Testing the revised matching-to-sample protocol with

To start the current research, modifications were made to the training protocol reported by Keaveney (2005) in her PhD dissertation. One possible limitation of the Keaveney (2005) protocol is that over a quarter of the participants who took part in Keaveney’s research found it difficult to pass the symmetry test stages. In an attempt to alleviate this problem, in the amended protocol developed for this research, explicit symmetry training followed by mixed symmetry testing (i.e., testing sound-to-symbol and symbol-to-sound relations) was added to the procedure. Primarily though, these additional components were included in the modified protocol to provide a more

comprehensive training process, with the aim of reinforcing the relations between the sounds and symbols from which the recombined test words were formed. Instilling a thorough knowledge of letter–sound relations has been highlighted as important for word recognition (Foy & Mann, 2006; Roberts, 2003; Share, 1995).

Many studies have investigated generalisation to recombined consonant– vowel–consonant (CVC) words consisting of one syllable (e.g., ‘sun’, ‘pot’). This focus on CVC words mirrors early reading stimuli as beginning readers typically commence with relatively short words before progressing to longer, more complex words (Snow, Scarborough, & Burns, 1999). However, the role of recombinative generalisation in progression to larger words has not to date been empirically demonstrated. To this end, a new recombinative generalisation test was added to the modified protocol to examine generalisation of established sub-word units to novel disyllabic CVCVC words. As far as is known, this was the first study in this area to investigate this issue. If participants can read these untrained CVCVC combinations following MTS training on the sub-word units, this would support a key role for recombinative generalisation in productive reading skills and further extends the potential uses and advantages of the training protocol.

In Chapter 2 the modified MTS protocol developed for the current research is described in detail. As in the Mueller et al. (2000) and Keaveney (2005) protocols, to begin with, participants were trained using onset and rime sub-word units. In later experiments the size of the training unit was varied to include phonemes and syllables. Initially the new MTS protocol was tested with literate adult participants and the results from this study are presented in Chapter 3. Through this research, the aim was to try and develop an ‘optimal’ MTS training protocol. Thus, it was necessary to assess the contribution of each of the individual training components

within the protocol (e.g., symmetry training) to isolate the minimum training stages that needed to be completed by participants for recombinative generalisation to emerge. The findings from this study are reported in Mahon, Lyddy, and Barnes- Holmes (2010) and are discussed in Chapter 4.

When learning to read, letters and sounds do not have fixed functions. A letter or sound that operates as part of a rime in one word (e.g., ‘hat’) may appear as the onset in another word (e.g., ‘tin’). Thus, letters and sounds must be interchangeable within words (see McCandliss, Beck, Sandak, & Perfetti, 2003).

According to Perfetti (1991), during reading development, it is fundamental for children to learn that the constituent letters and phonemes of words can occur in different word positions (i.e., initial, medial, final position within a word). In Chapter 5, a new across-unit recombinative generalisation test was added to the protocol to examine if the participants could recognise recombined words composed from untrained onsets and rimes that were derived from the explicitly taught onsets and rimes. As far as is known, this is the first study in this area to examine across-unit transfer within the context of a MTS training protocol. Across-unit transfer was explored further in a subsequent experiment in which participants were tested with recombined consonant blend words (Chapter 6).

Pivotal when learning to read is discovering the equivalence relations between spoken and printed units (see Rayner et al., 2001; Snow & Juel, 2005). As such, the early stages of the training protocol were designed to teach participants the sound– symbol relations from which the recombined test words were formed. In contrast, the later recombinative generalisation testing stages simulated reading of new words made up of the sounds and symbols, but arranged in different formations.

There is ample research concerned with how grain size (i.e., the size of the orthographic unit) may influence the learning of phoneme–grapheme mappings (see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005, for review). One of the aims of the current research was to determine if the size of the orthographic unit employed during MTS training (e.g., onset and rime, phoneme, syllable) had any effect on the participant’s ability to recognise novel recombined words. Although previous MTS experiments have incorporated whole word or onset and rime training procedures (e.g., Mueller et al., 2000; Keaveney, 2005), to date, no other MTS study has systematically compared recombinative generalisation performance following sound–symbol training at different grain sizes. For the current thesis this study was undertaken and the findings are analysed in Chapter 7.

The final adult research chapter of the thesis (Chapter 8) examines if the MTS protocol can be used to facilitate recognition of regular and exception words; words that conform to, or deviate from, expected letter–sound mappings. Both types of words will be encountered during reading instruction and hence, to increase the ecological validity of the procedures, it was important to determine if the protocol could be suitably employed to enable recognition of the various words that beginning readers may be confronted with.

1.5.2 Supporting word recognition skills in children with learning difficulties