Learning to read words: what's meaning got to do with it?

When children first begin learning to read, they use their knowledge of letter sounds to 'sound out' words. This provides children with a means to assign a pronunciation to spelling patterns, a process that provides the fundamental foundation of reading development. However, this decoding process is slow and effortful, and in a language such as English, it is also error prone, given the inconsistent nature of the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. Clearly, children need to move beyond decoding strategies if they are to make progress in learning to read. Rather surprisingly, we understand relatively little about the factors that underpin children's progress. Understanding more about how children learn to read words is important as it will inform how best to teach reading, and potentially lead to the development of intervention programmes to help those children who find learning to read difficult. This research investigates the hypothesis that how well children understand the meaning of words is directly related to their ability to read words. We hypothesise that knowledge of a word in the oral domain may combine with information gleaned from a decoding attempt to enable the word to be read correctly.

儿童初学阅读时，会借助字母音知识来“拼读”单词。这一过程为儿童提供了为拼写模式标注发音的方法，是阅读发展的核心基础。然而，该解码过程（decoding process）缓慢且费力；在英语这类拼写与发音对应关系不一致的语言中，该过程还极易出错。显然，若要在阅读学习上取得进步，儿童需超越解码策略的使用范畴。

令人颇感意外的是，目前学界对支撑儿童阅读进步的相关因素仍知之甚少。深入探究儿童如何学习认读单词具有重要价值：这既能为优化阅读教学提供理论依据，也有望开发出针对阅读学习困难儿童的干预方案。本研究验证了一项核心假设：儿童对单词含义的理解程度，与其认读单词的能力直接相关。我们提出如下假说：口语领域的单词知识，可与解码过程中获取的信息相结合，从而实现单词的正确认读。