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Journal of Educational Psychology1980, Vol. 72, No. 6, 730-742

Reading Ability and Utilizationof Orthographic Structure in Reading

Dominic W. Massaro and Glen A. TaylorUniversity of Wisconsin

A perceptual-recognition task was used to assess whether utilization of ortho-graphic structure in letter recognition varies with reading ability. Anagramsof words were made to create strings that orthogonally combined frequencyand regularity measures of orthographic structure. These strings and theoriginal words were used as test stimuli in a letter-recognition task. Good andpoor college readers showed equally large effects of orthographic structure ontask accuracy, whereas poor sixth-grade readers did not utilize orthographicstructure to the same degree as very good sixth-grade readers. To facilitatethe teaching of orthographic structure, some of the important constraints inwritten English and various games for teaching these constraints are pre-sented.

One of the primary concerns of educatorsis the wide range of reading ability acrossboth child and adult populations. Good andpoor readers have been shown to differ inperformance on a variety of general tasks,but until recently little attempt has beenmade to explore how children of differentreading abilities might differ in basic word-recognition processes. If poor readers revealfundamental deficits in certain recognitionprocesses, then instruction for the poorreaders could be directed at these processes.The rationale for the present research is thatthe study of basic word-recognition pro-cesses can aid in assessing word-recognitionabilities of good and poor readers at both theelementary school and adult levels.

The goal of the present research was todetermine how the reader's knowledge andutilization of orthographic structure varied

This research was supported by funds from the Na-tional Institute of Education to the Wisconsin Researchand Development Center for IndividualizedSchooling.

David Klitzke programmed the experiments, assistedin testing the subjects, and contributed to the dataanalyses. Peter Lucas and Jim Jastrzembski also madesignificant contributions to the data analyses.

Glen A. Taylor is now at Bell Laboratories, Homdel,New Jersey.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Dominic W.Massaro, who is now with the Program in ExperimentalPsychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Cal-ifornia 95064.

with reading ability. Orthographic struc-ture refers to the constraints describing howletters are sequenced in the written lan-guage. Previous research (Massaro, Ven-ezky, & Taylor, 1979) established the psy-chological reality of orthographic structure,and the present objective was to evaluate itscontribution to letter processing as a func-tion of reading ability. The framework forthe present study was an information-pro-cessing model that has been developed andtested over the past few years (Massaro,1975,1978,1979b).

Figure 1 presents a schematic represen-tation of the stages of processing in reading.Given the information-processing model, animportant issue is determining the stage orstages of processing responsible for readingdifficulty. In the present model, deficitscould exist in either the temporary process-ing stages, the long-term knowledge base, orin both. Feature detection, primary recog-nition, secondary recognition, and re-hearsal-recoding stages might each be re-sponsible for various reading difficulties. Inthe present study, we concentrated on thoseprocesses involved in letter and word rec-ognition.

During an eye-fixation period, the lightpattern of the letters is transduced by thevisual receptors. A feature-detection pro-cess detects and transmits visual features topreperceptual visual storage. The primary

Copyright 1980 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-0663/80/7206-0730$00.75

730

READING ABILITY AND ORTHOGRAPHIC STRUCTURE 731

LONO TERM MEMORY

PREPERCEPTUALVISUALSTORAGE

IEANINO

Figure 1. Information-processing model of reading printed text.

recognition process attempts to synthesizethe isolated features in preperceptual visualstorage into a sequence of letters and spacesin synthesized visual memory. To do this,the primary recognition process can utilizeinformation held in long-term memory,which for the accomplished reader includesa list of features for each letter of the al-phabet along with information about theorthographic structure of the language. Theprimary recognition process evaluates thefeatures in preperceptual visual storage andcompares or matches these features withperceptual prototypes in long-term memory.A perceptual prototype represents each ofthe letters as it would ideally be representedin preperceptual visual storage. The pri-mary recognition process seeks for each let-ter position the perceptual prototype thatprovides the best match to the featural in-formation in preperceptual visual storage.This process operates on a number of letterssimultaneously (in parallel). Featural in-formation is resolved by feature detection atdifferent rates, and there is some evidencethat gross features are available before moredetailed features (Breitmeyer & Ganz, 1976;Massaro & Schmuller, 1975).

