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Biomedical subjects

R Treiman

Publications and source records attributed to R Treiman.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

The role of phonology in a letter detection task.

In two experiments, we investigated whether onsets and rimes have a role in the processing of written English. In both experiments, participants detected letter targets (e.g., t) in nonwords like vult faster than in nonwords like vust. This finding is consistent with Selkirk's (1982) view that sonorants (e.g., the /l/ of vult) cohere with preceding short vowels and are part of the vowel nucleus. In contrast, the /t/ of vust is part of the syllable's coda st and so is harder to isolate. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the time required for one to detect single-member codas following vowel digraphs (e.g., the t in veet) was similar to the time to detect the same target letter following a postvocalic sonorant (e.g., the t in vult). No evidence was found for onsets. The results provide support for a phonological organization among letters of printed rimes.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Children's phonological awareness: confusions between phonemes that differ only in voicing.

Given the role of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell, it is important to examine the linguistic factors that influence children's performance on phonemic awareness tasks. We found that, contrary to some previous claims, children did not perform better with fricative consonants (e.g., /z/) than with stops (e.g., /d/) in a phoneme recognition task. However, preschoolers and kindergartners were more likely to mistakenly judge that a syllable began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme of the syllable differed from the target only in voicing (e.g., /t/ for the target /d/) than when it differed in place of articulation (e.g., /b/-/d/) or in both place and voicing (e.g., /p/-/d/). These results shed light on the organization of children's phonological systems. They also have implications for the design and interpretation of phonemic awareness tasks.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1998

What's in a name: Children's knowledge about the letters in their own names.

Two studies were performed to determine whether children's experiences with their own names boost their knowledge about the components of the name, the letters. The children in Study One showed a significant superiority for the initial letter of their own first name in tests of letter-name, but not letter-sound, knowledge. This pattern was found for Australian first graders (mean age 5 years, 5 months), U.S. kindergartners (mean age 5 years, 8 months), and U.S. preschoolers (mean age 4 years, 10 months). Study Two, with U.S. preschoolers (mean age 4 years, 11 months), again revealed an advantage for the initial letter of a child's first name in knowledge of letter names but not knowledge of letter sounds. Moreover, the children were better at printing the initial letter of their own first name than other letters. The results show that different factors are involved in the learning of letter names and letter sounds. They further suggest that children use letter-based strategies with their own names at a time when they are often considered to be "logographic" readers.

Child↗
PubMed1998

The foundations of literacy: learning the sounds of letters.

Learning the sounds of letters is an important part of learning to read and spell. To explore the factors that make some letter-sound correspondences easier for children to learn than others, we first analyzed knowledge of letters' sounds (and names) by 660 children between 3 1/2 and 7 1/2 years old. A second study examined pre-schoolers' (M age 4 years, 11 months) ability to learn various sound-letter mappings. Together, the results show that an important determinant of letter-sound knowledge is whether the sound occurs in the name of the letter and, if so, whether it is at the beginning or the end. The properties of the sound itself (consonant versus vowel, sonorant versus obstruent, stop versus continuant) appear to have little or no influence on children's learning of basic letter-sound correspondences. The findings show that children use their knowledge of letters' names when learning the letters' sounds rather than memorizing letter-sound correspondences as arbitrary pairings.

Child↗
PubMed1997

The Fragility of the Alphabetic Principle: Children's Knowledge of Letter Names Can Cause Them to Spell Syllabically Rather Than Alphabetically

The present research was designed to investigate how children's early-acquired knowledge of letter names affects their spelling. Specifically, we asked whether kindergartners and first graders sometimes spell a sequence of phonemes such as /bi/ (the name of the letter b) or /zi/ (the name of the letter z) with the corresponding consonant letter rather than spelling the sequence alphabetically, with a consonant letter followed by a vowel letter. Children made a number of letter-name spelling errors, especially when the consonant and vowel formed a complete syllable. These results show that children's knowledge of letter names can cause them to deviate from the alphabetic principle-the principle that each phoneme should be represented with a single grapheme. The findings further suggest that syllables play a special role in early writing.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1997

Can children and adults focus on sound as opposed to spelling in a phoneme counting task?

Given the well-established link between phonemic awareness and literacy, it is important to better understand the foundations of phonemic awareness. The authors investigated the phoneme counting task, examining the degree to which children reading at a first-grade level and college students can focus on sound as opposed to spelling. In 2 experiments, both groups were found to be sensitive to some phonetic details that are not systematically represented in print. They had some ability to distinguish between monophthongs (as in he) and diphthongs (as in how), and they tended to count fewer "sounds" for syllables ending with the more sonorous (or vowel-like) consonant/r/than for syllables ending with less sonorous consonants. However, print-related knowledge also affected both groups. Even children judged syllables that were the names of letters to contain fewer "sounds" than syllables that were not letter names.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Children's sensitivity to syllables, onsets, rimes, and phonemes.

