Sight Vocabulary &Decoding from Context

Define these terms:Automaticity

ProsodyWord Frequency

Context

What is/are the most important idea(s) about Sight Vocabulary and

Decoding from Context that you learned online?

Learning to Read Words

Cattell (1886) – readers can recognize words more readily than they can recognize individual letters (!)

Word superiority effect (“quiz” vs. “q”)

Pseudoword effect (“brane” vs. “ploz”)

Can you recognize these letters?

Write down the letters these symbols represent.

Can you read this text?

You can read words when you can’t read letters!

WHY? HOW?

You can’t turn reading off!This is referred to as the Stroop Effect.

BLUE

RED

GREEN

Focus on the top-most empty box. When the stimulus appears, announce the color that you see.

Six WR Strategies

1.Sight recognition (using visual elements)

2.Decoding (phonological recoding)

3.Analogizing (‘pednesday’)

4.Processing spelling patterns (onset/rime)

5.Guessing using context

6.Using a dictionary

The Stroop Effect occurs with automatized word recognition.And some other WR oddities …

For example, can you read these sentences?

What about these sentences?

Some letter parts are more informative than others.

Ascending lettersprovide more

information.

Using Context: How reliable is context?

When is a cat not a cat?

When it’s an “m.”

When is a blob more than a blob?

Question:When is a blob

more than a blob?

Answer: When its part of a still bigger blob!

Phases of learning to read Words

1. Logographic: use of non-phonemic visual, contextual, or graphic features

2. Alphabetic: use of grapheme-phoneme relationships to connect spelling & pronunciation

3. Orthographic: use of spelling patterns

From Ehri, L. (1994). Development of the ability to read words: Update. In Robert B. Ruddell, Martha Rapp Ruddell, & Harry Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading, 323-358. Newark, DE: IRA.

Logographic Phase

Sight words on flashcards – one has a thumb print. This word is quickly learned. Why?

Logographic word readers focus on salient visual cues.

(They learned the thumb print, not the word.)

Alphabetic Phase

Phonetically regular words (e.g., zip) are learned more quickly than irregular words (e.g., the). Why?

Alphabetic readers use letter-sound relationships. Early phonetic cue readers add guessing to incomplete decoding. Intermediate phonetic cue readers make less use of context. Advanced phonetic cue readers are beginning to realize that groups of letters can be associated with sounds.

Orthographic PhaseWords are often read aloud and learned according to word neighborhoods that acknowledge both patterns and inconsistencies in pronunciations (e.g., made/wade vs. most/cost)

How do you pronounce “shough”? (“show,” “shuff,” “shoff,” “shou”)

Orthographic readers use syllabic and other multi-letter symbol-sound relationships that are sensitive to word families and the relative frequency of pronunciations.

From Ehri, L. (1994). Development of the ability to read words: Update. In Robert B. Ruddell, Martha Rapp Ruddell, & Harry Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading, 323-358. Newark, DE: IRA.