Silent word-reading fluency is strongly associated with orthotactic sensitivity among elementary school children
Introduction
During recent years, reading acquisition and disability research have focused on the auditory (i.e., phonological) components of reading, including distinguishing language sounds (i.e., phonemic awareness) and deciphering the sounds represented by written words (i.e., decoding) (see Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012, for a review). Skilled decoding of written words is essential to reading accuracy, and indeed deficits in reading, such as those characterized by dyslexia and related writing deficits, represent a failure to map the written word to spoken language (Lyon, Shaywitz, & Shaywitz, 2003).
However, for written languages with deep orthographies, such as English, efficient decoding is hindered by a plethora of grapheme–phoneme mapping variants—many and penny and the past and present forms of read, for example. In such languages, fluent reading depends not only on accurate decoding but also on rapid visual recognition of both typically and atypically spelled words (e.g., Kwok, Cuetos, Avdyli, & Ellis, 2017). Memory for the visual appearance of words is facilitated by familiarity with recurring letter patterns (i.e., orthotactics1) and how they can be consolidated into words (Ehri, 2005). Failure to automatically recognize the correct appearance of letters in their typical part-word (i.e., sublexical) configurations slows reading, and the extra effort required siphons off cognitive resources put to better use in reading comprehension (Little et al., 2017). Automatically recognizing the many common spelling conventions can provide a shortcut when speed is a priority.
The most common mode of reading in daily life for the rapid apprehension of information is silent reading (see Share, 2008). Therefore, it is of substantial practical importance for educators to understand the subskills that underlie this critical ability. Thus, orthotactic sensitivity, which potentially facilitates rapid word recognition, merits close scrutiny. To the current authors’ knowledge, however, there has been no research on the relation of sublexical orthotactic sensitivity to silent reading fluency. The current study examined the association of orthotactic sensitivity to fluency in silent word reading as well as in the related skill of lexical spelling recognition. It also examined the development of orthotactic sensitivity across elementary school age in a cross-sectional sample of young children, including those who learn to read easily and those whose reading development is significantly impaired.
As early as preschool children’s spelling efforts reveal a growing sense of what words look like (Treiman, Kessler, Boland, Clocksin, & Chen, 2018), and by kindergarten children begin to intuit the way in which letters tend to cluster in words. Some kindergartners even demonstrate a sense of which consonants are frequently doubled and where those doublets are likely to be found in real words (Gingras & Sénéchal, 2019) and invented pseudowords (Cassar and Treiman, 1997, Pacton et al., 2001, Wright and Ehri, 2007). First graders can often judge when a letter string is a real word even though they cannot yet name or spell it (Berninger, 1988); moreover, their spelling errors reveal a budding idea about morphemes, the parts of words that carry meaning (Treiman & Cassar, 1996; see also Deacon and Bryant, 2005, Kemp and Bryant, 2003). Among English–French biliterate second and third graders, sublexical spelling conventions even allow them to distinguish between pseudowords that “look English” (e.g., jight) and those that “look French” (e.g., jouille) (Jared, Cormier, Levy, & Wade-Woolley, 2013; see also Deacon, Commissaire, Chen, & Pasquarella, 2013). These striking demonstrations of sensitivity to mostly untaught orthotactic conventions suggest that children’s orthotactic knowledge is largely implicit and, for the youngest children, independent of decoding skills they have not yet acquired.
One model for how preliterate children develop orthotactic sensitivity, as articulated by Mano (2016), posits that by simply attending to text, without necessarily reading it, young children become familiar with redundant orthotactic patterns through implicit statistical learning (see Sawi & Rueckl, 2019, for a review). Statistical learning is, most broadly, the ability to extract regularities in the environment. It has neural correlates (Finn, Kharitonova, Holtby, & Sheridan, 2019) and applies across perceptual modalities. Moreover, it operates outside awareness and intent and therefore is implicit rather than explicit. It is functional from birth and plays a key role in early speech and language acquisition as well as later literacy skills, including spelling (Kessler, 2009, Samara et al., 2019; see Aslin, 2017, for a review). In the laboratory, literate adults have been quickly sensitized to the positional bigram frequencies in an ancient script by mere exposure (Chetail, 2017). Similarly, Henbest and Apel (2018) found that kindergartners could recognize the spelling of novel words to which they had been exposed only four times during a storybook exercise, when the words were presented in big, bold, colored font and stressed in the examiner’s oral reading, even without specific mention of spelling.
