Dutch elementary school children’s attribution of meaning to written pseudowords

Grade two through six elementary school Dutch children were asked to perform a lexical decision task including 90 pseudowords constructed by changing one or two letters in a Dutch word. Subsequently, the children were asked about the meaning of pseudowords they had not crossed out and that they, apparently, had considered to be words. Multiple regression analyses on the lexical decision task showed that the older children were more hindered by the morphemic structure of a pseudoword than by its orthographic neighbors. The younger children, in contrast, were less hindered by the morphemic structure of a pseudoword and more hindered by its orthographic neighbors. Word length was a (small) predictor only for grade 6. Moreover, the answers of the children reflected that in their construction of meanings for the pseudowords they were hindered both by the morphemic structure and by the orthographic neighbors of the pseudowords

Depth of reading vocabulary in hearing and hearing-impaired children

The main point of our study was to examine the vocabulary knowledge of pupils in grades 3–6, and in particular the relative reading vocabulary disadvantage of hearing-impaired pupils. The achievements of 394 pupils with normal hearing and 106 pupils with a hearing impairment were examined on two vocabulary assessment tasks: a lexical decision task and a use decision task. The target words in both tasks represent the vocabulary children should have at the end of primary school. The results showed that most hearing pupils reached this norm, whereas most hearing-impaired pupils did not. In addition, results showed that hearing-impaired pupils not only knew fewer words, but that they also knew them less well. This lack of deeper knowledge remained even when matching hearing and hearing-impaired children on minimal word knowledge. Additionally, comparison of the two tasks demonstrated the efficacy of the lexical decision task as a measure of lexical semantic knowledge

Developing a Structural Model of Reading: The Role of Hearing Status in Reading Development Over Time

The purpose of the present study was to develop a structural model of reading based on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Data from a 4-year longitudinal study of Dutch primary school children with and without hearing loss were used to conduct an exploratory analysis of how lexical components (i.e., decoding skills, lexical decision, and lexical use) relate to one another and to reading comprehension. Our structural model supports a positive role of the quality of the mental lexicon for reading comprehension. Furthermore, it was possible to apply the same conceptual model of reading development to both groups of children when incorporating hearing status as a grouping variable. However, a multigroup comparison model showed that the predictive values of the relations between the different tasks differed for the two groups

Spelling errors of 24 cohorts of children across primary school 2012-2015: A corpus study

In this paper we present a study of some spelling error types that Dutch primary school children made in the dictations and in the free or themed texts they contributed to the BasiScript corpus, i.e. a corpus comprising child written output produced between 2012 and 2015. The present article first briefly describes the corpus. Then it presents an analysis of the spelling errors that occurred in a selected set of words in the dictations regarding diphthongs (in grades 2 and 3) and verb forms (in grades 4 and 5) – which are notoriously difficult to spell for these age groups. In our analysis we investigate whether the frequencies of the words in the BasiLex corpus (a corpus of child written input) predict the spelling errors and whether there is a correlation between number of incorrect spellings of the words in the dictations and in the free texts and themed texts of the respective grades