Examining the Impact of Reading Fluency on Lexical Decision Results in French 6th Graders

How does lexical decision behavior vary in students with the same grade level (all students were in their first year of middle-school), but different levels of reading fluency? Here, we tested a prediction of the dual-route model: as fluency increases, variations in the results may reflect a decreasing reliance on decoding and an increasing reliance on the lexical route.

1,501 French 6^th graders passed a one-minute speeded reading-aloud task evaluating fluency, and a ten-minute computerized lexical decision task evaluating the impact of lexicality, length, word frequency and pseudoword type.

As predicted, the word length effect varied dramatically with reading fluency, with the least fluent students showing a length effect even for frequent words. The frequency effect also varied, but solely in proportion to overall reading speed, suggesting that frequency affects the decision stage similarly in all readers, while length disproportionately impacts poor readers. Response times and errors were also affected by pseudoword type (e.g., letter substitutions or transpositions), but these effects showed minimal variation with fluency. Overall, lexical decision variables were excellent predictors of reading fluency (r = 0.62).

Our results highlight the variability in middle-school reading ability and describe how a simple lexical decision task can be used to assess students' mental lexicon (vocabulary) and the automatization of reading skills.