The Quality of Orthographic Representations and Their Importance for Spelling and Reading

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When a word is stored in memory, it can be accessed in terms of how it sounds, how it is written, or the concepts it represents. For example 'apple' is pronounced with three phonemes (e.g., /æ/ /p/ l/), written with a doubled consonant separating two syllables (e.g., apple), and signifies a crunchy, sweet fruit. Word learning, then, is the process of creating and refining these phonological (sounds), orthographic (letters), and semantic (meaning) components of word identity in memory. This concept is not new to the reading field. In fact, it has been discussed by connectionist models and cognitive models for over two decades. According to the lexical quality hypothesis for example, it is the quality of the lexical representations that results in accurate spelling and fluent word reading (Perfetti, 2007). If phonology, orthography, and semantics are all contributors to lexical quality, then a deficiency in any one of these components should dampen word reading. Yet consider that while a detailed orthographic representation is needed to spell many words, reading can proceed with incomplete orthographic representations; We can, after all, read many words that we may not be able to spell. Thus, despite widespread acceptance for the importance of all three components of word identity, the role orthographic quality plays in word reading remains uncertain and there is a scarcity of research that directly evaluates its role. The present proposal does so through a series of studies with typical adult readers, in which their spelling performance is directly compared to reading speed across a variety of complex words. The proposed research directly addresses the question: are words that are spelled correctly accessed and read faster? The current proposal also includes experimental training studies that examine whether training to increase the quality of orthographic and/or semantic representations yields increases in reading speed. In other words, by strengthening the quality of the component representations and the links between them, will we see the increase in reading access speed and proficiency as may be predicted by current theory?