A hallmark of skilled reading is recognizing written words automatically from memory by sight. How beginning readers attain this skill is explained. They must acquire foundational knowledge, including phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme knowledge, decoding, and spelling skills. When these skills are applied, spellings of words become bonded to…

Orthographic mapping (OM) involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory. It explains how children learn to read words by sight, to spell words from memory, and to acquire vocabulary words from print. This development is portrayed by Ehri (2005a) as a sequence of…

First, second, and third graders (N = 102) who had completed from 1 to 3 years of literacy instruction in other schools and had experienced failure entered a private school for struggling readers and received instruction in either of 2 types of systematic phonics programs over a 4-year period. One group received a keyword analogy method (KEY) that…

First and second graders were taught to recognize a set of written words either more accurately or more rapidly. Both before and after word training, they named pictures printed with and without these words as distractors. Of interest was whether training would enhance or diminish the interference created by these words in the picture naming task.…

Distinguishes four phases in the development of sight word reading: prealphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic. Suggests that this system represents the regularities that underlie the written forms of English words that all learners must internalize to build a fully functioning sight vocabulary. (RS)

In a paired associate task, readers and prereaders were taught five words as oral responses, each word paired with a distinctive nonsense figure. The results raise doubts about the effectiveness of teaching beginning readers sight vocabulary words printed on flash cards. (RC)

This study extended the exploration of the development of word identification speed to younger skilled and less skilled readers. It focused on the attainment of unitized speeds to determine when the final phase in reading development (the speed of processing) is reached for familiar words during the early years. (Author/PN)

Takes a closer look at the reading skills of beginning readers who are able to read words by analogy. Finds that reading unfamiliar words by analogy to known words is an easier process and can be executed by beginners more readily than reading unfamiliar words by phonologically recoding the words. (MG)

Superior lexical awareness among readers is attributed to their experience with the printed correlates of spoken language. (Author)

Three experiments were conducted to explore the effect of word training on interference patterns in the picture-word task. Subjects were first and second graders. (MP)

A number of studies exploring how beginning readers acquire knowledge that enables them to spell words fairly accurately and to recognize words correctly and quickly as they are reading are described in this report. (The reported studies were designed to test hypotheses derived from a theory of printed word learning proposed by L. C. Ehri.) In the…

Results of a study in which first graders learned ten unfamiliar function words in two different formats indicated that sentence readers learned more about the syntactic and semantic identities of function words, whereas list readers remembered their orthographic identities better and could pronounce the words faster and more accurately in…

Describes several studies examining how children become skilled at processing graphic cues. Reports that prereaders do not acquire graphic skills by learning to read signs and labels in their environment. Concludes that mastery of letters is required for processing graphic cues. (MM)

The three articles in this publication discuss the following topics: (1) a psycholinguistic perspective on beginning reading that focuses on the child's linguistic system, rather than on the information processing strategies he or she learns to use in reading, and identifies word recognition as the major hurdle faced by the beginner; (2) the issue…

This study reveals that children from the age of four to six years are unable to segment meaningful sentences into component words. The experiment investigated three hypotheses of performance on a word-learning task for beginning readers and prereaders. Readers and prereaders were taught five words as oral responses, each word paired with a…