Orthographic facilitation in oral vocabulary acquisition

Abstract

An experiment investigated whether exposure to orthography facilitates oral vocabulary learning. A total of 58 typically developing children aged 8–9 years were taught 12 nonwords. Children were trained to associate novel phonological forms with pictures of novel objects. Pictures were used as referents to represent novel word meanings. For half of the nonwords children were additionally exposed to orthography, although they were not alerted to its presence, nor were they instructed to use it. After this training phase a nonword–picture matching posttest was used to assess learning of nonword meaning, and a spelling posttest was used to assess learning of nonword orthography. Children showed robust learning for novel spelling patterns after incidental exposure to orthography. Further, we observed stronger learning for nonword–referent pairings trained with orthography. The degree of orthographic facilitation observed in posttests was related to children's reading levels, with more advanced readers showing more benefit from the presence of orthography.

Keywords:

• Reading
• Orthography
• Vocabulary acquisition
• Learning
• Development

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank The Economic and Social Research Council for a studentship awarded to the first author and a grant awarded to the second and third authors. D.V.M Bishop is supported by The Wellcome Trust. We would also like to thank all teachers, parents, and children for their ongoing support with our research.

Notes

¹There were two exceptions to this. For two of the consistent items (luss, joig) children produced alternative but plausible spellings (lus, joyg). This was unexpected for joig; however, we added an extra s to luss to make this item longer and therefore more similar to other items. We accounted for this inconsistency by accepting these alternative spellings as correct if children had not been exposed to nonword orthography.