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Minding the gaps: literacy enhances lexical segmentation in children learning to read*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2017

NAOMI HAVRON  and
INBAL ARNON
NAOMI HAVRON*
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
INBAL ARNON
Affiliation:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
*
Address for correspondence: Naomi Havron, Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. e-mail: naomi.havron@mail.huji.ac.il
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Abstract

Can emergent literacy impact the size of the linguistic units children attend to? We examined children's ability to segment multiword sequences before and after they learned to read, in order to disentangle the effect of literacy and age on segmentation. We found that early readers were better at segmenting multiword units (after controlling for age, cognitive, and linguistic variables), and that improvement in literacy skills between the two sessions predicted improvement in segmentation abilities. Together, these findings suggest that literacy acquisition, rather than age, enhanced segmentation. We discuss implications for models of language learning.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 6 , November 2017 , pp. 1516 - 1538
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by ISF Grant 52712 (to IA). The authors thank the schools, teachers, parents, and children for their cooperation. We also thank our two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Finally, we thank the research assistants who administered the tasks: Tamar Johnson, Ruth Goldberg, and Yaron Shapira.

References

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