Abstract:
This research looked at conditions which result in the
development of integrated letter code information in the
acquisition of reading vocabulary. Thirty grade three
children of normal reading ability acquired new reading
words in a Meaning Assigned task and a Letter Comparison
task, and worked to increase skill for known reading words
in a Copy task. The children were then assessed on their
ability to identify the letters in these words. During the
test each stimulus word for each child was exposed for 100
msec., after which each child reported as many of his or her
letters as he or she could. Familiar words, new words, and
a single letter identification task served as within subject
controls. Following this, subjects were assessed for word
meaning recall of the Meaning Assigned words and word
reading times for words in all condi tions • The resul ts
supported an episodic model of word recognition in which the
overlap between the processing operations employed in
encoding a word and those required when decoding it
affected decoding performance. In particular, the Meaning
Assigned and Copy tasks. appeared to facilitate letter code
accessibility and integration in new and familiar words
respectively. Performance in the Letter Comparison task, on
the other hand, suggested that subjects can process the
elements of a new word without integrating them into its
lexical structure. It was concluded that these results
favour an episodic model of word recognition.
