Modeling the Length Effect: Specifying the Relation With Visual and Phonological Correlates of Reading

Abstract

Beginning readers' reading latencies increase as words become longer. This length effect is believed to be a marker of a serial reading process. We examined the effects of visual and phonological skills on the length effect. Participants were 184 second-grade children who read 3- to 5-letter words and nonwords. Results indicated that reading latencies could be decomposed into a length effect and an overall reading speed. Individual differences in the length effect were predicted by phonological awareness and visual attention span. Rapid naming accounted only for differences in overall reading speed.

Notes

¹In this score both identity and location of the reported letters were taken into account. This score differs from the score used in previous studies (e.g., Valdois et al., 2003), which was based on the total number of letters that was identified correctly. In our score it was also taken into account whether order of the letters was correct, because in reading it is important to perceive letters in the correct order in which they appear. However, the correlation between the score with and without taking order into account was .88, and the use of identity only scores in our analyses gave similar results.