Abstract
A lexical decision task was administered to adults and children in order to study the separate effects of letter frequency, letter sound, and word familiarity variables. Subjects were asked to decide if a four-letter string was a real or a nonsense word. Latency and error measures were obtained. An analysis of the real words indicated that adults and children are alike in being affected by (a) word familiarity, and (b) an interaction between initial consonant frequency and word familiarity. Children were also affected by (c) final consonant frequency, and (d) an interaction between vowel regularity and word familiarity. The results indicated that skilled readers can recognize four-letter words without extensive orthographic analysis. Unskilled readers may use the same process but revert to a phonological encoding when a word is both unfamiliar and contains an irregular vowel.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.