Reading Development and Attention to Letters in Words

Abstract

Four groups of Dutch readers, (a) beginners, second grade elementary school students with 2 years of reading experience, (b) advanced readers, sixth grade elementary school students with 6 years of reading experience, (c) expert readers, university students with 14 years of reading experience, and (d) poor readers, aged 13 years with 2 years of delay in reading skill, were presented with short stories followed by multiple-choice text comprehension questions. Participants were asked to read the stories for meaning and to circle the letter t whenever it occurred in the text. Five types of detection locations were defined: (1) verb suffix, (2) noun final, (3) intra word, second letter, (4) intra word, prefinal letter, and (5) definite article, final t. Differential detection patterns as a function of reading development were obtained. Beginning readers did not differ in detecting the final t in verbs and nouns, whereas expert readers showed a strong attentional bias to verb suffixes as compared with noun endings. Expert readers missed more intra word letters. In all groups prefinal letters were detected better than second letters in words, thus suggesting a general attentional bias for orthographic information in the second part of Dutch words. The t in the definite article was missed most often in all groups, which suggests sensitivity to word frequency at early stages in reading development. Poor readers did not show differential performance patterns as compared to the other reading groups. The overall developmental pattern can be characterized as a shift from attention for single letter information to attention for more complex morphological information in text.