Research Symposium

BIO

Hello, I am Ziraili and I am from Fort Pierce, Florida, which is a small coastal city located on the East coast in South Florida. I am majoring in in psychology and my research interests include reading comprehension, depression, anxiety, epigenetics, hormones & behavior, and phonological awareness. I aim to become a clinical psychologist in the future. Some of my hobbies include dancing, photography, going on walks, taking fitness classes such as barre and pilates, enjoying sunsets and sunrises, and watching rom-coms.

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

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to understand on a deeper level the relationship between phonemic awareness and word reading over time. While data that explains relationships between these factors does exist, there are gaps in considering how these relationships develop and change over time.
 
Learning is characterized by the interactions between the skills of individuals (children in this project) that enable them to complete the task and/or item, which produces continued changes in the children’s lexical representations pertaining to unique words. (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986; Nation & Castles, 2017; Rumelhart & Norman, 1978; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; Perfetti, 1991).
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Previous data has been collected that demonstrates the effects of children’s word-reading abilities. This data has reflected predictors of word recognition and decoding accuracy in child levels (e.g., Gilbert et al., 2011; Goodwin et al., 2014; Kearns et al., 2016; Steacy et al., 2022). This research, however, does not investigate the phonological awareness of the child or word readings when determining predictions of word recognition accuracy.
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​In this project, a sample of second-grade students was utilized to better understand the relationship between word recognition and reading accuracy, and phonological awareness based on Rasch-based Explanatory Item Response Models. These students have basic reading skills and developing phonological systems. This study aims to understand to what extent phonological awareness affects word reading and recognition, and the predictors of phonological, orthographic, and semantic knowledge in word reading accuracy.

Keywords: phonological awareness, lexical quality, word recognition, reading accuracy