Abstract
It is widely accepted that orthographic knowledge comprises two components: word-specific orthographic knowledge, also termed lexical orthographic knowledge, and general orthographic knowledge, or sublexical orthographic knowledge. Until now, the study of the relationship between these components throughout literacy development has been somehow neglected. In this study, we examined how they are related at an early stage of literacy development in European Portuguese, an orthography of intermediate depth. Children followed from Grade 2–3 performed two of the most common tasks of orthographic knowledge—the Orthographic Choice Task and the Orthographic Awareness Task. Crossed-lagged structural equation modeling showed significant mutual contributions between the two components of orthographic knowledge, providing thus preliminary evidence of bidirectional relations over time. Results are discussed in the context of theories of reading development taking into account the influence of orthography consistency.
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Notes
In northern Portugal, it is pronounced as diphthong [ow].
In some regions of Portugal telha (tile) pronounces as [´teλɐ].
A frequency measure for how commonly graphemes and bigraph sequences occur within a word in a specific language.
All tests used in this study were developed and administered to the participants as part of the project "Developmental benchmarks of reading and writing in European Portuguese from the 1st to 6th grades" (2008–2010), conducted under the auspices of the National Reading Plan. The stimuli sets for both orthographic tasks are available from the corresponding author on request.
The frequency of each word was retrieved from Portulex, “a lexical database that contains words from children's schoolbooks for reading and language instruction from grades 1–4” (Teixeira & Castro, 2007).
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Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by FCT – Foundation of Science and Technology under the PhD research Grant SFRH / BD / 72303 / 2010. Data collection was supported and carried out under the project “Developmental benchmarks of reading and writing, in European Portuguese, from first to sixth grade” (2008–2010), under the auspices of the National Reading Plan. We thank the students, teachers, administrators and school personnel of the two intervenient schools. We also thank all the examiners who collected data in the field. Lastly, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions that greatly contributed to improve the paper.
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Querido, L., Fernandes, S., Verhaeghe, A. et al. Lexical and sublexical orthographic knowledge: relationships in an orthography of intermediate depth. Read Writ 33, 2459–2479 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10052-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10052-2