The primary recognition process istherefore faced with a succession of partialinformation states. These may be regardedas yielding candidate sets of letters that aresuccessively more consistent with the avail-able featural information for each letterposition in the string being synthesized.The reduction of these candidate sets to asingle best matching letter (or to no match)relies not only on the incoming visual fea-

tures but also on a knowledge of ortho-graphic structure. If, for example, an initialth has been resolved in a letter string, andthe features available for the next letter areconsistent with either c or e, the processmight synthesize e without waiting for fur-ther visual information, since initial the isnot acceptable, whereas initial the is.Conversely, the actual presence of an irreg-ular string or substring such as thq mightdemand more exhaustive featural informa-tion for acceptance of each of the three let-ters because of the illegality of the sequence.It is assumed that the two sources of infor-mation, visual features and orthographicstructure knowledge, make independentcontributions to the recognition process(Massaro, 1973, 1975, 1979a; Thompson &Massaro, 1973). In this view, orthographiccontext facilitates word perception, but itdoes not modify the feature analysis of theprinted pattern (Massaro, 1979a).

The primary recognition process transmitsa sequence of recognized letters to synthe-sized visual memory. Figure 1 shows howthe secondary recognition process trans-forms this synthesized visual percept intomeaningful form in generated abstractmemory. We assume secondary recognitionattempts to close off the letter string into aword. The secondary recognition processmakes this transformation by finding thebest match between the letter string and aword in the lexicon in long-term memory.Knowledge of orthographic structure canalso contribute to secondary recognition;word recognition can occur without completerecognition of all of the component letters.

732 DOMINIC W. MASSARO AND GLEN A. TAYLOR

Given the letters bea and the viable alter-natives I and t in final position, only t makesa word, and therefore word identification(lexical access) can be achieved. Each wordin the lexicon contains both perceptual andconceptual codes. The word that is recog-nized is the one whose perceptual code givesthe best match and whose conceptual codeis most appropriate in that particular con-text.

Although Anderson and Dearborn (1952)acknowledged the effects of familiarity andset on word perception in their comprehen-sive book, The Psychology of TeachingReading, the utilization of orthographicstructure is not addressed. Nowhere do theauthors explicitly recognize that the per-ception of some letters can provide infor-mation about other letters or that some let-ters are more likely to occur in some posi-tions and contexts than others. Familiarityand set effects were assumed to occur at theword level or even higher at the phrase orsentence level, but not at the sublexical level.One of the first studies of the utilization oforthographic constraints in reading wascarried out by Miller, Bruner, and Postman(1954). These authors had subjects repro-duce letter sequences flashed in a tachis-toscope. The eight-letter strings repre-sented different approximations to Englishbased on Shannon's (1948,1951) algorithms.The authors found that performance im-proved with increases in the degree to whichthe letter strings approximated English. Bycorrecting for the statistical redundancy inthe strings, the amount of informationtransmitted was shown to be equal for thevarious approximations. This result isconsistent with more recent empirical andtheoretical work demonstrating that ortho-graphic structure provides an independentsource of information to the reader (Massa-ro, 1979a). Massaro (1980) provides a re-view of how orthographic structure facili-tates reading and Massaro, Taylor, Venezky,Jastrzembski, and Lucas (1980) discussvarious descriptions of orthographic struc-ture in English.

To assess how good and poor readers uti-lize knowledge about the structure of writtenlanguage, it is necessary to state various de-scriptions of this structure and then deter-

mine how well these descriptions capturereading performance. Venezky and Mas-saro (1979) and Massaro et al. (1979) havedistinguished between two broad categoriesof orthographic structure: statistical re-dundancy and rule-governed regularity.The first category includes all descriptionsderived solely from the frequency of lettersand letter sequences in written texts. Thesecond category includes all descriptionsderived from the phonological constraints inEnglish, scribal conventions for sequencingletters in words, or both. Massaro et al.(1979) contrasted a specific statistical-re-dundancy description with a specific rule-governed description in a series of experi-ments utilizing a target-search task. Thestatistical-redundancy description was thesummed single-letter positional frequenciesof the letters in the test string. Thissummed frequency measure was derivedfrom counts that give the number of occur-rences of each letter by word position andword length in a sample of written text(Mayzner & Tresselt, 1965). For test stringsof six letters, the frequency measures wouldbe the sum of the frequency of the string'sfirst letter as the first letter in six-letterwords plus the second letter's frequency asthe second letter in six-letter words, and soon. Although the rule-governed descriptionwas not as systematically developed, a set ofrules was formulated to classify strings asorthographically regular or irregular. Theselection rules are given in Massaro andTaylor (Note 1).

