Abstract
This chapter addresses the issue of whether development of reading skill entails the acquisition of multiletter recognition units that can be used to decode new printed words more efficiently. As an alternative, the possibility is raised that reading acquisition involves gradually learning more about orthgraphic representations of words and also increasing the number of orthographic lexical entries. Through lexical analogies, a new word having many orthographic neighbors in the mental lexicon (so-called friends) may then be easier to read than one with a few friends. In an experimental training study, beginning readers with about seven months of formal training in reading practised a varying number of times the reading of short lists of unfamiliar words that differ in only one or two initial letters. They also practised reading lists of dissimilar words. In a pretest and posttest the practised words, untrained analogous transfer words and the common letter clusters were separately tested with appropriate controls. The results showed that the gain in naming times for the transfer words was affected by the frequency of having practised similar words, but the efficiency of reading the common rime units was not affected at all. It is concluded that an account in terms of familiar sublexical grapheme clusters is probably not correct. Instead a mental analogy process is suggested to be the basis for transfer effects.
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Reitsma, P. (1997). How to get Friends in Beginning Word Recognition. In: Leong, C.K., Joshi, R.M. (eds) Cross-Language Studies of Learning to Read and Spell. NATO ASI Series, vol 87. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1197-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1197-5_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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