Direct Access and Phonological Encoding Processes in Children's Reading

S ummary . Nine‐year‐old children were presented with reading tasks in which psycholinguistic properties of words were manipulated. Although word imageability affected reading accuracy, grammatical class of words and regularity of spelling‐to‐sound correspondence did not. Regularity had no effects on lexical decision and judgments of phonology. Accuracy in reading aloud and judgments of phonology was substantially lower for non‐words than for words. Only the best readers had well‐developed skills in grapheme‐to‐phoneme sound conversion, and all appeared to rely on direct visual access when reading. A sentence comprehension task devised by Doctor and Coltheart (1980) was used for investigating the role of phonological coding in reading for meaning. Phonological effects were evident since children found it difficult to reject meaningless sentences which sounded correct. It is argued that the phonological effects could arise through post‐lexical phonological coding. The results support models of reading acquisition which suggest that the development of non‐lexical grapheme‐phoneme conversion skills lags behind the development of direct visual access

Cognition · Cognitive psychology · Grapheme · Lexical decision task · Linguistics · Orthography · Phonological awareness · Phonological rule · Phonology · Reading (process) · Sentence · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Second Language Acquisition and Learning · Writing and Handwriting Education