To create the test stimuli, Massaro et al.(1979) chose six-letter words and made an-agrams of each of them to find four stringsthat orthogonally combined high and lowsingle-letter positional frequency and regularand irregular orthographic structure. This2 X 2 factorial design provides a direct as-sessment of the contribution of frequencyand regularity to letter perception. Mason(1975) had previously evaluated the contri-bution of summed single-letter positionalfrequency in a letter search task. Good andpoor readers indicated whether or not a six-letter string contained a predeterminedtarget letter. In one experiment (Experi-ment 2; Mason, 1975), good readers averaged63 msec faster for strings high in positional


Wordswinterchargeturned(1293)

Regular

raphicarity

Irregular

Positional Frequency

High Low

triwenchagerdrunet(1438)

wrnteiahcgerrdnuet(1421)

trewingreachtredun(540)

rntewihreagcedtrnu(526)

Figure 2. The five types of items, examples of eachtype, and the average single-letter positional frequencyfor each type.

frequency than for those low in positionalfrequency. Mason found that 100 practicetrials in a follow-up experiment reduced theperformance advantage for high positionalfrequency strings to an average of about 22msec.

In the target search task of Massaro et al.(1979), good sixth-grade readers averagedabout 12 msec faster for regular than for ir-regular strings and about 12 msec faster forhigh than for low positional frequency;however, neither result was statisticallysignificant. Our interest in this issue led usto conduct an extensive sequence of targetsearch experiments contrasting a reaction-time task with an accuracy task. In the ac-curacy task, the test-letter string is presentedfor a short duration and followed by amasking stimulus. The subject indicateswhether or not the target letter was presentin the test string. The results of this re-search are reported in Massaro et al. (1979)and Massaro et al. (1980). The most salientfinding for the present experiments was thataccuracy tasks revealed stronger effects oforthographic structure than did reaction-time tasks. Since the previous experimentsdid not incorporate the variable of readingability, the present research used the pow-erful accuracy tasks to probe whether indi-viduals of varying reading ability use or-thographic structure differently.

The two experiments reported here weredirect replications of the Massaro et al.

(1979) accuracy task with a new set of itemsand the inclusion of corresponding wordstimuli. Figure 2 illustrates the five typesof items used in the experiments. Collegesophomores having good reading scores werecontrasted with peers having poor readingscores in the first experiment. Sixth gradersat two reading levels and adults comprisedthe three groups in the second experiment.

Experiment 1

Method

Subjects. A class of 248 college students in intro-ductory psychology was given the Nelson-DennyReading Test (Forms C & D, 1973) under the "cut-timeadministration" limits for adults. These limits permit7.5 minutes for the 100 vocabulary items and 15 minutesfor the 72 comprehension questions. The resultingdistribution of student scores closely paralleled thestandard norms for this administration procedure witha mean score for our sample of 80.9 and a standard de-viation of 21.8. Students scoring in the top 15% (rawscores of 106-140) and the bottom 15% (raw scores60-17) of our sample were selected as our "good reader"and "poor reader" populations, respectively. Of thesetwo groups, 19 good readers and 15 poor readers agreedto participate in the experiment and were paid $2.00 fortheir participation. Of these 34 subjects, 16 goodreaders and 11 poor readers achieved experimental ac-curacy scores between 65%-85%. Five of these goodreaders were randomly excluded to maintain equalgroup sizes. Thus, 11 good readers and 11 poor readersformed the final subject groups. The mean raw readingscore for the final good reader group was 113.5, and themean for the poor reader group was 50.3.

