Models of Skilled Reading and Language Acquisition

Flashcards for lecture notes on skilled reading models and language acquisition.

Word Recognition Models

Models of skilled reading attempt to answer questions about how words are recognized, whether through whole-word or subword representations, direct or phonologically mediated access, serial or parallel processing, top-down or bottom-up processing, single or multiple mechanisms, and activation or search processes.

Dual Route Model

This model suggests two routes to accessing the mental lexicon: an indirect (non-lexical) route via phonology and a direct (lexical/orthographic) route without phonological recoding.

Top-Down, Context-Driven Models

These models emphasize the role of context and prediction in word recognition, such as Smith's model where word recognition is confirming predictions.

Bottom-Up, Stimulus-Driven Models

These models prioritize information contained in the printed word and propose discrete, ordered stages of processing: sensory, recognition, and interpretative.

Whole-Word Models

Like Johnson's pattern unit model, these represent words as indivisible wholes, recognized by unique patterns formed by the letters.

Component-Letter Models

These models represent words as ordered arrays of graphemes, requiring all letters to be recognized for word recognition.

Interactive-Activation and Connectionist Models

These models suggest word recognition results from the interaction of excitatory and inhibitory activations from interconnected nodes, influenced by stimulus and neighboring words.

Lexical Search Models

These models propose that word identification is an active search for lexical addresses in an orthographic access file, ordered by frequency. Uses Basic Orthographic Syllable Structure (BOSS).

BOSS

Basic Orthographic Syllable Structure, the first syllable in a stem morpheme, used as an access code in lexical search models.

Cohesion

A semantic concept referring to the relations of meaning within a text that define it as a text.

Cohesive Devices

Refer either to upcoming text or more commonly to the prior text (anaphora).

Propositional Models of Text Processing

These models suggest people reduce text to a gist, represented as a network of propositions. Propositions are minimal units of information representing relationships among concepts.

Inferences

Deductions or guesses based on evidence in the text or derived from a person’s preexisting knowledge.

Schemata

Mental structures acquired through experiences with an event or routine social situations; culturally specific.

Methods of Studying Child Language Development

Include diaries/parental reports, observational data, interviews, and experimental techniques.

HASP

High Amplitude Sucking Paradigm, a method for studying speech perception of infants.

Stages of Psycholinguistic Development

Include cooing, canonical babbling, first words, one-word stage (holophrastic), two-word stage (pivot grammar), and multiple-word stage.

Holophrase

A one-word stage where a single word expresses a complete idea or sentence.

Protodeclaratives

Infant's attempts at communication that are about something.

Protoimperatives

Infant's attempts at communication that are request that something be done for or given to the infant using gestures, crying, etc..

Fast Mapping

A child's ability to learn the meaning of a word after only a single exposure.

Wug Test

A method of studying syntactic knowledge by assessing a child's ability to apply rules to novel words.

MLU

Mean Length of Utterances - a measure that calculates the length of child’s utterances, rather than in words.

Overregulation

Producing words according to acquired rules of learning, evidence that children learn the rules of the system and not merely imitate.