Evidence For Semantic Involvement In Regular And Exception Word Reading Analysis

Curriculum designers, boards of education, and classroom teachers plan literacy activities for emergent readers in hopes of using the most efficient approach to acquiring reading that results in students that are active, growing readers throughout their lives. Among theories of approaches to teaching both regular and irregular words, there is some separation in opinion as to which underlying skill best promotes word reading: phonological knowledge or semantic knowledge. This study, “Evidence for Semantic Involvement in Regular and Exception Word Reading in Emergent Readers of English” (Ricketts, Davies, Masterson, Stuart, & Duff, 2016), published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, attempted to clarify whether knowledge of word
The 40 stimulus words were taken from the Diagnostic Test of Word Reading Processes (DTWRP). Regular words included only words that were pronounced according to phoneme-grapheme correspondence, and an explanation of the DTWRP design was provided to support the words selected within that test. The nonsense word list for the auditory lexical decision assessment was selected to match the wordlist items in terms of letter length and initial