Developmental Changes in Reading Strategies

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate developmental changes in strategies used in reading. Pseudo words or non-words are often used in order to determine a subject's knowledge of an underlying rule structure when it is abstracted from its familiar semantic context. The Berko (1958) study on the child's implicit knowledge of morphophonemic rules is a classic example of this approach. Baron [in press) has pointed out that subjects may use a number of different strategies in reading unfamiliar words. One strategy is use of implicit rules at the grapheme-phoneme correspondence level (Venezky, 1974). A second possible strategy is to search for a familiar word by analogy to the known word(s). The analogies could be either in spelling or in pronunciation at either the syllable level as suggested by Smith (1973) or the lexical level as suggested by Carol Chomsky (1970).In post hoc interview studies both children (Glass and Burton, 1973) and adults (Baron, in press) report using analogy strategies in reading new words. According to stage theories of reading [cf Marsh and Desberg, 1973) the strategies should change as a function of developmental level, the young child beginning with a grapheme-phoneme decoding strategy and at some point, switching to direct lexical access perhaps based on the visual spelling pattern.The purpose of present study was to investigate whether or not the strategies used in pronouncing unfamiliar (pseudo) words changed as a function of developmental level. METHODSubjects: The subjects were forty elementary school students (fifth grade); forty secondary school students (eleventh grade) and forty college students.Procedure: The subjects were asked to pronounce a list of 10 pseudo-words which were constructed so each word would be pronounced differently depending upon the strategy used. For example the pseudo word (tepherd) would be pronounced (tefard) according grapheme phoneme correspondence strategy and as tepard (as in shepherd) by an analogy strategy. The list of the ten words with their alternative pronunciations is shown in Table 1. One half of each group was given the printed list asa free response task. The other of each group was given the list as a multiple choice task where the experimenter pronounced the word both ways and asked the subject to indicate the a Reprints may be requested from Dr. Marsh,

The effect of instruction on early nonword reading strategies

“…Previous research reports an increased use of analogy among older children (e.g. Bowey and Underwood, 1996;Brown and Deavers, 1999;Coltheart and Leahy, 1992;Leslie and Calhoon, 1995;Marsh, Desberg and Cooper, 1977;Marsh, Friedman, Desberg and Saterdahl, 1981). The reasons for these findings may lie with the fact that with a larger vocabulary there are more examples on which to base an analogy and/or that the likelihood of observing the consistency of spelling-to-sound correspondences at the level of the rime is greater the larger one's vocabulary (Treiman, Mullenix, Bijeljac-Babic and Richmond-Welty, 1995).…”

The Role of Reading by Analogy in First Grade Finnish Readers

“…The main sources of concern have dealt with three issues: rstly, at what age and reading level learning based on analogy is used in reading; secondly, to which type of spelling segment a reader successfully applies analogy; thirdly, to what extent the possible bene ts resulting from analogical learning in reading are affected by or based on phonological priming, not merely on the use of orthographic similarities. It has been proposed (Marsh et al, 1977(Marsh et al, , 1980) that readers could best use analogical processes in the late stages of reading development (e.g. from 16 years of age onwards).…”

The Reciprocal Relationship between Research and Development: An Example Involving a Decoding Strand for Poor Readers

“…The staff's knowledge continued to be (Cunningham, 1975-76;Gleitman, 1985;Glushko, 1979;Marsh, Densberg, & Cooper, 1977;Perfetti, 1985). 2.…”