Stimulus list. Listings of the 100 highest and 100lowest positional frequency anagrams were obtained forseveral hundred common six-letter words selected fromthe Kucera and Francis (1967) word list. The anagramlistings were produced by a computer program thatgenerated all 720 possible permutations for each six-letter word and computed the positional frequency foreach permutation from the Mayzner and Tresselt (1965)single-letter counts for six-letter words by summing theposition-dependent frequency for each letter. Wordswith repeated letters were not used. From the 200anagrams for each six-letter word, two were chosen withhigh positional frequencies and two were chosen withlow positional frequencies. Within each frequency pair,one member was chosen to be orthographically irregularand one to be orthographically regular. The rules forjudging regularity are given in Massaro et al. (1980) andMassaro and Taylor (Note 1). Those sources also givethe 200 stimulus items, that is, the 40 words and the fouranagrams of each word. From 24 additional words, 120practice stimuli were generated. These words were notas evenly matched for regularity and positional fre-quency as the experimental words, and a few containedrepeated letters.


Two occurrences of each of the 120 practice stimuliwere presented in random order for each subject'spractice session, and two occurrences of each of the 200experimental stimuli were presented in random orderfor each of two experimental sessions. In the two oc-currences of each stimulus, one occurrence was testedas a target trial and one as a catch trial. On target trials,the target letter was selected randomly from among thesix letters in the test string. For catch trials, a targetwas selected randomly from a set of 21 letters weightedby their probability of occurrence in the stimulus set.If the selected letter was present in the display string,additional drawings with replacement were made untilan appropriate target letter was selected. The letters;', k, q, x, and z did not occur in the experimental stim-ulus strings and, therefore, were never tested.

Apparatus. The visual displays were generated bya Digital Equipment Corporation LSI-11 computerunder software control and presented on TektronixMonitor 604 oscilloscopes (Taylor, Klitzke, & Massaro,1978a, 1978b). These monitors employ a P31 phosphorwith a decay to .1% of stimulated luminance within 32msec. The alphabet consisted of lowercase sans-serifletters resembling the type font Univers 55. For anobserver seated comfortably at an experimental station,the six-letter displays subtended about 1.9 degrees ofvisual angle horizontally, and the distance from the topof an ascender to the bottom of a descender was about.4°. This computerized laboratory facility permittedtesting up to four subjects in parallel. Each subjectreceived the same visual display on the display monitor,and the computer collected individual subjects' re-sponses.

Procedure. A trial began with the presentation of asingle point in the center of the screen that served as afixation point. After 250 msec the fixation point wasreplaced by the test string followed after a variableblank interval by the masking stimulus. The maskingstimulus was made up of a montage of random letterfeatures. The mask changed from trial to trial andcovered the exact area of the test stimulus on that trial.The fixation point returned, followed by the targetletter. The onset of the masking stimulus always oc-curred 70 msec after the onset of the test string, and theonset of the target letter always occurred 180 msec afterthe onset of the masking stimulus. The target letterremained present until all subjects responded or for amaximum of 4 sec. The intertrial interval between theoffset of the target letter and the onset of the fixationpoint was 500 msec.

The durations of the test strings and masking stimuliwere adjusted to keep average performance across allconditions and the subjects being tested together asclose as possible to 75% correct. The target durationcould vary between 10-39 msec, and the mask durationcould vary between 1-30 msec. The summed durationof the target and mask was always 40 msec, and thedurations were traded off using an adaptive algorithm.The durations were modified after every block of 20trials, during which time each trial type (target or catch)by display type (word, R-H, R-L, I-H, I-L) occurredexactly twice. Therefore, all conditions were tested anequal number of times under the same stimulus condi-tions.

Each subject was tested on a single day for about 90

minutes. The testing session consisted of 240 practicetrials and two 400-trial experimental sessions. Subjectswere given rest and feedback after the practice trials anda rest period between the two experimental sessions.

