BDA International Conference 2016

Abstract: Once children have learnt that words are built up by letters and that letters standfor sounds, they can teach themselves how to read simple words by blending the sounds ofthe letters that make up the words. After a few encounters with a word, the word will be readfluently.Over the last decades, insights have deepened in how Phonological Awareness (PA) and RapidAutomatized Naming (RAN) determine reading and spelling skills. The ability to commit writtenwords to memory and to retrieve this information from memory, so that words can immediatelybe recognised and spelled fluently, however, is relatively under-researched. This ability iscalled Orthographic Learning (OL). Share (1995) has proposed that children teach themselvesto recognise words and to spell them properly through phonological recoding, that is, byapplying letter-sound and sound-letter rules. In addition, he has suggested that the informationcommitted to memory is word-specific, that is, if we attempt to decode the word APPLE a fewtimes, we learn to read and spell APPLE and not the words we have not practised.In the keynote, the current literature on OL will be reviewed, with examples from our ownlab. Then I will present a recently conducted longitudinal study on OL, in which we attempt toanswer the following questions: (1) what is the developmental onset and time course of selfteaching,(2) what is the contribution of self-teaching to reading and spelling ability over andabove phonological memory, vocabulary, rapid naming, and exposure to print, and (3) what isthe relation between orthographic learning and paired associate learning?The keynote will be concluded with an overview of potentially new avenues for research into OL,e.g., to identify the learning mechanism underlying OL.