While reading is among the most important and well-researched topics of developmental psychology, sublexical regularities and how these regularities relate to reading skills have attracted less interest so far. This study tested general orthographic knowledge (GOK) using an indirect reaction time (RT)-based task, in which participants had to detect letters appearing within frequent and infrequent letter clusters. The aim of the method was to minimise the roles of phonological activation and metalinguistic decision. Three different age-groups of German-speaking individuals were tested: first graders (N = 60), third graders (N = 68), and adults (N = 44). Orthographic regularity affected RTs in all three groups, with significantly lower RTs for frequent than for infrequent clusters. The indirect measure of GOK did not show an association with reading measures in first graders and adults, but in the case of third graders it explained variance over and above age and phonological skills. This study provides evidence for phonology-independent GOK, at least in third graders.

虽然阅读是发展心理学中最重要和研究最充分的主题之一，但亚词汇规律以及这些规律与阅读技巧的关系到目前为止还没有引起多少兴趣。本研究使用基于间接反应时间 (RT) 的任务测试一般拼写知识 (GOK)，参与者必须检测出现在频繁和不频繁字母簇中的字母。该方法的目的是尽量减少语音激活和元语言决策的作用。测试了三个不同年龄组的德语个体：一年级学生 ( N  = 60)、三年级学生 ( N  = 68) 和成人 ( N = 44）。正字法规律影响了所有三组的 RT，频繁集群的 RT 显着低于不频繁集群。GOK 的间接测量没有显示与一年级学生和成人的阅读测量相关，但在三年级学生的情况下，它解释了超过年龄和语音技能的差异。这项研究为不依赖音系的 GOK 提供了证据，至少在三年级学生中是这样。