Oral vocabulary knowledge and learning to read new words: A theoretical review

ABSTRACT

In this theoretical review, evidence for the link between spoken and written word knowledge is summarised, highlighting the specific hypotheses posed in this field and the extent to which they are informative regarding causation. A brief overview of major theories of orthographic learning draws attention to how each characterises the role of oral vocabulary within the learning process, and the timing of its influence. The theoretical foundations and evidence for two cognitive mechanisms that seek to explain the relationship between spoken and written word knowledge are outlined, drawing attention to a key difference between them: the proposed timing of the effect. Set for variability (or mispronunciation correction) is thought to operate from the point of visual exposure, while orthographic skeletons are thought to exert an influence on written word learning that begins before exposure to written words. The review closes with a discussion of directions for future research.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council (grant number DP200100311) to AC and EB.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Nation and Cocksey (2009) suggest that only spoken word recognition tasks strictly assess knowledge of word pronunciations independent of any links with semantics.

2. Print-to-pronunciation regularity is one method of describing variability in the mappings between orthography and phonology. Another method is the measurement of a word’s consistency. When applied to reading, consistency describes the predictability of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. It is sometimes employed as a binary measure, but is more often used continuously, with a theoretical range of zero to one. When employed as a continuous measure, consistency refers to the proportion of all words with the same graphemes that share the pronunciation. Regularity and consistency are different approaches to capturing the complexities of writing systems.

3. Novel word stimuli serve two main purposes. First, their use ensures that participants cannot have any pre-existing knowledge of them, thus providing tight experimental control over the knowledge that children bring to this task. Second, their use permits tight experimental control over stimulus properties (e.g. number of phonemes, number of letters, predictability of mappings between graphemes and phonemes).

4. On this account, each written word is considered to be an “item” which must be individually acquired.

5. However, there will be some instances in which phonological decoding of an irregular word produces a known pronunciation that is in fact an incorrect reading of the written word. For instance, the written word sweat is phonologically decoded as /swiːt/, which matches the pronunciation of the written word sweet. The words sweat and sweet are potentiophones. In this instance, without the benefit of contextual support, no significant adjustment to the pronunciation is likely.

6. This proposed phenomenon avers that a blended pronunciation such as /k/+/æ/+/t/ is not phonologically identical to uttering the whole word /kæt/ as a single unit. Therefore the blended pronunciation requires some (minimal) form of matching to the known spoken word.

7. The reader is referred to Edwards and colleagues (2021) for an insightful discussion and investigation of the child- and word-level characteristics that influence performance on the mispronunciation correction task.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP200100311].