Results

Figure 3 presents the average percentageof correct responses as a function of the fivedisplay types; reader ability is the curveparameter. There was an overall 26% dif-ference across display types, F(4,80) = 169,p < .001, but this difference was identical forgood and poor readers, F(4, 80) = .37. Re-sponses were 13% more accurate for wordsthan for regular-high items, 9% more accu-rate for regular than for irregular items, and4% more accurate for high-frequency thanfor low-frequency items. These resultsreplicated other studies with these items(Massaro et al, 1980) and, in addition,showed absolutely no effect of reading abilityon the role of orthographic structure.

Although the role of orthographic struc-ture did not change with reading ability,good and poor readers were influenced dif-

100

90

80

70

60

50WORD R-H R-L I-H I-L

Figure 3. Percentage of correct responses for good andpoor college readers as a function of display type. (R-H= regular high; R-L = regular low; I-H = irregular high;I-L = irregular low.)


100

90

SO

70

O 60

50100

90

80

70

60

50

40

Good

Poor

WORD R-H R-L I-H I-L

Figure 4. Percentage of correct responses on targetand catch trials for good and poor college readers as afunction of display type. (R-H = regular high; R-L =regular low; I-H = irregular high; I-L = irregularlow.)

ferently by the type of trial. Figure 4 plotsperformance accuracy of good and poorreaders for target and catch trials as a func-tion of display type. Good readers wereabout equally accurate on target and catchtrials, whereas poor readers averaged 20%better on catch than on target trials, F(l, 20)= 5.87, p < .025. This result may reflect aconservative bias for poor readers. Givenincomplete visual information, poor readersmay be more reluctant to say that they sawa target letter even though their evidence isjust as good as that for good readers.

Experiment 2

Method

Subjects. The subjects were 47 sixth-graders se-lected from the Madison Public Schools and 14 collegestudents in introductory psychology. All subjects,sixth-graders and adults, volunteered to participate andwere paid $3.00 for participation. The sixth gradersranged in chronological age from 11.6 to 13.3 years.

Five of the sixth-grade readers had to be eliminated,since they failed to perform between 65%-85% correctin the task or because of equipment malfunctions. Thesixth graders were administered the comprehensionsubtest of the Gates-MacGinite Reading Test (SurveyD, Form 1,1965). Comprehension grade-level scoresvaried from Grade 3.5 (raw score of 19) to 11.9+ (perfectscore of 52), with an average of 7.2. In addition, scoreson the Sequential Tests of Educational Progress (Step;Addison-Wesley, 1977) were available for all but fourof the sixth graders. We did not have many very poorreaders in our sample of sixth graders. Two groups ofsixth-grade readers were created by including readerswith the most extreme reading scores. The "poor"reader group included all children with a comprehensionscore at or below Grade 6.2 on the Gates test and at orbelow the 63rd percentile on the STEP test. The"good" reader group included all students at or aboveGrade 10.8 on the Gates test and at or above the 98thpercentile on the STEP test. Given these criteria, 10readers were included in each of the two groups. Theaverage Gates grade levels were 5.48 and 11.8 for thepoor and good reader groups, respectively. The cor-responding average percentiles on the STEP test were32.7 and 98.8. Finally, the 10 adults performing closestto 75% correct in the target search task were chosen forthe adult reading group. All participants, aixth gradersand adults, were paid $3.00 for participation.

Stimuli and apparatus. The test displays and ap-paratus were identical to those in Experiment 1.

Procedure. The procedure was identical in all re-spects to that in Experiment 1 except for two differ-ences. First, the target letter was given before ratherthan after the test display. Each trial began with afixation point for 250 msec, followed by a target letterfor 500 msec followed by the test display and maskingstimulus. The fixation point then replaced the maskingstimulus and remained on until all subjects respondedor for a maximum of 4 sec. The next trial began afteran intertrial interval of 500 msec. Second, the dura-tions of the test and masking stimuli were adjusted foreach of the subjects individually rather than across allof the subjects being tested together. This procedureis much more sensitive and allows a direct assessmentof the durations needed for each subject.

The sixth graders were given the 20-minute readingtest prior to the experimental test session; the adultsreceived only the test session. The testing sessionconsisted of 120 practice trials and two 200-trial ex-perimental sessions. Subjects were given rest andfeedback after the practice trials and a rest period be-tween the two experimental sessions. The completeexperiment took about 90 minutes for the sixth gradersand 60 minutes for the adults.

