How granularity of orthography-phonology mappings affect reading development : evidence from a computational model of English word reading and spelling

• Main Authors: Lim, Alfred, O’Brien, Beth A., Onnis, Luca
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering; Reading Development; English
• Online Access: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/How-Granularity-of-Orthography-Phonology-Mappings-a-Lim-O'Brien/6e1f581e69718738ffa8c4a5ad7468280df4d9a3#extracted; https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146263
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

It is widely held that children implicitly learn the structure of their writing system through statistical learning of spelling-tosound mappings. Yet an unresolved question is how to sequence reading experience so that children can ‘pick up’ the structure optimally. We tackle this question here using a computational model of encoding and decoding. The order of presentation of words was manipulated so that they exhibited two distinct progressions of granularity of spelling-to-sound mappings. We found that under a training regime that introduced written words progressively from small-to-large granularity, the network exhibited an early advantage in reading acquisition as compared to a regime introducing written words from large-to-small granularity. Our results thus provide support for the grain size theory (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005) and demonstrate that the order of learning can influence learning trajectories of literacy skills.