Developmental Changes in Reading Strategies

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate developmental changes in strategies used in reading. Pseudo words or non-words are often used in order to determine a subject's knowledge of an underlying rule structure when it is abstracted from its familiar semantic context. The Berko (1958) study on the child's implicit knowledge of morphophonemic rules is a classic example of this approach. Baron [in press) has pointed out that subjects may use a number of different strategies in reading unfamiliar words. One strategy is use of implicit rules at the grapheme-phoneme correspondence level (Venezky, 1974). A second possible strategy is to search for a familiar word by analogy to the known word(s). The analogies could be either in spelling or in pronunciation at either the syllable level as suggested by Smith (1973) or the lexical level as suggested by Carol Chomsky (1970). In post hoc interview studies both children (Glass and Burton, 1973) and adults (Baron, in press) report using analogy strategies in reading new words. According to stage theories of reading [cf Marsh and Desberg, 1973) the strategies should change as a function of developmental level, the young child beginning with a grapheme-phoneme decoding strategy and at some point, switching to direct lexical access perhaps based on the visual spelling pattern. The purpose of present study was to investigate whether or not the strategies used in pronouncing unfamiliar (pseudo) words changed as a function of developmental level.