Much of the previous research on orthotactic sensitivity, however, has focused on a narrow range of orthotactic conventions, children from limited age ranges, or tasks that include both phonotactic features (i.e., word–sound patterns) and orthotactic features. One goal of the current study was to expand the scope of prior investigations by examining sublexical orthotactic sensitivity across a wider range of orthotactic conventions in a large, cross-sectional sample of children ranging from kindergarten to Grade 5. The study employed a word-likeness test in which all the pseudowords were pronounceable, thereby reducing the likelihood of a confound that participants would rely on pronounceability rather than orthotactic familiarity to judge word-likeness.
Orthotactic sensitivity is linked to reading. It has been linked to reading accuracy (e.g., Conrad et al., 2013, Coyne et al., 2012) as well as oral reading fluency (O’Brien, 2014). Furthermore, evidence suggests that reading facilitates the development of orthotactic sensitivity (Deacon et al., 2012, Leslie and Shannon, 1981). During formal reading instruction, children’s attention is drawn to words frequently and intensively, which increases orthotactic sensitivity (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1993). Other factors facilitating increased orthotactic sensitivity include the personal salience of the text read as well as an emerging ability to learn from explicit tasks (Raviv & Arnon, 2018) such as reading and spelling instruction. Moreover, although decoding is not necessary for orthotactic pattern acquisition, exposure to the alignment between phonotactic and orthotactic word structures (at least where it exists in English) facilitates the learning of both (Romberg & Saffran, 2010). Thus, reading intensifies opportunities for orthotactic statistical learning.
The question of whether orthotactic sensitivity facilitates reading acquisition has received less attention. Some longitudinal data for Grades 1 to 3 suggest that sublexical orthotactic sensitivity does not predict reading accuracy (Deacon et al., 2012). One other longitudinal investigation of the same question included lexical spelling recognition along with orthotactic sensitivity in the independent measure, confounding interpretation for the current purposes (Cunningham, Perry, & Stanovich, 2001).
Crucially, however, these studies operationalize reading as oral reading. By contrast, much less is known about the relation of orthotactic sensitivity to the acquisition of silent reading, the most common form of reading in daily life. There is some evidence that oral reading and silent reading depend on certain underlying skills to different degrees and on different developmental trajectories. For example, rapid automatic naming accounts for substantially less variance in silent reading than in oral reading, where it plays a major role (Georgiou & Parrila, 2020). Moreover, the role of phoneme–grapheme mapping diminishes more rapidly during development in silent reading than in oral reading and is replaced by visual orthographic recognition strategies (Waters, Seidenberg, & Bruck, 1984). In fact, silent reading fluency is linked to the ability to recognize the correct spelling of whole words (Barker, Torgesen, & Wagner, 1992), suggesting that familiarity with the appearance and orthographic structure of words may indeed be an important factor in silent reading. Research with children (Corcos & Willows, 1993) and adults (Cleary, Morris, & Langley, 2007) suggests that sensitivity to orthotactic regularities might facilitate reading efficiency by visually bonding individual letters into clusters, thereby reducing the number of discrete units to be read and recalled and easing young readers through the transition from letter-by-letter reading to lexical reading. Faster word identification in turn facilitates more efficient reading (Booth, Perfetti, & MacWhinney, 1999), freeing up more cognitive resources for comprehension (Little et al., 2017).
The Corcos and Willows, 1993, Cleary et al., 2007 studies focused on oral reading but theoretically should apply to silent reading as well—or perhaps even more so. The current study aimed to test the hypothesis that differences in sublexical orthotactic sensitivity predict individual differences in children’s silent reading fluency. Unlike the Barker et al. (1992) study of silent reading, however, the current investigation emphasized children’s ability to read single words, rather than connected text, in order to reduce the potential confound of reading comprehension and to make the task more accessible to the youngest readers.
