Orthographic facilitation in oral vocabulary acquisition

摘要

An experiment investigated whether exposure to orthography facilitates oral vocabulary learning.A total of 58 typically developing children aged 8-9 years were taught 12 nonwords. Childrenwere trained to associate novel phonological forms with pictures of novel objects. Pictures wereused as referents to represent novel word meanings. For half of the nonwords children were addition-ally exposed to orthography, although they were not alerted to its presence, nor were they instructed touse it. After this training phase a nonword–picture matching posttest was used to assess learning ofnonword meaning, and a spelling posttest was used to assess learning of nonword orthography.Children showed robust learning for novel spelling patterns after incidental exposure to orthography.Furttier, we observed stronger learning for nonword–referent pairings trained with orthography. Thedegree of orthographic facilitation observed in posttests was related to children's reading levels, withmore advanced readers showing more benefit from the presence of orthography.