Antzaka, A. . 1 , Lallier, M. . 1 , Acha, J. . 2 & Carreiras, M. 1, 2, 3
1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
2 University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU
3 Ikerbasque
The visual attention span (VAS) has been linked to reading development in alphabetic orthographies and is considered to support the acquisition of orthographic representations. Cross-linguistic studies suggest VAS importance could be greater when depending on larger orthographic units, e.g. in deeper orthographies. However, even in transparent orthographies reading can depend on larger orthographic units as demonstrated by studies on reading morphologically complex words.
We aim to study reading of morphologically complex and simple words and pseudowords in Basque (a transparent orthography) and whether the role of the VAS and morphological awareness (MA) depends on the lexicality or morphological complexity of the stimulus.
Reading aloud and copying skills were studied in readers of Basque in 2nd (N=25) and 4th (N=29) grade. Both tasks included 1/4 monomorphemic Basque words, 1/4 bimorphemic Basque words, 1/4 monomorphemic pseudowords and 1/4 bimorphemic pseudowords (either including a real suffix or lemma). VAS was assessed using a visual 1-back task and MA was assessed with a sentence completion measure designed to test derivational suffixing. Results reveal both VAS and MA contribution are modulated by lexicality in the reading aloud task, while only VAS contributed to the copying task, tending to contribute more to copying monomorphemic items.