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Learning to read: Contributions from a psycholinguistic perspective.



Learning to read is a sign of literacy and a gateway to education. It involves mastery of a rich variety of skills and is not accomplished quickly or easily. As a consequence, reading instruction is a large part of the educational curriculum during the early school years and a basic concern of teachers, parents and researchers (Paris & Jacobs (1984). Alphabetic processes are central in learning to read words as indicated by theory and evidence with limited evidence to support claims otherwise (Ehri et al., 2001). From a psycholinguistic perspective, this assignment will seek to address the contributions researchers have made towards our understanding of the processes by which beginner readers acquire this skill. Both normal and disordered reading will be discussed to provide an insight into the language processing system showing how the discipline has helped the process of learning to read and how it has also helped children to overcome diffculties with reading. Furthermore, this assignment will focus primarily on word recognition rather than sentence structure and the semantic processes of learning to read.
Usually, children start their schooling with some proficiency in language skills, however they usually have no knowledge about how to read. Mastering the alphabetic code is the first step, that is, the system of grapheme-phoneme relationship that connects the spellings of words to form words and their pronunciations (Ehri et al., 2001). Moreover, deficits at the level of word recognition are characteristic of children who fail to acquire age-appropriate reading skills. Duncan, Seymour & Hill (1997) further pointed out that learning to read is further complicated by the inconsistencies derived from morphological information and the fact that spoken forms of words change over time, whereas the written forms are essentially fixed, therefore making...