The Discrimination of Printed Words by Prereading Children

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Beginning readers must learn to identify letters within words, not just in isolation.
• Prior research shows difficulties in discriminating multi-element stimuli even when component elements are understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether discriminating individual letters automatically leads to discriminating simple words.
• To examine the challenges beginning readers face in distinguishing words that differ by a single initial letter.

Main Methods:

• Two studies involving 32 children aged 3.5 to 5.5 years.
• Assessed individual letter discrimination using matching-to-sample tasks.
• Evaluated word discrimination on tasks with 3-letter words differing in the first letter.
• Employed fading procedures to teach word discrimination to a subset of children.

Main Results:

• Children accurately discriminated individual letters but struggled with word discrimination (21/32 below 85% accuracy).
• Word discrimination accuracy did not improve with retesting over several months.
• Fading procedures successfully taught word discrimination, with generalization to new words.

Conclusions:

• Discriminating individual letters does not guarantee the ability to discriminate simple words.
• Early reading instruction may need explicit strategies for whole-word perception.
• Challenges in discriminating multi-element stimuli persist even with component element mastery.