Orthotactic sensitivity is also linked to spelling. Among elementary school-age children in Grade 2 and higher, sublexical orthotactic familiarity plays as much of a role as phoneme–grapheme mapping in lexical (whole-word)-level orthographic (spelling) recognition and production (Hayes et al., 2006, Treiman, 1993). Children’s spelling difficulties vary not only with words’ phoneme–grapheme mapping regularities but also with the positional distributional properties of their sublexical letter clusters (n-grams) for weak and strong spellers alike (Waters, Bruck, & Malus-Abramowitz, 1988; see also Pacton, Borchardt, Treiman, Lété, & Fayol, 2014, for the impact of orthotactic sensitivity on adults’ novel word learning). For instance, the trigram -tch, as in patch and watch, appears more frequently at the end of a word than -cht, as in yacht, a more difficult word to remember how to spell (Masterson, Stuart, Dixon, & Lovejoy, 2003). Moreover, given the link between lexical spelling recognition and silent reading fluency (Barker et al., 1992), the current study also attempted to replicate previous findings that orthotactic sensitivity is linked to one measure of orthographic knowledge, namely lexical spelling recognition.
Despite the enormous body of research on dyslexia, the literature on orthotactic sensitivity in dyslexia is relatively sparse. Siegel, Share, and Geva (1995) tested a large group of children and adults with dyslexia using a word-likeness test that pitted high-frequency versus low-frequency initial and final consonant clusters against each other (e.g., cnif–crif, nitl–nilt). Surprisingly, participants with dyslexia scored significantly higher than reading-level-matched controls without dyslexia, leading the researchers to speculate that those with dyslexia may be more attuned to orthotactic characteristics because they are less able to rely on phonological strategies in reading. Cassar, Treiman, Moats, Pollo, and Kessler (2005) replicated the study with a wider age range of children with dyslexia (7–15 years) and a reading-level and spelling-level control group of children in Grade 1 using an expanded word-likeness test. In addition to testing sensitivity to the frequency of initial and final consonant clusters (e.g., dret–gvet, pilt–pibk), the study also looked at vowel doublet identity (heek–haak) as well as consonant doublet identity (gatt–gaww) and position (pess–ppes). In contrast to Siegel et al. (1995), the study found no difference in word-likeness judgment between children with dyslexia and the younger controls. One methodological challenge in these two studies, however, is that some (in the first study) or all (in the second study) of the orthotactically less frequent initial and final consonant clusters were also unpronounceable (e.g., cnif, gvet, nitl, pibk), confounding orthotactic and phonotactic frequency detection. Finally, one study assessed morphotactic sensitivity (configurations of morphemes within words) in 9- to 14-year-old children with dyslexia. The participants were asked to spell one-morpheme and two-morpheme words with phonologically identical endings (e.g., shared–beard, feast–faced) heard in isolation and in a sentence. Their skills were comparable to those of 6- to 8-year-old spelling-matched controls. As in the current study, item choices involved morphemic affixes with a conventional letter configuration (-ed) (Bourassa, Treiman, & Kessler, 2006).
The current study aimed to contribute to this evidence base by comparing both orthotactic sensitivity and silent word-reading fluency in children with serious reading difficulties versus same-age children with typical reading development. (In the current study, seriously impaired decoding fluency served as a proxy for dyslexia.) A third group, consisting of younger children matched on oral sight-word reading fluency to the group with dysfluent decoding, was included in the orthotactic sensitivity comparison to replicate the previous studies’ methods.
This study proposed to test the following hypotheses:
- 1.
Orthotactic sensitivity is evident in preliterate children and improves early in formal reading instruction. This hypothesis was tested with a large sample of children in kindergarten through Grade 5 (N = 271) using an adapted and modified word-likeness task with a broad range of orthotactic conventions common to children’s literature, clear-cut orthotactic frequency differences, and reduced phonotactic confounds compared with word-likeness tasks used in previous research.
