Research Symposium

BIO

I’m excited to be pursuing my academic career at Florida State University, where I plan on majoring in Economics and Accounting. I have always had an interest in research, and through the UROP program, I was able to explore my interest further and help on a research project that matched my goals. Throughout my time here, I am ready to make meaningful connections with my peers and mentors to shape my future career path.

Examining the Effects of Children’s Word Specific Phonological Awareness on Word Reading Accuracy Within a Lexical Quality Theoretical Framework

Abstract

Although the significant relation between phonological awareness (PA) and word reading is well documented, questions remain about the nature of this relationship over time. This is particularly important given that the development of lexical representations is item-based and depends on the unique interaction between the skills a child brings to the task and item/word characteristics. This study integrates a word specific measure of PA to further clarify the relationship between the quality of an individual’s phonological representations and word reading accuracy.
Method
Second-grade (n=80) and first-grade students (data collection in progress) attending Title-I schools in the southeast United States completed the Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST; Kilpatrick, 2021) and read the same 52 words. Children also completed other child-level, word-level and child-by-word level measures of reading and reading related skills.
Results
Preliminary results from logistic cross classified random-effects models using our sample of secondgrade students indicated significant child-level (decoding and vocabulary) and word-level (spelling-topronunciation transparency rating, frequency, and phoneme length) predictors of word reading
accuracy. At the child-by-word level, a child’s word specific PA, letter-sound knowledge, and familiarity
were not significant predictors. Initial results suggest these second-grade students have sufficiently redundant orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations of the words in our study. Redundancy can facilitate word recognition in the absence of complete and precise word knowledge (Adlof et al., 2016). The lack of significant child-by-word effects in our models may represent the important role redundancy played in their word reading accuracy and the potential consequences of lexical quality (Perfetti, 2007).

Keywords: phonological awareness, word reading accuracy, psychology