Abstract
The study investigated the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and novel word reading. Fourth-grade students were assessed on standardized measures of word identification, decoding, and receptive vocabulary, as well as on an experimental word identification measure using words that students in the fourth grade are unlikely to have seen before in print. In the experimental measure, pairs of words were matched on printed frequency and orthographic pattern (with a variety of spelling patterns represented), but differed in terms of the frequency of expected oral exposure for children (i.e., higher vs. lower). Results showed that students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge was significantly related to performance on both the standardized and experimental measures of word identification, even after accounting for the substantial amount of variance explained by decoding ability. Students performed better reading the words with higher expected oral frequencies on the experimental task than on those items with lower expected oral frequencies. The results point to the benefits, albeit modest, of oral word familiarity for reading words when they are first encountered in print and suggest that this top-down effect is not limited to exception words, as has been suggested, but has a wider scope.
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Notes
Because the term “word identification” is used in differing ways in the literature, we want to clarify that in this study it pertains to words read aloud correctly, both on the standardized Word Identification task that was administered and on the experimental measure, with no implications regarding retrieval of word meaning.
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Acknowledgments
This study was conducted as part of the first author’s master’s thesis research project. We gratefully acknowledge the help of Drs. Charles Collyer, JoAnn Hammadou, Susan Loftus, Hollis Scarborough, Amy Weiss, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful input regarding the study and the manuscript. In addition, we thank the principal, teachers, and students for their cooperative participation, and Jenlyn Furey and Rachel Jones for their valuable assistance with data collection.
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Mitchell, A.M., Brady, S.A. The effect of vocabulary knowledge on novel word identification. Ann. of Dyslexia 63, 201–216 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-013-0080-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-013-0080-1