Children Processing Novel Irregular and Regular Words During Reading: An Eye Tracking Study

Children may link words in their oral vocabulary with novel printed word forms through a process termed mispronunciation correction, which enables them to adjust an imperfect phonological decoding. Additional evidence suggests that sentence context may play a role in helping children to make link between a word in oral vocabulary and its irregular written form. Four groups of children were orally trained on a set of novel words but received no training on a second set. Half the trained words were designated irregular spellings and half regular spellings. Children later read the words in contextually supportive or neutral sentences while their eye movements were monitored. Fixations on untrained words were longer than on trained regular words but were similar to trained irregular words. Fixations on regular words were shorter than on irregular words, and there were larger differences between irregular and regular words viewed in contextually supportive sentences. Subsequently, children were able to read irregular words more accurately when they had previously appeared in a supportive context. These results suggest that orally known irregular words undergo additional processing when first viewed in text, which is consistent with the online operation of a mispronunciation correction mechanism.