Results

Figure 5 plots the percentage of correctresponses as a function of orthographicstructure for each of the three groups ofreaders. Performance improved an averageof 11% with increasing orthographic struc-ture, F(4, 108) = 30.4, p < .001, but the


100

90

80

70

60

50

Poor 15.481Good 111.8]Adult

IWORD R-H R-L I-H I-L

Figure 5. Percentage of correct responses for adultreaders, good sixth-grade readers, and poor sixth-gradereaders as a function of display type. (R-H = regularhigh; R-L = regular low; I-H = irregular high; I-L = ir-regular low.)

overall interaction of orthographic structureand reading level missed statistical signifi-cance, F(8,108) = 1.54, p > .2. The range ofstructure effects was 14% for adults, 12% forthe good sixth-graders, and only 7% for thepoor sixth-grade readers. Specific com-parisons between pairs of reader groups werecarried out. The comparison between theadults and poor sixth-grade readers pro-duced a significant interaction of readergroup and display type, F(4, 72) = 2.89, p <.05. These specific comparisons showedthat adults and good sixth-grade readerswere significantly better at utilizing ortho-graphic structure than were poor sixth-gradereaders.

Overall, subjects were about 9% more ac-curate on target than on catch trials, F(l, 27)= 15.7, p < .001, but this result did not in-teract with reader ability, or with ortho-graphic structure.

To provide a more detailed evaluation oforthographic structure, two additionalanalyses were carried out. First, an analysiswas performed on the 4 classes of anagrams,

treating regularity and frequency as factors.Regular anagrams were recognized about 3%better than irregular anagrams, F(l, 27) =13.85, p < .001. Performance was about 3%more accurate on high- than on low-fre-quency anagrams, F(l, 27) = 14.46, p < .001.The significant interaction of regularity andfrequency, F(l, 27) = 4.73, p < .001, reflectedthe greater advantage of the regular-highitems relative to the other three classes ofanagrams. None of these effects interactedwith reading ability.

The second analysis was carried out tocontrast the words with the regular-highanagrams. Words were recognized about5.5% better than the regular-high anagrams,F(l, 27) = 22.56, p < .001, and this effectinteracted with reading ability, F(l, 27) =3.33, p = .05. Poor sixth-grade readersshowed a 1.5% word advantage, their goodreading colleagues showed a 5.5% advantage,and adults showed an 8.5% advantage. Thisresult showed that utilization of the lexicalstatus and/or the orthographic structure ofwords was a direct function of readinglevel.

To assess whether the stimulus durationsvaried across the three groups of readers, ananalysis was carried out with the letter-stringdurations as the dependent measure. Foreach subject, the duration could be changedafter every block of 20 trials, giving a total of20 duration values across the 400 trials.Blocks of trials and reader group were thefactors in the analysis of variance. Thedurations decreased from about 25 to 24msec across the 20 blocks of the experiment,F(19, 513) = 5.16, p < .001. The durationalso varied systematically with reading level,F(2, 27) = 23.37, p < .001. The averagedurations were 27, 25, and 18 msec for thepoor sixth-grade, good sixth-grade, and adultreaders, respectively. Even the 2 msec dif-ference between the poor and good sixth-grade readers was statistically significant,F(l, 18) = 5.83, p < .05. Although the taskappeared to be more difficult for the poorerreaders, it should be emphasized that theduration differences as a function of readinglevel do not necessarily implicate differencesat a visual level. If, for any reason, poorreaders make more errors in the task thangood readers, then duration differences


would be observed. As an example, it couldhave been the case that poor readers forgotthe target letter or hit the wrong button bymistake more often than good readers. Ingeneral, performance differences in anycomplex task do not implicate the reason(s)for the differences.

The orthographic structure effects weresignificantly smaller in the precue task ofExperiment 2 than in the postcue task ofExperiment 1. The 26% difference acrossitem types for the college sophomores wasreduced to a 14% difference. This results isconsistent with the idea that the target letterprecue may encourage the reader to rely lesson knowledge about orthographic structure.Rather than attempting to resolve the letterstring into a word or wordlike string, thesubject may simply look for critical featuresof the target letter (Massaro et al., 1980).This 12% difference between the two tasksis about twice as large as the difference ob-served by Massaro et al. (1980). The inter-action of orthographic structure with readingability may have been even more apparentin Experiment 2 if the overall effect of or-thographic structure had been of the samemagnitude as it was in the postcue task.

