title: Context effects on orthographic learning of regular and irregular words.
abstract: The self-teaching hypothesis proposes that orthographic learning takes place via phonological decoding in meaningful texts, that is, in context. Context is proposed to be important in learning to read, especially when decoding is only partial. However, little research has directly explored this hypothesis. The current study looked at the effect of context on orthographic learning and examined whether there were different effects for novel words given regular and irregular pronunciations. Two experiments were conducted using regular and irregular novel words, respectively. Second-grade children were asked to learn eight novel words either in stories or in a list of words. The results revealed no significant effect of context for the regular items. However, in an orthographic decision task, there was a facilitatory effect of context on irregular novel word learning. The findings support the view that contextual information is important to orthographic learning, but only when the words to be learned contain irregular spelling-sound correspondences.
authors.affiliation: Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. huachen.wang@mq.edu.au
authors.forename: Hua-Chen
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Castles
authors.forename: Lyndsey
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Nickels
authors.forename: Kate
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nation
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001315:Australia; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014825:Vocabulary