A report on Part 3 of the Matthew Effects article by Stanovich

1. Matthew Effects: Part 3
Pages 372-378
Created by: Anna Nolen

2.  Most authors do not spell out the clear meaning of the term
“word calling”. The assumptions made behind it’s use are as
follows:
1. Word calling occurs when the words in the text are efficiently
decoded into their spoken forms without comprehension of
the passage taking place.
2. This is a bad thing because, it means that the child does not
understand the true purpose of reading, which is extracting
meaning from text.
3. Children who engage in word calling do so because they have
learned inappropriate reading strategies.
4. This is caused by the overreliance on phonic strategies.
 Becoming too preoccupied with teaching children to recode,
may take children away from comprehension of the text.
The Phenomenon of “Word calling”:

3. In some situations a child should not be considered a “word caller”
 Evidence states that even for young children, automatic word
decoding leads to semantic activation (but only when the meaning
of the word is automatically stored in memory.
 Saying that a child is a “word caller” depends on the listening
comprehension of the child. Therefore If the child does not
understand the word when spoken, “word calling” is not the
cause of their reading difficulty.
 It is possible for accurate decoding to be slow and capacity-
demanding. Therefore it breaks down comprehension.
The Phenomenon of “Word calling”:

4.  Readers of different skill levels soon diverge in the
amount of practice they receive in reading and
writing activities.
 They have different histories of success, failure, and
reward in academic tasks.
 Long-term effects of differing “Reading histories”
between good and poor readers include:
 Motivational differences
 Self-esteem in academic tasks
Consequences of Reading History
and Practice:

5. Research and Theorists have explained:
 Ehri’s work demonstrated the effect that experience of print has on
knowledge of sound structure and metalinguistic functioning.
 Others have speculated that the development of ability to comprehend
complex sentence structure is the result of reading experience.
 Torgeson (1985), raised the possibility that memory performance
differences between readers of varying skill are consequences for
readers experiences.
 Poorer readers have less developed knowledge bases because of their
lack of reading practice.
 Chall (1983), explained, “When reading development is delayed by
personal or environmental factors or both, the effects on the person,
unless given special help, are too often disastrous” (pp. 2-3).
Consequences of Reading History
and Practice:

6.  The reading-level match is a research design, where
the performance of older disabled readers is
compared with a younger non-disabled group at the
same level.
 It is often employed to rule out differential practice
explanations of correlations between cognitive skills
and reading ability.
 Therefore, the inferior performance by older students is
less likely to be due to lack of experience than a deficit
displayed in a control group of equal chronological age.
The Reading-Level Match Design:

7.  The reading-level match design helps us to understand that
normal children reading at the same level do not show similar
performance patterns.
 Theories have been posed that less-skilled readers are going
through the same stages of cognitive development as the skilled
reader, but at a slower rate.
 Therefore, reading will be delayed because the sub-skills for reading
are inadequately developed.
 The lag in development states that the performance of less skilled
readers should be similar to younger reader at a similar level of
reading achievement.
 An alternative to this design, is determined by reading level.
The Reading-Level Match Design:

8.  Phonological Awareness is a skill in early reading that
determines differences in reading ability.
 Phonological awareness is necessary for the discovery and
exploitation of the alphabetic principle.
 The alphabetic principle allows children to recognize words that
are in their vocabulary, but have not been taught or seen in
print.
 The key is recognizing unknown words through phonological
recoding.
 Although phonological awareness enables word recognition in
beginning reading, it does not determine reading abilities at all
developmental levels.
Developmentally Limited Relationships:
Phonological Awareness and Phonological
Recoding Ability

9.  Research indicates that there is a shift away from
phonologically mediated word recognition toward direct
visual access at more advanced stages of reading.
 For fluent adults, the majority of words encountered in
print are recognized by direct visual access.
 For these individuals, phonological information is only
activated for reading very difficult, or low-frequency words.
 Therefore, the less skilled the reader, the more likely they are
to use phonological information for word recognition.
Developmentally Limited Relationships:
Phonological Awareness and Phonological
Recoding Ability

10. Research indicates:
 There is a distinction between the availability of
knowledge and the actual use of that knowledge in the
word-recognition process. –Backman, Bruck, Hebert, and
Seidenberg (1984)
 Children’s knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences is
increasing at the same time as when they are learning to
recognize many words without using it.
 Venezsky (1976), “The reliance on letter-sound
generalizations in word recognition slowly decreases as
word identification abilitiy increases, and the mature
reader probably makes little use of them in normal reading.
Developmentally Limited Relationships:
Phonological Awareness and Phonological
Recoding Ability

11.  Individual differences in the process of phonological
recoding are less implicated in determining reading ability
in older readers because fewer unknown words are
encountered. However, this process is available on the few
occasions when low-frequency words occur in text.
 Phonological coding is only one example of a
developmentally limited relationship. Another relationship
is word-recognition efficiency.
 However, the casual link between individual differences in
word-recognition and comprehension deserves further
research investigation.
Developmentally Limited Relationships:
Phonological Awareness and Phonological
Recoding Ability