Abstract
Children learn new words via their everyday reading experience but little is known about how this learning happens. We addressed this by focusing on the conditions needed for new words to become familiar to children, drawing a distinction between lexical configuration (the acquisition of word knowledge) and lexical engagement (the emergence of interactive processes between newly learned words and existing words). In Experiment 1, 9–11-year-olds saw unfamiliar words in one of two storybook conditions, differing in degree of focus on the new words but matched for frequency of exposure. Children showed good learning of the novel words in terms of both configuration (form and meaning) and engagement (lexical competition). A frequency manipulation under incidental learning conditions in Experiment 2 revealed different time-courses of learning: a fast lexical configuration process, indexed by explicit knowledge, and a slower lexicalization process, indexed by lexical competition.
Highlights
Skilled reading is underpinned by a word recognition system that is fast, efficient and effective
How do children develop such a system and what factors influence children’s transition from novice to expert? These questions have been identified under the rubric of orthographic learning – the term used to describe the processes required for a reading system to move from one that is heavily reliant on alphabetic decoding to one that resembles skilled word recognition – but relatively little is known about how orthographic learning happens (Nation & Castles, in press)
We take a novel approach to understanding orthographic learning, focusing on the conditions needed for new words to move from unfamiliar to familiar
Summary
Skilled reading is underpinned by a word recognition system that is fast, efficient and effective. These questions have been identified under the rubric of orthographic learning – the term used to describe the processes required for a reading system to move from one that is heavily reliant on alphabetic decoding to one that resembles skilled word recognition – but relatively little is known about how orthographic learning happens (Nation & Castles, in press). We take a novel approach to understanding orthographic learning, focusing on the conditions needed for new words to move from unfamiliar to familiar. The self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995, 2008) describes how exposure to a new word offers an opportunity to commit its spelling to memory so that on subsequent encounters, it is recognized more efficiently. Phonological decoding is key as new words are learned via children’s own decoding attempts. While plenty of evidence supports this notion, correlations between phonological decoding and orthographic
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