Study looks at whether a child’s understanding of sub-lexical orthographic regularities predicts their reading development across one year.
This study was published by the Journal of Research in Reading. Its aims were to examine whether children who had an understanding of sub-lexical orthographic regularities predicted their reading development. Sub-lexical orthographic regularities refer to the conventions of written language such as consonants and vowels.
The participants of this study were 1st-grade students recruited from 18 different public schools within Eastern Canada. The sample size of this study was 128 children, with a relatively equal number of males and females. In order to measure the children’s level of sub-lexical orthographic understanding, the researchers asked them to select which of the two letter strings looked more word-like. One of the letter-strings contained vowels and consonants while the other contained all consonants or all vowels (e.g., vack vs vgck or uai). To measure whether their answers predicted reading development, the children were assessed on their word reading abilities a year later in Grade 2.
Overall, the findings indicate a significant correlation between a child’s sub-lexical orthographic knowledge in Grade 1 and word reading scores in both Grade 1 and 2. This suggests that sub-lexical orthographic understanding may support a child’s initial steps in word reading. These results highlight the importance that further research be conducted on how to best support the development of this knowledge to aid in a child’s reading development.
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