Children Processing Novel Irregular and Regular Words During Reading: An Eye Tracking Study

ABSTRACT

Children may link words in their oral vocabulary with novel printed word forms through a process termed mispronunciation correction, which enables them to adjust an imperfect phonological decoding. Additional evidence suggests that sentence context may play a role in helping children to make link between a word in oral vocabulary and its irregular written form. Four groups of children were orally trained on a set of novel words but received no training on a second set. Half the trained words were designated irregular spellings and half regular spellings. Children later read the words in contextually supportive or neutral sentences while their eye movements were monitored. Fixations on untrained words were longer than on trained regular words but were similar to trained irregular words. Fixations on regular words were shorter than on irregular words, and there were larger differences between irregular and regular words viewed in contextually supportive sentences. Subsequently, children were able to read irregular words more accurately when they had previously appeared in a supportive context. These results suggest that orally known irregular words undergo additional processing when first viewed in text, which is consistent with the online operation of a mispronunciation correction mechanism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval statement

This study was approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee (approval: 5201500098) and adhered to the standards of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2007).

Informed consent

Legal guardians of all participating children gave their informed consent for children to participate in this study. Children gave their assent prior to participation in the study and were informed of their right to withdraw at any time.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. Note that some additional measures were collected that were not relevant to the present study.