- 2.
Orthotactic sensitivity predicts fluency in silent word reading. This was the study’s central hypothesis. Silent word-reading fluency was tested with a speeded word-search task accessible to young readers.
- 3.
Orthotactic sensitivity is associated with orthographic knowledge. Orthographic knowledge (spelling) was tested with an orthographic choice recognition test pitting a real word against two pseudohomophones.
- 4.
Children with dyslexia, as defined here by serious decoding deficits, are less sensitive to sublexical orthotactic patterns in written words compared with children their age with typical reading development and are comparable to the level of orthotactic sensitivity in younger children with equal oral sight-word-reading fluency.
Participants were 271 children (136 boys) ranging in age from 5.76 to 11.72 years (M = 8.65 years, SD = 1.51). Most participants were Caucasian (n = 218, 80.4%), whereas the rest were African American (n = 30, 11.1%), Asian (n = 11, 4.1%), biracial (n = 7, 2.6%), or Hispanic (n = 4, 1.5%); the racial information for 1 participant was not reported. Most participants came from middle-class to upper-middle-class, well-educated families. More than 80% of participants’ mothers completed at least a 4-year college degree (n = 228, 84.1%), whereas the remaining mothers completed high school (n = 35, 12.9%) or their educational data were missing (n = 8, 3.0%). English was the first language of all participants, and all had normal or corrected-to-normal vision by parent report. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated no differences across grades on gender, estimated intelligence, or mother’s education. Race varied across grades from approximately 71% Caucasian among second graders to 100% Caucasian among kindergartners.
The 271 participants attended kindergarten (n = 23), Grade 1 (n = 52), Grade 2 (n = 55), Grade 3 (n = 44), Grade 4 (n = 50), and Grade 5 (n = 47). Overall, an effort was made to include children from the widest possible range of reading ability across each grade level. Participants were recruited from two religious and four secular private schools unselected for learning ability (n = 111), a secular private school dedicated to children with dyslexia or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (n = 71), a religiously affiliated afterschool program (n = 47), and a municipal summer day camp (n = 42), all in the suburbs of a large city in the midwestern United States. For the purposes of the study, summer day camp participants were assigned to the grade just completed.
An additional 10 children received parental permission to participate. Of those, 1 elected not to participate, 1 dropped out during testing, and 1 was absent on testing day. The data from the remaining 7 children were excluded from all analyses because of excessive hyperactivity (n = 2), inability to perform the practice items on the test of interest (n = 1), estimated intelligence below 80 (n = 2), or failure to follow instructions (n = 2).
The study was approved by the university institutional review board. Only children who had written parental permission and gave their assent were included. Children were offered novelty items or an ice cream coupon in exchange for participation.
Orthotactic sensitivity was evaluated with the Orthotactic Sensitivity Test (OST), a researcher-designed, paper-and-pencil word-likeness instrument based on similar tests by Treiman, 1993, Siegel et al., 1995, from which 8 items were borrowed directly and several others were used in modified form (see Fig. A1 in Appendix A). The test consists of 30 pairs of pronounceable pseudowords of four to seven letters each in addition to six practice pairs. The target in each pair consists of high-frequency positional bigrams at the beginning, middle, and end, whereas in each foil there is one unique positional n-gram with frequency equal to zero in English text for children aged 5–9 years (Masterson et al., 2003). In total, 24 pairs consist of one-syllable pseudowords and the remaining 6 pairs contain two-syllable pseudowords that include a common morphemic affix (-y, -er, -ed, -ing, or im-) or a zero-frequency variant. Morphemic affixes were included because they have high-frequency spelling conventions just as root words do. The task was to circle as quickly as possible the pseudoword in each pair that “looks more like a word might look.” To give participants room to trust their implicit knowledge, no corrective feedback was given on the practice items or test. The number of correct responses, response time in seconds to complete the entire task, and errors were recorded. In addition, it was determined whether that score could have been obtained by chance to distinguish an orthotactic strategy from a guessing strategy. Finally, the 30 items were subsequently grouped into six categories according to the type of orthotactic characteristic manipulated for the purpose of tracking changes in sensitivity to different sorts of spelling conventions across grade levels.