Correlation Analyses

It is reasonable to expect that post hoccorrelations of various measures of ortho-graphic structure with performance on eachitem would provide a more sensitive evalu-ation of the contribution of orthographicstructure. Rather than looking for differ-ences between classes of items, the post hoccorrelations allowed an assessment of dif-ferences among-all of the items in the task.Massaro et al. (1980) found that some posthoc descriptions of orthographic structureprovided a better description of performancein the target search task than did eithersingle-letter positional frequency or the bi-nary classification of regularity. Accord-ingly, it is possible that these post hoc mea-sures of orthographic structure would pro-vide a more sensitive assessment of its uti-lization as a function of reading ability.

A number of frequency measures and onemeasure of regularity were correlated withperformance on each of the 200 items used

in the present experiments. The source ofall of the frequency measures comes from theMassaro et al. (1980) analysis of a word cor-pus sampled by Kucera and Francis (1967).Counts were determined for single-letter,bigram, and trigram units. Tables wereprepared by counting the occurrence of eachunit by position in words of a given length.Massaro et al. (1980) provide the tables alongwith the details of their preparation. Thesingle-letter positional frequency of a givenletter in the test string is measured by thefrequency with which the letter occurs in thesame serial position in words of six letters.The summed single-letter frequency of thecomplete letter string is the sum of the pos-itional frequencies of each of the individualletters in the string. Summed bigram andtrigram frequencies are analogously definedin terms of bigram and trigram letter com-binations. Position-insensitive counts givethe cumulative frequencies of the unitswithout regard to position in words of sixletters.

All unit frequencies were based on wordtoken rather than type counts. A type countcounts each particular word only once re-gardless of how often it occurs, whereas atoken count counts the number of occur-rences of each word. The two counts arehighly correlated in the English language.Each position-sensitive frequency of a givenunit was transformed to a logarithmic valuebefore the summed counts for the letterstrings were computed. The log of 0 wasdefined as 0. Massaro et al. (1980) and thepresent study found that these log countscorrelated more highly with the performancemeasures than did the linear frequencycounts.

The word-frequency counts were takendirectly from the Kucera and Francis (1967)count. Log word frequencies were used inthe correlations, since these correlatedhigher than linear word frequency. Thevalue 0 was assigned to all nonwords.

Finally, as an attempt to quantify regu-larity, Massaro et al. (1980) computed asimple count of orthographic irregularitiesfor the 200 test items. An irregularity wascounted for each impermissible vowel clusteras well as for each phonologically illegalconsonant cluster when considered as part


Table 1Correlations of a Number of Predictor Variables With Overall Accuracy Performance as aFunction of Reading Level in Experiments 1 and 2

Experiment

Predictor

Position-sensitive frequencySingle letterBigramTrigram

Position-insensitive frequencySingle letterBigramTrigram

Word frequencyRegularity

1

Good

.513

.671

.704

.203

.520

.644

.601

.514

Poor

.492

.678

.720

.229

.543

.645

.634

.508

Adults

.294

.423

.434

.157

.339

.374

.346

.280

2

Good

.232

.413

.474

.130

.342

.424

.358

.286

Poor

.249

.256

.246

.080

.155

.193

.167

.206

Note. With df = 199, correlations greater than .18 are significant at p < .01.

of a monosyllable. The counts were madenegative so that the expected correlationswould be positive. The exact rules for theirregularity count was given in Massaro et al.(1980) and Massaro and Taylor (Note 1).

