Phonological and Orthographic Relationships of Reading Performance

Abstract

This study investigated the use of an intermediate level of orthographic representation based on the theoretical framework of transformational-generative grammar. A general objective was to determine whether a system of semantic correspondence was utilized when irrelevant phonetic aspects of orthography were encountered by good and poor readers from a fifth-grade population. A 2 x 2 x 4 factorial design was employed to investigate the effects of reading ability (good and poor), word reality (real and pseudo), and mode of presentation for stimuli and response items (oral and written). Good readers performed better than poor readers at a statistically significant level (p < .0005) on those tasks which required recognizing regularities on a deep level. When regularities were recognized on a surface level, these differences between good and poor readers diminished. Good readers appeared to display a search technique which abandons a simpler level of correspondence in favor of one more efficient, one which precludes grapheme/phoneme correspondences for one directed toward semantic correspondence.