Roads travelled researching how children learn to read words

ABSTRACT Application of psycholinguistic insights initiated a long career researching how children learn to read words. A theory was proposed claiming that spellings of individual words are stored in memory when their graphemes become bonded to phonemes in their pronunciations along with meanings, and this enables readers to read stored words automatically “by sight”. Our studies offered support for this theory. In addition, they clarified how children move into reading. Results showed that teaching beginners to decode words using grapheme-phoneme subunits facilitates word reading and spelling much better than teaching children to decode whole syllabic units or to read words by analogy. Findings showed that storing spellings of new words in memory improves vocabulary learning in many types of learners. This research underscores the importance of systematic phonics instruction to establish foundational knowledge – phonemic segmentation, grapheme-phoneme relations, and decoding skill – setting beginners on a path to becoming skilled readers.