The Importance of the First Letter in Children's Parafoveal Pre-processing in English: Is It Phonologically or Orthographically Driven?

Abstract

For both adult and child readers of English, the first letter of a word plays an important role in lexical identification. Using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, we examined whether the first-letter bias in parafoveal pre-processing is phonologically or orthographically driven, and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Participants read sentences which contained either: a correctly spelled word in preview (identity; e.g., circus); a preview letter string which maintained the phonology, but manipulated the orthography of the first letter (P+ O- preview; e.g., sircus); or a preview letter string which manipulated both the phonology and the orthography of the first letter (P- O- preview; e.g., wircus). There was a cost associated with manipulating the first letter of the target words in preview, for both adults and children. Critically, during first-pass reading, both adult and child readers displayed similar reading times between P+ O- and P- O- previews. This shows that the first-letter bias is driven by orthographic encoding, and that the first letter’s orthographic code in preview is crucial for efficient, early, processing of phonology