Context effects on orthographic learning of regular and irregular words

The effects of inter-letter spacing in visual-word recognition: Evidence with young normal readers and developmental dyslexics

“…Indeed, it would be rather surprising if the default settings (not based on empirical data) were optimal. The vast majority of experiments with developing readers has focused on the impact of sublexical/lexical factors in visual-word recognition and reading (e.g., length, neighbourhood size, orthographic consistency, regularity, word-frequency age-ofacquisition, etc; see Defior, Jimenez-Fernandez, & Serrano, 2009;Manolitsis, Georgiou, & Parrila, 2011;Manolitsis, Georgiou, Stephenson, & Parrila, 2009;Verhoeven, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2006;Wang, Castles, Nickels, & Nation, 2011), whereas e as occurs with adult skilled readers e much less attention has been paid to the influence of perceptual factors such as font, letter size, or inter-letter spacing (see Tinker, 1963, for early research on typographical factors during reading; see also Sanocki & Dyson, 2012, for a recent review). The present study represents a modest effort to shed some light on role of a potentially important parameter such as inter-letter spacing during visual-word recognition and reading with developing readers.…”

Orthographic learning in developmental surface and phonological dyslexia

“…Half of the target items were taken directly from Byrne et al (2008) and Wang et al (2011), and the second half were created by changing the consonants of the items in the first half of the items (e.g., we created faip from laif). In this way, the items across the two sets were similar in level of difficulty, and the items in the two conditions were matched for bigram frequency.…”

“…The novel words were presented either in short stories or in lists. This was designed to explore the effect of context on orthographic learning as previous studies have found that the degree to which context affects learning may be related to individual differences in phonological decoding ability (Landi, Perfetti, Bolger, Dunlap, & Foorman, 2006) or the "decodability" (regularity) of the words to be learned (Wang, Castles, Nickels, & Nation, 2011). Therefore, it is possible that children with phonological decoding deficits rely more on contextual information.…”

“…The main differences between Byrne's orthographic learning task and Share's (1999) original self-teaching paradigm was that the first sentence in the story explicitly highlights to the child what the novel word is ("The new word is ____"). To explore the effect of context with the two dyslexia cases, the novel words were presented either in word lists (no context condition; based on Wang et al, 2011) or in stories (context condition).…”

5th Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI 2016)

“…The second very important strand of thought in the literature relates to the regularity in learning material that are required to support optimal learning [37,38,2,39]. This includes training or drill as an important component [40,41].…”