Printed word learning in beginning readers

Three experiments using beginning Dutch readers (7 and 8 years of age) as subjects provide evidence that visually recognizing the unique graphemic structure of words is an important component in word identification, even at rather early stages in learning to read. Only a moderate amount of practice in reading strings of letters was necessary for young children to read the regular spelling faster than an altered spelling that preserved the word sound. In normal beginners this effect appeared regardless of their ability to identify the words the first time; in learning-disabled children, matched in overall reading speed, learning about the graphemic compositions of words seems to proceed at a much slower rate. The results are discussed with regard to the importance of building accurate graphemic entries in the mental lexicon for acquiring fluency in reading.     

Changes in letter processing in beginning readers

Letter pairs were tachistoscopically presented to children from grades 1, 2 and 6 (85.6, 99.4, and 147.8 months of age, respectively). They were required to determine whether the letters had a same name by pressing one of two response keys as fast as possible. Also a letter detection task was presented where letter matching was either based on physical or name characteristics. The name match in both tasks was slower than the match of letters which shared the same visual form. The name-physical match differences changed significantly as a function of grade level. Shifts in latency differences over grades can be considered as a fundamental correlate of reading ability. Children increasingly employ strategies of processing based on nominal cues and become efficient in extracting the invariant features of letters amongst irrelevant variations such as type face.