Learning to read in most alphabetic orthographies requires not only the acquisition of simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) but also the acquisition of context-sensitive GPCs, where surrounding letters change a grapheme’s pronunciation. We aimed to explore the use and development of simple GPCs (e.g. a ➔ /æ/) and context-sensitive GPCs (e.g. [w]a ➔ /ɔ/, as in “swan” or a[l][d] ➔ /o:/, as in “bald”) in pseudoword reading. Across three experiments, English- and German-speaking children in grades 2–4 read aloud pseudowords, where vowel graphemes had different pronunciations according to different contexts (e.g. “hact”, “wact”, “hald”). First, we found that children use context-sensitive GPCs from grade 2 onwards, even when they are not explicitly taught. Second, we used a mathematical optimisation procedure to assess whether children’s vowel responses can be described by assuming that they rely on a mix of simple and context-sensitive GPCs. While the approach works well for German adults (Schmalz et al. in Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 26, 831–852, 2014), we found poor model fits for both German- and English-speaking children. Additional analyses using an entropy measure and data from a third experiment showed that children’s pseudoword reading responses are variable and likely affected by random noise. We found a decrease in entropy across grade and reading ability across all conditions in both languages. This suggests that GPC knowledge becomes increasingly refined across grades 2–4.

在大多数字母拼写法中学习阅读不仅需要获取简单的音素-音素对应（GPC），还需要获取上下文相关的GPC，其中周围的字母会改变音素的发音。我们旨在探索和开发简单的GPC（例如➔/æ/）和上下文相关的GPC（例如[w] a➔/ɔ/，如“天鹅”或a [l] [d]➔/ o：/，如伪单词读取中的“秃头”所示。在三个实验中，2-4年级的说英语和德语的孩子会朗读假单词，其中元音字素根据不同的上下文（例如“ hact”，“ wact”，“ hald”）具有不同的发音。首先，我们发现，即使没有明确教给孩子，他们也会从2年级开始使用上下文相关的GPC。其次，我们使用数学优化程序来评估是否可以通过假设儿童依赖简单和上下文相关的GPC来描述儿童的元音响应。尽管这种方法对德国成年人有效（Schmalz等人在《认知心理学杂志》上第26页，，831–852，2014），我们发现德语和英语儿童的模型拟合效果较差。使用熵测度和来自第三项实验的数据进行的其他分析表明，儿童的伪单词阅读响应是可变的，并且可能受到随机噪声的影响。我们发现两种语言在所有条件下的年级和阅读能力的熵均降低。这表明GPC知识在2-4年级之间变得越来越完善。