EXPERIMENT 3: Reading irregular words in isolation and in context

Experiment 2 showed that the children were able to use context to enhance their decoding skills. The performance of the Good Readers suggested that they were developing orthographic strategies. The development of orthographic processing requires the expansion of lexical knowledge. Such word specific knowledge is important for satisfactory word reading.

This evidence is compatible with the solution that Adams and Huggins (1985) presented to the conflicting evidence on contextual facilitation. They developed a test requiring the reading of single irregular words first in isolation and then followed by reading the same words placed at the ends of meaningful sentences. The test consisted of a frequency graded list of 50 words with irregular spelling- sound correspondences. The simple method of counting accuracy with and without

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context enabled them to measure the degree to which children at different ages and with different abilities could use context to aid word reading.

Adams and Huggins found that, within individuals, reading performance showed one of three characteristics. Firstly, there were some words that the children could read quickly and accurately - they argued that these words were solidly represented in the children's orthographic lexicon and could be accessed directly. Reading of these words was not enhanced by context. The number of words read in this first category depended on the level of ability of the child. Secondly, there was a group of about 5-10 words that the children would hesitate on and misread. Accuracy of reading within this group of items could be improved by context. Adams and Huggins suggested that words in this group were in a transition stage - they had partial representation which could be enhanced by context. Finally there was a tail of low frequency words that were read incorrectly, generally using spelling-sound correspondences, and the reading of these words could not be improved by context. The length of the tail tended to be inversely related to the number of words read correctly at the beginning of the list. They argued that the ability to read irregular words correctly would depend on their subjective frequency. With the items used in the test it might be argued that, as the subjective frequency of an item is increased, so the item is more likely to be entered as an orthographic unit in the orthographic lexicon. The more children are able to read irregular words with low frequency, the more it can be argued that they are developing an orthographic strategy and becoming advanced readers, free from the need to use alphabetic strategies.

The implication of this study is that both good and poor readers can make differential use of context, depending on the degree of subjective difficulty of the items. Experiment 3 tested the prediction that the Poor Readers in this cohort would have less developed lexical knowledge using the test of irregular word reading developed by Adams and Huggins. It was expected that they would be able

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to take advantage of context and would do so from an earlier point in the test than would the Good Readers.

4.7 METHOD

4.7.1 SUBJECTS

The subjects were the sixteen cohort children. They were of mean age 10 years 8 months (range 10.05 to 11.01) when asked to perform this task.

4.7.2 MATERIALS

The test developed by Adams and Huggins was printed on A4 size paper using Times Roman 12 point print. The 50 single words were presented in two columns and the words in context were printed in double spacing on separate sheets with each sentence beginning on a new line. Table 4.8 presents the first three and the last three sentences from the context list. The words underlined are the target items which were of course not underlined for the children.

The ship sailed across the ocean. Mary burned her finger on the iron. The girls rowed the boat to the island. He strummed a tune on his ukulele. Her jacket and shoes were made of suede. She wrote a letter to her fiance.

Table to show examples of the sentences for reading irregular words in context

Table 4.8

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The test items were all words with irregular spelling-sound correspondences. The words were all of decreasing frequency and arranged from highest frequency at item

1 to lowest frequency at item 50.

4.7.3 PROCEDURE

Each child was tested individually. The children were asked to read the list of test words presented singly. They were then asked to return to their class to carry on with their set class task. The single word reading task lasted approximately one minute. The sixteen children were all tested in a 40 minute period. The children were then asked to return to read the words in sentences. They returned in the same order as they had been originally tested in order to control approximately for the time between single word reading and context reading. Adams and Huggins gave the children twenty minutes between testing. All their children carried out a standard control task in the intervening period. It was considered inappropriate here to take up so much of the children's time through imposing activities when they were engaged in class work. In fact, all the children were engaged in either a language assignment or a mathematics assignment which involved reading during the interval between the first and second parts of the experiment. They were not told when they read the single words that they would have to read the words again in context.

The words read were scored as either right or wrong and a percentage total correct with and without context for each child was computed. The performance was also broken down into percentage correct for each sequence of 10 items to investigate frequency effects. Finally, the percentage improvement with context for each block of five items was computed. These scoring procedures followed those reported by Adams and Huggins.

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