Abstract
The effect of exposure to print on the efficiency of phonological and orthographic word recognition processes was examined by comparing two groups of university students having similar reading comprehension scores but different levels of exposure to print. Participants with a high level of exposure to print were faster and more accurate in naming pseudowords, in choosing the correct member of a homophone pair, and in making lexical decisions when nonwords were pseudohomophones. In the lexical decision task, low-print-exposure participants were more sensitive to the frequency of the orthographic patterns in the stimuli. The results of a form priming task demonstrated that high-print-exposure participants more quickly and strongly activated the orthographic representations of common words and subsequently more strongly activated the corresponding phonological representations. Even among successful students, differences in exposure to print produce large differences in the efficiency of both orthographic and phonological word recognition processes.
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This research was supported by a Graduate Fellowship to the first author and Grant OGP0153380 to the second author, both from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. This article was based on a master’s thesis completed by D.C. under the supervision of D.J. A major portion of this paper was presented at the Seventh Meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavioural, and Cognitive Science, Winnipeg, Canada, June 1997.
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Chateau, D., Jared, D. Exposure to print and word recognition processes. Memory & Cognition 28, 143–153 (2000). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211582
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211582