Science of Learning:Nurturing a lexical legacy: reading experience is critical for the development of word reading skill

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Science of Learning:Nurturing a lexical legacy: reading experience is critical for the development of word reading skill

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http://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-0 ... ign=buffer

npj Science of Learning 2, Article number: 3 (2017)
doi:10.1038/s41539-017-0004-7
Nurturing a lexical legacy: reading experience is critical for the development of word reading skill

By Kate Nation

Abstract

The scientific study of reading has taught us much about the beginnings of reading in childhood, with clear evidence that the gateway to reading opens when children are able to decode, or ‘sound out’ written words. Similarly, there is a large evidence base charting the cognitive processes that characterise skilled word recognition in adults. Less understood is how children develop word reading expertise. Once basic reading skills are in place, what factors are critical for children to move from novice to expert? This paper outlines the role of reading experience in this transition. Encountering individual words in text provides opportunities for children to refine their knowledge about how spelling represents spoken language. Alongside this, however, reading experience provides much more than repeated exposure to individual words in isolation. According to the lexical legacy perspective, outlined in this paper, experiencing words in diverse and meaningful language environments is critical for the development of word reading skill. At its heart is the idea that reading provides exposure to words in many different contexts, episodes and experiences which, over time, sum to a rich and nuanced database about their lexical history within an individual’s experience. These rich and diverse encounters bring about local variation at the word level: a lexical legacy that is measurable during word reading behaviour, even in skilled adults.

Most children cannot read before they go to school, but fast forward a few years and they are working their way through Harry Potter. How does this learning happen? The science of reading has taught us much about the genesis of reading. In alphabetic languages such as English, we know that an understanding of phonology—the sound system of spoken language—underpins the development of the alphabetic principle1—the insight that print represents meaning via sound. Armed with this insight, children discover the spelling-sound mappings that characterise their language and from this, they have a means to access language from print. Our scientific understanding of the end point of learning is also advanced. Cognitive psychology is abound with studies examining how adults process written words2 and much is known about the neural systems that support word reading.3,4,5 Despite a rich understanding of both beginning reading and its end state, how children move from one to the other is not well understood. The lexical legacy hypothesis, introduced in this paper, provides a new perspective on the transition from novice to expert.

The focus of this paper is with how people read words. While reading comprehension requires much more than the identification of individual words, comprehension can not happen without it.6,7 Thus, understanding how word reading expertise develops is critical. Importantly, however, as will become clear once the lexical legacy hypothesis is described, we can not divorce the processes involved in word identification from the reality that words are not experienced in an isolated vacuum. Words occur in meaningful context, in both spoken and written language. The lexical legacy account argues that this is important. It sees skilled word reading as, in part, a consequence of experiencing words in diverse and meaningful language environments during reading experience. Reading experience provides the substrate that allows a person to build knowledge of an individual word, not just of its spelling and pronunciation, but knowledge of its meaning and how it connects to other words. This rich knowledge base underpins reading fluency and reading comprehension. But before elaborating further, we need to begin with what happens before then, for reading experience can only exert its influence once children are able to read words. So what needs to happen to get the system kick-started?
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