Children growing up today do not only read printed books but also electronic books (e-books) which are offered to them through the internet or applications on tablets. The purpose of this study was...Show moreChildren growing up today do not only read printed books but also electronic books (e-books) which are offered to them through the internet or applications on tablets. The purpose of this study was to research whether a reading voice in combination with highlighted print in e-books has a positive influence on the reading development of beginning readers. The study involved 54 fluent Dutch speaking students without any learning- and/or behavioural problems who were in third grade of regular primary education. The research was a randomised pretest posttest within subjects design. During the pre-and posttest, word recognition and reading comprehension skills were measured by means of one standardised and three book bound tasks. The intervention is the reading and listening to e-books via the computer with a built-in reading voice and different levels of highlighted print (one line, half a page or no highlighted print). Results indicated that reading e-books leads to better word recognition and reading comprehension skills. Different levels of highlighted print do not have effect on the proficiency in word recognition and reading comprehension. Similarly, there is no difference found between the most and least skilled readers in the extent to which they profit from highlighted texts in e-books. Students read better independently when they were able to read along with the spoken text several times. It seems that reading along the spoken text before reading the text independently is an appropriate way to stimulate reading development and could be a valuable addition to current reading instructions.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
Different speech variants can exist of one word, but how much information of these variants is actually stored in the mental lexicon of the speaker? I hypothesise that dialect makes for different...Show moreDifferent speech variants can exist of one word, but how much information of these variants is actually stored in the mental lexicon of the speaker? I hypothesise that dialect makes for different reduction patterns in the consonant cluster /st/ and that consequently, phonetic detail of reduced word forms is stored in the mind of the speaker. This was tested by a production experiment in which spontaneous speech and read speech are compared and a perception experiment in which participants had to perform a lexical decision task. Results showed that different dialects indeed show different frequencies and patterns of cluster reduction. Specifically, the Ede dialect reduced and deleted /s/ more frequently than the dialect Roosendaal. Reaction times of the third experiment showed that reduced word forms are not stored next to the canonical form. However, response data revealed that phonetic detail was influential when recognising reduced forms. I propose a hybrid model of the episodic and abstract model of storage of word forms in that phonetic detail of variants is stored next to the canonical form.Show less
