Tracking the acquisition of orthographic skills in developing readers: masked priming effects.

Full Abstract

A masked priming procedure was used to explore developmental changes in the tuning of lexical word recognition processes. Lexical tuning was assessed by examining the degree of masked form priming and used two different types of prime-target lexical similarity:
one letter different (e.g., rlay-->PLAY) and transposed letters (e.g., lpay-->PLAY). The performance of skilled adult readers was compared with that of developing readers in Grade 3. The same children were then tested again two years later, when they were in Grade 5. The skilled adult readers showed no form priming, indicating that their recognition mechanisms for these items had become finely tuned. In contrast, the Grade 3 readers showed substantial form priming effects for both measures of lexical similarity. When retested in Grade 5, the developing readers no longer showed significant one letter different priming, but transposed letter priming remained. In general, these results provide evidence for a transition from more broadly tuned to more finely tuned lexical recognition mechanisms and are interpreted in the context of models of word recognition.

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Author information

Author/s: Castles, Anne (A); Davis, Chris (C); Cavalot, Pauline (P); Forster, Kenneth (K);

Affiliation: Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. acastles(-atsign-)maccs.mq.edu.au

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: Journal of experimental child psychology (J Exp Child Psychol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2007-Jul; vol 97 (issue 3) : pp 165-82

Dates: Created 2007/06/11; Completed 2007/08/27;

PMID: 17408686, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adolescent
Cognition
Humans
Learning

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