Abstract
Reading acquisition involves learning to associate visual symbols with spoken language. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that instruction on the relationship between spellings and sounds may be particularly important.However, it is unclear whether the effectiveness of this form of instruction depends on pre-existing oral language knowledge.To investigate this issue, we developed a series of computational models of reading incorporating orthographic, phonological and semantic processing to simulate bothartificialand natural orthographic learning conditions in adults and children. We exposed the models to instruction focused on spelling-sound or spelling-meaning relationships, and tested the influence of the models’ oral language proficiency on the effectiveness of these training regimes. Overall, the simulations indicated thatoral language proficiency is a vital foundation for reading acquisition, and may modulate the effectiveness of reading instruction. These results provide a computational basis for the Simple View of Reading,and emphasise the importance of both oral language knowledge and spelling-sound instructionin the initial stages of learning to read.
Highlights
Reading acquisition requires learning to map written forms onto representations of sound and meaning
Recent work has contrasted the effectiveness of sound-focused and meaning-focused training in a laboratory model of reading acquisition (Taylor, Davis, & Rastle, 2017). These authors trained literate adult participants to read two sets of 24 novel words which were written in two different unfamiliar alphabetic orthographies and compared reading acquisition when training was biased toward orthography-to-semantic (OS) mappings versus orthography-tophonology (OP) mappings
Simulation 2: Learning to read a second orthography In Simulation 1, we demonstrated that the effectiveness of orthography to phonology (OP) focused training for developing written word comprehension depended on preliterate oral language skills
Summary
Reading acquisition requires learning to map written forms (orthography) onto representations of sound (phonology) and meaning (semantics). There has been a vigorous debate over whether initial reading instruction should focus on the relations between print and sound, or on the relationship between print and meaning (Suggate, 2016; Torgerson, Brooks, Gascoine, & Higgins, 2019) The former is typically characterised by phonics-style training, in which children are exposed intensively to the relationship between the sounds of the language (phonemes) and the letters or letter clusters that represent them (graphemes). Recent work has contrasted the effectiveness of sound-focused and meaning-focused training in a laboratory model of reading acquisition (Taylor, Davis, & Rastle, 2017) These authors trained literate adult participants to read two sets of 24 novel words which were written in two different unfamiliar alphabetic orthographies (in each orthography, one character related to one phoneme) and compared reading acquisition when training was biased toward orthography-to-semantic (OS) mappings versus orthography-tophonology (OP) mappings. OS focused training resulted in faster but not more accurate written word comprehension, and showed no transferable benefit for the reading aloud task
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