Beginning reading without phonology

Abstract

The reading development of the individual members of a class of new entrants to primary school (aged 4 1/2–5 1/2 years) was studied over a period of a year. The teaching they received emphasised the formation of a “sight vocabulary”. Instruction in letter-sound associations was restricted to spelling and writing. The children appeared to “read without phonology”, that is without the application of letter-sound (grapheme-phoneme) associations. Words could be read only after they had been taught. Errors involved visual confusions and occasional semantic, visual-then-semantic, derivational, and functor substitution paralexias. Error responses were generally selected from the set of words the child had been taught and this set was represented in episodic memory. In many cases spatial distortions which were destructive of word shape were not effective in abolishing reading. The results are discussed in terms of the formation of a rudimentary word recognition system, termed a “logographic lexicon”.