Internal consistency for the 30 items on the OST was assessed with the Kuder–Richardson 20 (KR-20) formula, which is interpreted as consistent with Cronbach’s α for dichotomous items. Items on the OST demonstrate good internal consistency (α = .89).
Silent word-reading fluency was assessed using the Silent Word Fluency Test (SWFT), a timed, researcher-designed word-search measure of silent word-reading fluency (see Fig. B1 in Appendix B). The SWFT was administered to a subsample of participants (n = 158) due to time constraints, and 3 participants in Grade 1 were unable to read the practice items, leaving a total of 155 participants (kindergarten: n = 4; Grade 1: n = 33; Grade 2: n = 37; Grade 3: n = 24; Grade 4: n = 26; Grade 5: n = 31) with SWFT scores. All participants who completed the SWFT were age 6 years or older. The SWFT consists of 108 single-morpheme words of three to five letters each set out in a 9 × 12 matrix on white paper in landscape orientation. Each of the 12 target words is the name of a common bird (e.g., duck) or animal (e.g., pig) and appears three times in the matrix. Birds and animals were chosen to make the category accessible to the youngest participants. Foils were formed by systematically changing each letter or bigram (e.g., duck–luck–deck–dull, pig–wig–peg–pin); none is a bird or animal. In four cases, a consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) target was paired with a CVCe foil or vice versa (e.g., snake–sneak, sheep–shape). Orthographically similar words were chosen as foils in order to present the greatest challenge to the word recognition system (Andrews, 1997) and to reduce the possibility of using phonological cues. Mean target frequency is 503.2 per million, and mean foil frequency is 130.1 per million for text readable by children aged 5–9 years (Masterson et al., 2003). Targets and foils were pseudorandomly distributed in the matrix such that there were four targets per row and no word appeared more than once in a row or column. A separate 2 × 4 practice matrix consisted of eight comparable words (e.g., lion, hen), including three targets and five orthographically unrelated foils.
Participants were given the SWFT practice sheet and told that they were going to play a game. “Somebody left the cages open at the zoo, and all the birds and animals escaped! Your job is to round them up as quickly as you can by finding and circling their names.” Corrective feedback was given, if necessary, upon completion of the practice page. Participants were then given the test page and told that the examiner wanted to see how many birds and animals they could round up in 45 s. No instruction was provided regarding scanning strategy. The number of items correctly circled in the 45-s time limit was recorded.
To assess retest reliability, a separate group of children (n = 21) in Grades 1 to 5, recruited from the same afterschool program that participated in the main study, completed the SWFT on two occasions. On average, the second occasion occurred approximately 14 days after the first occasion, with a range from 13 to 21 days. Scores across the two occasions were highly correlated, suggesting strong retest reliability (r = .95, p < .001).
Lexical spelling recognition of specific real words was assessed using the timed Word Choice (WC) subtest of the Process Assessment of the Learner–second edition (PAL-2; Berninger, 2007b). The WC subtest is an orthographic choice test and contains an initial practice item followed by 30 items of increasing difficulty, each consisting of a real word and two pseudohomophones printed in lowercase letters. The task is to circle the correctly spelled words as quickly as possible. The subtest is normed for children in Grades 1 to 6; therefore, only those participants in Grades 1 to 5 (n = 248) took this test. The number of correct responses and the time in seconds to complete the task were recorded.
The WC subtest provides scores for accuracy and fluency (derived from total test accuracy and completion time), with average reliability coefficients across the full grade range of .75 and .78, respectively. Retest reliability coefficients for accuracy are .85 for Grades 1 to 3 and .63 for Grades 4 to 6. Retest reliability coefficients for fluency are .78 and .77, respectively, for those grade bands. Among norming sample children in Grade 1, performance on the subtest was associated with scores on tests of verbal working memory, morphological decoding fluency, and school readiness (Berninger, 2007a).
