spelling-reading is reviewed. A novel version of the Start-End Competitive Queuing (SE-CQ) spelling model is introduced, and tested against the distribution of positional errors in Letter Position Dysgraphia, data from intralist intrusion errors in spelling to dictation, and dysgraphia because of nonperipheral neglect. It is argued that no other current model is equally capable of explaining this range of data. To pursue the common-coding hypothesis, the representation used in SE-CQ is applied, without modification, to the coding of letter identity and position for reading and lexical access, and a lexical matching rule for the representation is proposed (Start End Position Code model, SE-PC). Simulations show the model's compatibility with benchmark findings from form priming, its ability to account for positional effects in letter identification priming and the positional distribution of perseverative intrusion errors. The model supports the view that spelling and reading use a common orthographic description, providing a well-defined account of the major features of this representation. The mental processing of written words is one of the most active and fruitful topics of investigation in cognitive, developmental and educational psychology, and cognitive neuropsychology and neu-roimaging. Many researchers in these fields have presented evidence that reading and spelling are linked at a fundamental level, sharing, for instance, a single orthographic lexicon and ortho-graphic description of known words (supporting evidence is reviewed below). While this experimental work has been accompanied by a vigorous program of computational modeling, to a great extent the theoretical literatures on reading and spelling have remained separate. This article describes a unified model of the mental representation of the identity and serial position of letters in written words that accounts for data from both spelling and reading. The structure of the article is as follows: Section 1 motivates the search for shared perception-action representations from the perspective of ideomotor theory, and summarizes current evidence in support of the application of this perspective to reading and spelling. In Section 2, the Start End-Competitive Queuing (SE-CQ) model of spelling is described and tested against data from three different disorders of spelling. Section 3 describes the Start End-Position Coded (SE-PC) model of reading, which uses the SE-CQ letter representation without change. The model is evaluated with respect to data from both normal and reading-impaired subjects. Section 4 summarizes the model and discusses a number of issues arising from it.
... Despite the fact that in our study we have not found errors in words with a smaller number of graphemes, the decrease in latencies in the short words is consistent with other studies that, through measures of accuracy, find that short words require less cognitive load in their writing (Cossu et al., 1995;Goswami et al., 1998;Valle, 1989). In addition, it has been recently demonstrated that patients with damage to the graphemic buffer present a marked length effect (Katz, 1991;Tainturier & Rapp, 2004). Another possible explanation for the decrease in latencies in words with a smaller number of graphemes could be that shorter words form part of the orthographic lexicon before longer words, as has been found in other studies (Lété et al., 2008;Sánchez Abchi et al., 2009). ...
... A pesar de que en nuestro estudio no hemos encontrado errores en las palabras con menor número de grafemas, la disminución de las latencias en las palabras cortas concuerda con otros estudios que, a partir de medidas de precisión, encuentran que las palabras cortas requieren menor carga cognitiva para su escritura (Cossu et al., 1995;Goswami et al., 1998;Valle, 1989). Además, recientemente se ha demostrado que los pacientes con daño en el buffer grafémico presentan un marcado efecto longitud (Katz, 1991;Tainturier & Rapp, 2004). Otra explicación posible a la disminución de las latencias en palabras con menor número de grafemas, podría ser que las palabras más cortas forman parte del léxico ortográfico antes que las palabras más largas, como se ha encontrado en otros estudios (Lété et al., 2008;Sánchez Abchi et al., 2009). ...
Several studies performed on deep orthography systems reveal variables that influence writing latencies that occur over the course of learning. In transparent orthographies such as Spanish there are very few studies on writing that measure latencies and duration. The aim of this present study was to take a more in-depth look at knowledge of the writing mechanisms used by Spanish children in primary education, by studying the errors, latencies and duration of the writing of words. To do this, sixty children performed a copying task and a dictation task with regular words of different frequency and length. The obtained results show changes in the writing mechanisms used by the children as they became more expert, as indicated by the greater effect of word length in the first years of primary. This word length effect is a more determining factor with regard to the number of letters in words than for the number of syllables. These results hold important implications for the teaching of writing in Spanish.
... There is now convincing evidence that the syllable is also involved in adult handwritten word production. Several case studies of patients with acquired dysgraphia indicate that orthographic representations encode the identity and respective positions of the graphemes, but also information on their consonant/ vowel status, as well as their syllabic and morphological structure (Caramazza & Miceli, 1990;Miceli, Benvegnu, Capasso, & Caramazza, 1995;Miceli, Capasso, Ivella, & Caramazza, 1997;Tainturier & Rapp, 2004;Badecker, Hillis, & Caramazza, 1990). Furthermore, research on handwriting dynamics in adults has revealed that word writing is regulated by syllable structure (Á lvarez et al., 2009;Kandel, Á lvarez, et al., 2006;Kandel et al., 2011;Lambert et al., 2008;Sausset et al., 2012). ...
Some research on written production has focused on the role of the syllable as a processing unit. However, the precise nature of this syllable unit has yet to be elucidated. The present study examined whether the nature of this processing unit is orthographic (i.e., an ortho-syllable) or phonological. We asked French adults to copy three-syllable and two-syllable words with or without a mute e. In French, a silent e may affect the orthographic syllabification of a word and increase the number of ortho-syllables. In Experiment 1, the mute e was in final position. The presence of the mute e increased writing latencies. In Experiment 2, which com-pared words with or without an internal mute e, the latencies for three-syllable words did not differ from those for two-syllable words containing a mute e. These results support the hypothesis that handwriting has a specific orthographic pro-cessing unit based on graphemic constituents.
... The orthographic sequences computed by lexical or sublexical processes would be maintained by the buffer during the time needed for the sequential assignment of format-specific information depending on the output modality (for example, letter name in oral spelling or letter shape in handwriting). Patients with graphemic buffer deficits (Caramazza et al., 1987;Buchwald and Rapp, 2004;Tainturier and Rapp, 2004) make errors affecting individual graphemes (substitutions, deletions, additions, transpositions), and they show a significant effect of word length. Moreover, they perform comparably across modality of input (copying, spellingto-dictation, written picture naming), across modality of output (typing, handwriting, oral spelling), and across type of stimulus (regular and irregular word, non-words). ...
Spelling deficits have repeatedly been observed in children with dyslexia. However, the few studies addressing this issue in dyslexic adults have reported contradictory results. We investigated whether Spanish dyslexics show spelling deficits in adulthood and which components of the writing production process might be impaired in developmental dyslexia. In order to evaluate the involvement of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the graphemic buffer, lexical frequency, phonology-to-orthography consistency and word length were manipulated in two writing tasks: a direct copy transcoding task and a spelling-to-dictation task. Results revealed that adults with dyslexia produced longer written latencies, inter-letter intervals, writing durations and more errors than their peers without dyslexia. Moreover, the dyslexics were more affected by lexical frequency and word length than the controls, but both groups showed a similar effect of P-O consistency. Written latencies also revealed that while the dyslexics initiated the response later in the direct copy transcoding task than in the spelling-to-dictation task, the controls showed the opposite pattern. However, the dyslexics were slower than the controls in both tasks. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that spelling difficulties are present in adults with dyslexia, at least in a language with a transparent orthography such as Spanish. These difficulties seem to be associated with a deficit affecting both lexical processing and the ability to maintain information about the serial order of the letters in a word. However, the dyslexic group did not differ from the control group in the application of the P-O conversion procedures. The spelling impairment would be in addition to the reading deficit, leading to poorer performance in direct copy transcoding compared to spelling-to-dictation.
