The first experiment examined whether young children who could discriminate individual alphabet letters could also discriminate consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words that differed only in first letter (e.g., rap and tap). Twenty-three pre-reading children, ages 3 years, 7 months to 5 years, 8 months, participated. When presented a matching-to-sample task (MTS) involving individual letters, all but two showed accuracy of at least 88%. When presented with a MTS task involving CVC words differing only in the first letter, however, 11 showed accuracy of less than 80%, with 7 performing at chance levels. That is, some children did not initially focus on the first letter even though subsequent letters were irrelevant to the discrimination. In the second experiment, a subset of the children were trained successfully using a MTS procedure that began with the initial letters presented alone, and gradually increased the size of the final two letters. All children showed generalization to untrained letters. Studies of reading acquisition that assess generalization to novel words should not assume that such abstraction occurs without training.
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