Kemény, F.
Institute of Psychology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria
Although skilled reading is primarily driven by whole word recognition, typical letter patterns are also identified and learned throughout reading development. The current experiments tested how primary school children vary in the extent of learning sublexical regularities, and how General Orthographic Knowledge (GOK) predicts reading performance.
In Experiment 1, children saw pairs of bigrams (two consonants), and had to choose the more frequent cluster. While both 1st and 3rd graders performed above chance and their GOK performance correlated with reading, GOK did not explain any variance in reading over and above phonological abilities. Results not being in line with previous studies, we further investigated the issue with the introduction of awareness.
In Experiment 2, children also faced a task measuring conscious control over GOK. In the first part, children had to choose the most frequent cluster from four possibilities (automatic and controlled processes aligned), and in the second part the least frequent one (automatic and controlled processes contradicting). Choice differences characterize conscious control, which in fact had a unique contribution to reading skills. The current study highlights, that not the knowledge, but the flexible use of statistical orthographic representations supports reading skills.