To identify participants with decoding impairments, participants were given the timed oral Phonemic Decoding Efficiency (PDE) subtest of the Test of Word Reading Efficiency–second edition (TOWRE-2; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 2012). The PDE subtest is normed for ages 6–24 years and consists of a list of pronounceable pseudowords, 8 for practice and 66 for the test, increasing in length and difficulty. In total, 9 children in kindergarten and 1 child in Grade 1 were 5 years of age and thus were not administered this test. An additional 2 children were excluded for failing to complete the practice items, leaving 259 participants with TOWRE-2 data. Scores represent the number of items read correctly in the 45-s time limit, standardized with a mean of 100 (SD = 15). The published retest reliability coefficient for the PDE subtest is .90, and scorer reliability is .99. The subtest scores were also correlated with performance on untimed decoding tests and showed strong association with other measures of reading fluency and comprehension (Torgesen et al., 2012).
To identify a younger group with adequate decoding skills and matched on oral word-reading fluency for comparison with the participants with decoding impairments, the timed oral Sight Word Efficiency (SWE) subtest of the TOWRE-2 (Torgesen et al., 2012) was administered. For the same reasons as noted for the PDE subtest, the number of participants with SWE scores was 259. The subtest consists of a list of sight words, 8 for practice and 108 for the test, increasing in length and difficulty. Administration, standard scores, and norming details are as described for the PDE subtest. The published retest reliability coefficient of the SWE subtest is .91, and scorer reliability is .99. Subtest scores are correlated with performance on untimed sight-word-reading tests as well as with other measures of reading fluency and comprehension, and the subtest is effective in identifying students with reading disabilities.
To screen out participants whose limited cognitive abilities might provide an alternative explanation for poor performance on the variables of interest, intelligence was estimated using the Similarities and Matrix Reasoning subtests of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence–fourth edition (WPPSI-IV; Wechsler, 2012) for the 5-year-olds and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–fourth edition (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 2003) for children age 6 years or older. Similarities and Matrix Reasoning are tests of verbal abstraction and nonverbal reasoning, respectively. In the age band of interest, correlations with the Full Scale intelligence quotient (FSIQ) in the normative sample are .64 to .74 for Similarities and .51 to .73 for Matrix Reasoning on the WISC-IV (Wechsler et al., 2004) and are .75 to .77 and .74 to .79, respectively, on the WPPSI-IV (Wechsler, 2012).
Testing was done during the school day or during the afterschool or camp programming. Each child was tested individually by the first author (N.K.) in a quiet room within 1 h. Tasks were administered in the following order for all participants: OST, WC, SWE and PDE subtests of the TOWRE-2, SWFT, and Similarities and Matrix Reasoning subtests of the WPPSI-IV or WISC-IV. This order was chosen to avoid effects of prior word reading on OST or WC performance.
Section snippets
Sample characteristics
Participants represented a wide range of oral word-reading skill and estimated intelligence. Oral word-reading achievement (M = 99.20, SD = 19.06, range = 55–143) was taken as the standard score of the TOWRE-2 SWE subtest. As noted, it is a measure of oral word-reading fluency, a higher achievement bar than simple oral word-reading accuracy.
Estimated intelligence (M = 11.99, SD = 2.38) was calculated as the mean of the scaled scores of the WISC-IV Matrix Reasoning and Similarities subtests.
Discussion
This cross-sectional study examined sublexical orthotactic sensitivity over a range of English spelling conventions in children with a wide range of oral word-reading and decoding fluency ability from kindergarten to Grade 5. Among children with at least average decoding fluency, orthotactic sensitivity improved rapidly between Kindergarten and Grade 2, with a quarter of the participants in kindergarten, half of those in Grade 1, and nearly all children in Grade 2 and higher scoring above
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Nancy Krasa: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Investigation, Resources, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Ziv Bell: Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Steven Beck for his guidance as principal investigator and William Schwartz for his invaluable coding assistance. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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