The Development of Sensitivity to Sublexical Orthographic Constraints: An Investigation of Positional Frequency and Consistency Using a Wordlikeness Choice Task

Abstract

The developmental sequence of the types of orthographic knowledge that children acquire early in reading development is unclear. Following findings of skilled reading, the orthographic constraints of positional frequency and feedback consistency were explored with a wordlikeness judgement task for grades 1–3 English-speaking children. The data provide evidence for the early development of sensitivity to positional frequency, but not sound-spelling consistency. However, sensitivity to each type of orthographic structure was predicted by rapid naming and sensitivity to consistency was predicted by phonological awareness. As well, sensitivity to each type of constraint was related to word reading fluency.

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of a larger study supported by the Evaluation Services Center at the University of Cincinnati and Saperstein Associates. Thanks to Jerry Jordan, Jackie Clark, Janae Jakins, Jayne Andersen, Mandy Williams, Nancy Fuentes, Nancy West, Shannon Barnard, and Kim Wagenschutz for their help with the project. A portion of the data was presented at the 2010 meeting of the International School Psychology Association.

Notes

1. Large-scale studies using regression methods and controlling for these and other covariates (e.g., frequency, familiarity, neighborhood, bigram frequency, feedforward consistency) did not support this sound-to-spelling effect (Balota et al., 2004; Kessler, Treiman, and Mullennix, 2007), but the correlational studies tend to pull out variance shared between these highly intercorrelated variables, and thus may underestimate feedback effects (Ziegler et al., 2008).