Research Symposium

BIO

Hi, My name is Maya and I am a freshman psychology student here at FSU. I am looking to further my research experience and ultimately go into clinical psychology.

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

Abstract

Purpose
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 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 second-
grade students indicated significant child-level (decoding and vocabulary) and word-level (spelling-to-
pronunciation 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.
Conclusions
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

Keywords: psychology, reading comprehension