It has been argued that children's performance on phonological awareness tasks varies with the linguistic level that is tapped by the task. For example, tasks that involve syllables are thought to be easier than tasks that involve lower-level linguistic units, and tasks that tap the level of onsets are thought to be easier than tasks that require access to single phonemes. In previous research, however, the linguistic status of a unit has often been confounded with its size. Five experiments were carried out in an attempt to disentangle these variables and so to provide a better test of the linguistic status hypothesis. In the first study, preschoolers and kindergartners more readily judged that two stimuli shared a beginning sound when that sound was an onset on its own than when it was part of a cluster onset. In two additional experiments, there was an advantage for syllables over rimes in kindergarten and first-grade children when the shared units occurred in the middle syllables of trisyllabic stimuli. The superiority for syllables was largely masked in two other studies in which the stimuli that shared a unit rhymed. This latter result suggests that children's familiarity with rhyme can override the syllable advantage. Overall, the results support the linguistic status hypothesis by indicating that effects of linguistic level on phonological sensitivity cannot always be reduced to effects of unit size.

Child↗
PubMed1996

Effects of Morphology on Children's Spelling of Final Consonant Clusters

Most research on children's spelling has emphasized the role of phonological or sound-based processes. We asked whether morphology plays a part in early spelling by examining how children write words with final consonant clusters. In three experiments, children made different patterns of omission errors on the last two consonants of words such as tuned and bars, in which the consonants belong to different morphemes, and words such as brand and Mars, in which the consonants belong to the same morpheme. These differences emerged even among children reading at the first-grade level. Effects of morphology appeared whether children spelled single words to dictation (Experiments 1 and 3), finished partially completed spellings (Experiment 2), or wrote sentences containing specified words (Experiment 3). Children did not use morphological relations among words as much as they could have, given their knowledge of the stems, but they did use them to some extent. Although phonology plays an important role in early spelling, young children can also use other sources of information, including certain morphological relationships among words.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1996

Children's sensitivity to syllables, onsets, rimes, and phonemes.

It has been argued that children's performance on phonological awareness tasks varies with the linguistic level that is tapped by the task. For example, tasks that involve syllables are thought to be easier than tasks that involve lower-level linguistic units, and tasks that tap the level of onsets are thought to be easier than tasks that require access to single phonemes. In previous research, however, the linguistic status of a unit has often been confounded with its size. Five experiments were carried out in an attempt to disentangle these variables and so to provide a better test of the linguistic status hypothesis. In the first study, preschoolers and kindergartners more readily judged that two stimuli shared a beginning sound when that sound was an onset on its own than when it was part of a cluster onset. In two additional experiments, there was an advantage for syllables over rimes in kindergarten and first-grade children when the shared units occurred in the middle syllables of trisyllabic stimuli. The superiority for syllables was largely masked in two other studies in which the stimuli that shared a unit rhymed. This latter result suggests that children's familiarity with rhyme can override the syllable advantage. Overall, the results support the linguistic status hypothesis by indicating that effects of linguistic level on phonological sensitivity cannot always be reduced to effects of unit size.

Child↗
PubMed1995

What happened to the "n" of sink? Children's spellings of final consonant clusters.

Children's spellings provide a window on their representations of spoken words. These representations may not always match those assumed by the conventional orthography. We examined one specific case in which this may be true, that of CVCC (consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant) syllables. In three experiments, first graders often produced spellings such as "sach" for the nonword [symbol: see text] and "pit" for the nonword /pIlt/. We suggest that many children consider these syllables to contain three phonemes instead of four phonemes. Rather than treating the postvocalic nasal or liquid as a separate phoneme, children consider it an attribute of the vowel. This suggestion was supported by the results of a phoneme counting test in which children often used three tokens for syllables such as [symbol: see text] and /pIlt/. The results suggest that, in addition to difficulties in gaining access to phonemes, nonstandard phonemic representations may be a stumbling block in the acquisition of alphabetic literacy.

Attention↗
PubMed1995

Role of the syllable in the processing of spoken English: evidence from a nonword comparison task.

Previous research using monitoring tasks suggests that syllables do not play a role in the initial processing of speech by English listeners. The role of syllables in a different task, one involving the speeded comparison of 2 nonwords, was investigated. In 2 experiments, responses to nonword pairs that shared a complete syllable were significantly faster than responses to pairs that shared part of a syllable when the shared unit was at the beginning or in the middle of the nonwords. Results were mixed when the shared unit was at the end of the nonwords, possibly reflecting a confounding effect of rhyme. Findings suggest that syllabified representations of the nonwords may be used in a comparison task, even in English. Results are interpreted relative to different demands of the nonword comparison and monitoring tasks.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography.

The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant-vowel-consonant phonological structure were examined. orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency of pronunciation of the orthographic rime accounted for variance in latencies and errors beyond that contributed by the consistency of pronunciation of the individual graphemes and by other factors. In 3 experiments, as well, children and adults made more errors on words with less consistently pronounced orthographic rimes than on words with more consistently pronounced orthographic rimes. Relations between spellings and sounds in the simple monomorphemic words of English are more predictable when the level of onsets and rimes is taken into account than when only graphemes and phonemes are considered.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Errors in short-term memory for speech: a developmental study.

