Routes to Reading and Spelling: Testing the Predictions of Dual-Route Theory

Abstract

Dual-route theory, which emphasizes the importance of lexical and nonlexical routes, makes specific predictions about the kinds of strategies that young students might adopt when attempting to correctly read and spell regular and irregular words. The current study tests these predictions by assessing strategy choice on regular, irregular, and nonword items among a group of 55 English-speaking students ages 8-10 years. Performance measures and verbal self-reports were used to classify strategy choice in reading and spelling. The results confirmed that students were able to draw from a wide repertoire of coexisting strategies to support their reading and spelling activities. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that pure lexical retrieval could best predict reading and spelling accuracy scores on irregular words, whereas both lexical and nonlexical strategies could, to varying degrees, predict scores on the regular items. Unexpectedly, none of the reported reading or spelling strategies could accurately predict students' scores on the nonword items after controlling for age. The theoretical implications for the application of dual-route theory to early reading and spelling, especially in relation to nonword performance, are discussed and outlined.

Young Children's spelling representations and spelling strategies

“…The production task prompted children to rely on just one particular spelling production strategy which was based on the correct or incorrect use of onset/rime (equivalent to analogy). The use of this specific and unconventional production task is an important limitation because it remains unclear whether these reported implicit and explicit levels of representations are in fact associated with other phonological or rule-based production strategies found in past studies (Farrington-Flint, 2015;Farrington-Flint, Stash & Stiller, 2008;Sheriston, Critten & Jones, 2016). Therefore, the relationship between spelling recognition and spelling production, in terms of the extent to which implicit/explicit representations might guide or constrain spelling production, requires further investigation in the present study.…”

“…This study will examine mechanisms of children's spelling in relation to both the RR and OW models of cognitive development for the first time as while there is growing evidence to support the application of both approaches in this domain, the relationship between children's spelling representations and production strategies remains unclear primarily because past studies have tended to consider spelling representations (Critten et al, 2007; and spelling procedures (Sheriston et al, 2016;Farrington-Flint, 2015;Farrington-Flint et al, 2008;Rittle-Johnson & Siegler, 1999) in isolation. Although Critten et al (2013) did provide an attempt to explore possible relations between spelling knowledge and procedures, they used an unconventional production task which failed to explore production strategies other than analogy.…”

The Role of Imaginative Fairy Tales in Reading Literacy

“…Whereas the collaborative conceptual conversation between the teacher and the students during the reading of the storybook influences the future success of students in interpreting the content of the reading. While there were still students who did not like reading due to the less interesting reading material (Chandra et al, 2018(Chandra et al, , 2020Sheriston, 2016;Taufina & Chandra, 2017).…”

Attention Components and Spelling Accuracy: Which Connections Matter?

“…The literature has recognised that they depend on the same knowledge of the alphabetical system and of the spellings of specific words, but dissociations have also been observed [ 38 ]. The dual-route cascaded model, initially proposed to describe acquired dysgraphia in adults [ 39 ] and to systematise adult cognitive mechanisms for single-word reading [ 40 , 41 ], has been successfully applied to explain how spelling can be achieved by two main different processes or routes: “ sub-lexical ” and “ lexical ” [ 42 ]. According to our knowledge, several authors have described spelling as following dual-route models [ 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ].…”