Evidence for semantic involvement in regular and exception word reading in emergent readers of English

Jessie Ricketts,Robert Davies,Jackie Masterson,Morag Stuart,Fiona J Duff

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.05.013

Abstract

We investigated the relationship between semantic knowledge and word reading. A sample of 27 6-year-old children read words both in isolation and in context. Lexical knowledge was assessed using general and item-specific tasks. General semantic knowledge was measured using standardized tasks in which children defined words and made judgments about the relationships between words. Item-specific knowledge of to-be-read words was assessed using auditory lexical decision (lexical phonology) and definitions (semantic) tasks. Regressions and mixed-effects models indicated a close relationship between semantic knowledge (but not lexical phonology) and both regular and exception word reading. Thus, during the early stages of learning to read, semantic knowledge may support word reading irrespective of regularity. Contextual support particularly benefitted reading of exception words. We found evidence that lexical–semantic knowledge and context make separable contributions to word reading.

Highlights

We present findings on: (i) correlation and regression analyses exploring general relationships between semantic knowledge and word-level reading; and (ii) mixed-effects models that probe effects of regularity and reading task, as well as itemspecific relationships between semantic knowledge and word-level reading
The results support our primary hypothesis that variation in semantic knowledge is associated with variation in word reading performance
We have extended previous findings on reading words in isolation by assessing word reading in context, which is more akin to how children encounter words naturally

Summary

Participants

Children were exposed to 40 words in the context of four tasks, two assessing reading (reading in isolation, reading in context) and two indexing lexical knowledge (auditory lexical decision, definitions). Tasks were completed in the following fixed order: auditory lexical decision; reading in isolation; definitions; and reading in context. Children were asked to read sentence stems and target words aloud. Sentence stems and target words were presented separately to minimise differences between the two reading tasks. Regular and exception words were paired according to difficulty (using the difficulty order from the DTWRP; Forum for Research in Literacy and Language, 2012) so that sentence stems could be matched in pairs for overall printed word frequency (Masterson et al, 2003), and for length in words, letters and syllables (all Fs < 1).

Results

Exception context

Discussion