The Discrimination of Printed Words by Prereading Children

In addition to the discrimination of individual printed letters, beginning readers must learn to perceive individual letters within complex, whole-word stimuli. The present study shows that the discrimination of letters presented individually does not automatically entail the discrimination of 3-letter printed words that differ only in the first letter (e.g., sat, mat). Thirty-two children ranging in age from 3½ to 5½ years participated in two studies. All showed highly accurate discrimination of individual letters in identity matching-to-sample procedures before being exposed to the word-matching task. On the word-matching task, 21 of the 32 children showed accuracy of less than 85%, and 11 of these showed accuracy of 65% or less. Word-discrimination accuracy did not improve in retests of a subset of children after periods ranging from 3 weeks to 3 months. In Study 2, six children who initially showed relatively low word-matching accuracy were taught using fading procedures. Moreover, generalization to untaught words was shown. These results extend basic laboratory studies that have shown difficulties discriminating multi-element stimuli despite the discrimination of the individual component elements.