Are children's representations of words distributed? effects of orthographic neighbourhood size, consistency and regularity of naming

Abstract Two groups of children with mean ages of 7.47 and 9.04 years and with reading ages of 7.27 and 9.48 years respectively were asked to read lowfrequency words which differed in the consistency and regularity of their endings and which had many or few orthographic neighbours. Both groups found words with many neighbours easier to read than those with few. Only the better readers were affected by the type of ending; regular-consistent words were easier than both regular-inconsistent words and exception words which were irregular and inconsistent. However, there was no difference between the latter two types of word. It is suggested that consistency affects children's reading before regularity per se and some regularity effects may be attributable to consistency. The pattern of performance observed is most easily interpreted within connectionist models of reading in conjunction with a distributed model of phonological production such as that of Dell (1986).

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