The hyphen as a syllabification cue in reading bisyllabic and multisyllabic words among Finnish 1st and 2nd graders

Abstract

<p> Finnish ABC books present words with hyphens inserted at syllable<br /> boundaries. Syllabification by hyphens is abandoned in the 2nd grade for bisyllabic<br /> words, but continues for words with three or more syllables. The current eye<br /> movement study investigated how and to what extent syllable hyphens in bisyllabic<br /> (kah-vi ‘cof-fee’) and multisyllabic words (haa-ruk-ka ‘fork’, ap-pel-sii-ni ‘orange’)<br /> affect eye movement behavior and reading speed of Finnish 1st and 2nd graders.<br /> Experiment 1 showed that 2nd graders had longer gaze durations, needed more<br /> fixations and had longer selective regression path durations for hyphenated than<br /> concatenated words. This implies that hyphenated words were difficult to process<br /> when first encountered, but also hard to integrate with prior sentence context. The<br /> effects were modified by number of syllables and reading skill. That is, the<br /> hyphenation effects were larger for multisyllabic than bisyllabic words and larger<br /> for more than less proficient readers. Experiment 2 showed the same hyphenation<br /> effect for 1st graders reading long multisyllabic words, even with a hyphen that was<br /> smaller in size and hence visually less salient. We argue that syllable hyphens<br /> prevent reasonably proficient readers from using the most efficient processing route<br /> for bi- and multisyllabic words and discuss the possible implications of the results<br /> for early Finnish reading instruction.</p>