In a previous study (R. Treiman & C. Danis, 1988), adults who were presented with lists of spoken consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense syllables for immediate recall produced many errors that combined the initial consonant onset of one to-be-remembered syllable with the vowel-consonant rime of another to-be-remembered syllable. These onset-rime recombination errors were more common than other types of recombination errors and also more common than serial position errors. These findings suggest that nonwords are remembered in terms of smaller phonological units. To replicate the previous results and to determine whether they generalize to children, the author tested kindergarteners, 3rd graders, 6th graders, and adults on lists of nonsense CVCs. Onset-rime conjunction errors were the most frequent type of recombination error, even among kindergarteners, suggesting that children code spoken syllables in terms of onset and rime units from a young age.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

To what extent do orthographic units in print mirror phonological units in speech?

Three experiments were performed to examine the degree to which the orthographic units in printed syllables reflect the phonological units in speech. Two of the experiments used a pronunciation decision task in which subjects had to determine whether a non-word sounded like a real word when pronounced. The third experiment used a lexical decision task. In all three experiments, evidence was obtained for orthographic units that correspond to onsets and rimes. The evidence was equivocal on whether the phonological category of the consonant that follows the vowel affects the internal structure of the orthographic rime as it does the structure of the phonological rime. The results are discussed in terms of the role of linguistic units in the processing of print.

Humans↗
PubMed1994

What types of linguistic information do children use in spelling? The case of flaps.

We sought to determine what types of linguistic information children represent in their spelling by examining their performance on the flaps of words such as city and lady. In 4 experiments, children often misspelled flaps as d. This d bias was common until at least second grade, with few children showing a bias toward t. We found no evidence that children have an underlying representation of city as containing /t/, for children said such words with /d/ when speaking very slowly. Even kindergartners were more accurate at spelling the flaps of words such as dirty, which have a stem ending with /t/, than the flaps of words such as city. Thus, children use meaning relations among words to aid their spelling before they have formally been taught to do so. The results show that young children are not purely phonetic spellers as they are often portrayed. The results further suggest that phonology and orthography are closely related systems that interact during development.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1993

Phonology and spelling: the case of syllabic consonants.

Two experiments were performed to explore the effects of one aspect of English phonology, syllabic consonants, on children's spelling. In Experiment 1, kindergarteners (age 6), first graders (age 7), and second graders (age 8) spelled words with stressed syllabic /r/, such as sir, and words with medial vowels, such as wet. Vowel omissions (e.g., "sr") and vowel misorderings (e.g., "sre") were more common for the syllabic /r/ words than for the comparison words. In Experiment 2, first and second graders spelled words with unstressed syllabic /r/, such as wander, unstressed syllabic /l/, such as easel, and unstressed syllabic nasals, such as carton. Words with unstressed vowels in the second syllable, such as bandit, were also included. For first graders, vowel omissions and misorderings occurred primarily for syllabic /r/ and /l/. By second grade, only orthographically influenced errors on syllabic /l/ remained. The results show that phonology plays an important role in early spelling. They also shed light on the nature of children's phonological representations.

Child↗
PubMed1991

Classifying by dimensions and reading: a comparison of the auditory and visual modalities.

Children have difficulty learning to read alphabetic writing systems, in part, because they have difficulty segmenting spoken language into phonemes. Young children also have difficulty attending to the individual dimensions of visual objects. Thus, children's early difficulty in reading may be one sign of a general inability to selectively attend to the parts of any perceptual wholes. To explore this notion, children in kindergarten through fourth grade (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) and adults (Experiment 2) classified triads of spoken syllables and triads of visual objects. Classifying speech by common parts was positively related to reading and spelling ability (Experiments 1 and 4), but usually not to classifying visual stimuli by common parts under free classification instructions (Experiments 1 through 3). However, classification was more consistent across the visual and auditory modalities when the children were told to classify based on a shared constituent (Experiment 4). Regardless of instructions, performance on the visual tasks did not usually relate to reading and spelling skill. The ability to attend selectively to phonemes seems to be a "special" skill--one which may require specific experiences with language, such as those involved in learning to read an alphabetic writing system.

Attention↗
PubMed1991

Early absorption of enteral ranitidine after major laparotomy.

Thirty-six patients were studied following abdominal aortic surgery to determine if a commonly used medication could be absorbed from the gastrointestinal (GI) tract in the early postoperative period. Patients were randomized into two groups: Group I received ranitidine elixir 3 mg/kg via nasogastric tube every 12 hours; Group II received intravenous (IV) ranitidine 1 mg/kg every 8 hours. Ranitidine serum levels were measured with high performance liquid chromatography 1 hour after administration of the first three doses. Gastric pH was measured every 4 hours. It was found that serum ranitidine levels generally regarded as clinically effective were achieved in both groups. Although the levels were significantly higher following intravenous (IV) administration (Group II), there were no differences in average gastric pH. The authors conclude that within 24 hours of aortic surgery enterally administered ranitidine is effectively absorbed and provides prophylaxis equivalent to IV administration of the drug at lower cost. Other medications might be deliverable via the GI tract in the early postoperative period.

Administration, Oral↗