The influence on children of the purpose of experiencing reading vocabulary: encoding-retrieval interactions in word perception

摘要

This research looked at conditions which result in thedevelopment of integrated letter code information in theacquisition of reading vocabulary. Thirty grade threechildren of normal reading ability acquired new readingwords in a Meaning Assigned task and a Letter Comparisontask, and worked to increase skill for known reading wordsin a Copy task. The children were then assessed on theirability to identify the letters in these words. During thetest each stimulus word for each child was exposed for 100msec., after which each child reported as many of his or herletters as he or she could. Familiar words, new words, anda single letter identification task served as within subjectcontrols. Following this, subjects were assessed for wordmeaning recall of the Meaning Assigned words and wordreading times for words in all condi tions • The resul tssupported an episodic model of word recognition in which theoverlap between the processing operations employed inencoding a word and those required when decoding itaffected decoding performance. In particular, the MeaningAssigned and Copy tasks. appeared to facilitate letter codeaccessibility and integration in new and familiar wordsrespectively. Performance in the Letter Comparison task, onthe other hand, suggested that subjects can process theelements of a new word without integrating them into itslexical structure. It was concluded that these resultsfavour an episodic model of word recognition.