Although there is evidence for a close link between the development of oral vocabulary and reading comprehension, less clear is whether oral vocabulary skills relate to the development of word-level reading skills. This study investigated vocabulary and literacy in 81 children of 8-10 years. In regression analyses, vocabulary accounted for unique variance in exception word reading and reading comprehension, but not text reading accuracy, decoding and regular word reading. Consistent with these data, children with poor reading comprehension exhibited oral vocabulary weaknesses and read fewer exception words correctly. These findings demonstrate that oral vocabulary is associated with some, but not all reading skills. Results are discussed in terms of current models of reading development.Vocabulary is important for 3

Reading comprehension is an area of difficulty for many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). According to the Simple View of Reading, word recognition and oral language are both important determinants of reading comprehension ability. We provide a novel test of this model in 100 adolescents with ASD of varying intellectual ability. Further, we explore whether reading comprehension is additionally influenced by individual differences in social behaviour and social cognition in ASD. Adolescents with ASD aged 14-16 years completed assessments indexing word recognition, oral language, reading comprehension, social behaviour and social cognition. Regression analyses show that both word recognition and oral language explain unique variance in reading comprehension. Further, measures of social behaviour and social cognition predict reading comprehension after controlling for the variance explained by word recognition and oral language. This indicates that word recognition, oral language and social impairments may constrain reading comprehension in ASD.

An experiment investigated whether exposure to orthography facilitates oral vocabulary learning. Fifty-eight typically developing children aged 8-9 years were taught 12 nonwords. Children were trained to associate novel phonological forms with pictures of novel objects. Pictures were used as referents to represent novel word meanings. For half of the nonwords children were additionally exposed to orthography, although they were not alerted to its presence, nor were they instructed to use it. After this training phase a nonword-picture matching post-test was used to assess learning of nonword meaning and a spelling post-test was used to assess learning of nonword orthography.Children showed robust learning for novel spelling patterns after incidental exposure to orthography.Further, we observed stronger learning for nonword-referent pairings trained with orthography. The degree of orthographic facilitation observed in post-tests was related to children's reading levels, with more advanced readers showing more benefit from the presence of orthography.Keywords: reading, orthography, vocabulary, acquisition, learning, development Orthographic facilitation 3 ORTHOGRAPHIC FACILITATION IN ORAL VOCABULARY ACQUISITIONLearning new vocabulary is a life-long endeavour. Children learn an impressive number of words in the first few years of life, and clearly we continue to learn new words throughout adulthood.Once children start school and begin to read, they must learn not only oral vocabulary, but also sight vocabulary. Also, as reading development progresses, vocabulary acquisition can occur via exposure to new words in written as well as oral contexts. In this study we sought to investigate whether presenting children with spellings while they are learning the meanings of new words facilitates oral vocabulary acquisition. Influential approaches to vocabulary instruction do not emphasise the use of spelling patterns while teaching children new words. For example, in a recent book Beck, McKeown and Kucan (2002) recommend that spellings are shown to children but only after words and their meanings have been taught.Learning new oral vocabulary involves making links between a word's pronunciation (phonology) and its meaning (semantics). For example a child must learn that a dog is an animal that barks, has fur and so on. Learning sight vocabulary involves making additional links between these representations and a word's spelling or orthography i.e., the word 'dog' is spelled d-o-g. When we learn sight vocabulary we may map orthography onto a known word (children are likely to know the word dog when they come to the task of learning to read), sometimes however the word is unfamiliar and we construct a representation linking phonology, semantics and orthography more simultaneously.In the Lexical Quality Hypothesis, Perfetti and Hart (2002) specify that to learn a new sight word a child or adult must acquire and integrate information about word orthography, phonology and semantics. The main tenet of the Lexical Quali...

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