| Abstract | To disambiguate vowel assignment to a vowel diagraph in a word, readers must take into account aspects of the word context beyond the vowel diagraph units themselves. The present study examined the development of young readers’ use of this context in two experiments. First-, third-, and fifth-grade children read aloud high- and low-frequency words containing vowel digraph units with variant and invariant pronunciations (Experiment 1); the third-grade children also read pseudowords containing vowel digraph units with variant pronunciations (Experiment 2). Words and pseudowords containing vowel digraph units with variant pronunciations were further categorized by the uniformity of pronunciation of the word digraph-final consonant unit as it appeared in real words (i.e., the orthographic neighborhood consistency). Word reading accuracy of all groups was affected by word frequency and variation in the pronunciation of the vowel digraph unit; however, only the third- and fifth-grade children demonstrated sensitivity to orthographics neighborhood consistency. With the pseudowords, the influence of the vowel digraph-final consonant unit in determining pronunciation was again indicated. The findings from both experiments support the hypothesis that with reading experience, children identify the systematic relationship between pronunciation and orthographic structure and utilize that knowledge in the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. |
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