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

<p>Abstract copyright data collection owner.</p>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