The dependent variable for the correla-tions was the average performance on eachof the test items. For each of the 200 stim-ulus items, an average percentage correctscore was computed by averaging the scoresfor each item across the subjects in eachgroup of readers. Table 1 gives the corre-lations of the predictor variables with overallaccuracy performance as a function ofreading level in Experiments 1 and 2. Po-sition-sensitive summed trigram countsprovided the overall best predictor of per-formance. All of the predictor variableswere correlated with performance to somedegree and what was true for one measurewas generally true for the others. The pre-dictor variables were significantly correlatedwith each other. For example, the correla-tion of word frequency with performancecould be completely accounted for by tri-gram frequency. Word frequency and po-sition-sensitive trigram frequency correlated.78 in the present list of letter strings.

For the postcue task in Experiment 1,position-sensitive summed trigram fre-quency accounted for about 50% of thevariance in overall accuracy on each of the200 test items. Consistent with the main

effects in the factorial design, the correlationdid not differ for good and poor adult read-ers. The large correlations found in thepostcue task of Experiment 1 were signifi-cantly attenuated in the precue task of Ex-periment 2. For adult readers, the bestpredictor accounted for only 19% of thevariance. However, the correlations withorthographic structure now varied system-atically with reading level. The correlationswere very similar for the adults and goodsixth-grade readers and significantly smallerfor the poor sixth-grade readers. For ex-ample, position-sensitive summed trigramfrequency predicted about three times asmuch variance for the adults and goodsixth-grade readers as for the poor sixth-grade readers (p < .001). For every measureof orthographic structure except single-letterfrequency, the correlations for adults andgood sixth-grade readers were significantlylarger than those for poor sixth-grade read-ers (p < .001). Therefore, the reading leveldifferences found in the factorial analyses inExperiment 2 were also apparent in thecorrelational analyses.

Discussion

The present results revealed significantdifferences in the utilization of orthographicstructure as a function of reading level.Poor sixth-grade readers do not appear to


utilize structure to the same degree as dotheir good-reader peers or adult readers. Inaddition, good sixth grade readers appear tohave already reached an asymptotic level ofthe utilization of orthographic structure.Finally, good and poor college readers utilizeorthographic structure equally well in thetarget search task.

Mason and Katz (Experiment 2; 1976)found similar results with sixth-gradereaders. The good readers were reading atabout Grade 9 level, whereas the poor read-ers were reading at about Grade 3. Perfor-mance on a nonredundancy condition wascompared with a redundancy condition in atarget search task, using Greek and othersymbols as test items. On each trial, a targetsymbol was presented, followed by a teststring of 6 symbols; subjects indicatedwhether or not the target symbol was presentin the test string. In the no-redundancycondition, any of the 12 symbols was equallylikely to occur in any of the six positions inthe test string. In the redundancy condi-tion, the symbols were constrained to occuronly in some positions. Given the no-re-dundancy condition, reaction times did notdiffer for the good and poor readers. Goodand poor readers given the redundancycondition did differ, however, in that goodreaders benefited from redundancy, whereaspoor readers did not.

The results of Experiment 2 along withthose of Mason and Katz (1976) encouragethe belief that the utilization of orthographicstructure is related to reading level of youngreaders. The failure to find differences be-tween good and poor college readers in Ex-periment 1 does not necessarily weaken thisconclusion, since they represent a differentpopulation of readers. Although good andpoor college readers may utilize orthographicstructure to similar degrees in the targetsearch task, these poor readers may havespent more time and effort in mastering theuse of this structure in learning to read. Ifthis were the case, other skills necessary forgood reading may not have developed to asufficient degree.

Classroom Practice

Given the establishment of orthographic

structure as a psychological construct and itsrelationship to reading ability, it may not bepremature to discuss some implications ofthe present research for learning to read. Ifthe utilization of orthographic structure inword recognition is an important componentin reading, then it may be profitable to fa-cilitate the child's understanding of thisstructure. First, we present some of theimportant constraints in written Englishthat could be profitably taught. Althoughthese constraints are based on letter occur-rences in written text for adults (Kucera &Francis, 1967), an analysis of written textsfor Grades 3-9 (Carroll, Davies, & Richman,1971) indicated that orthographic con-straints remain relatively constant for textsacross reading levels.

One of the most noticeable constraints inEnglish orthography is the difference be-tween where consonants and vowels occur inwords. Vowel sounds are relatively infre-quent in initial or final position in Englishwords. Therefore, the reader can expectwords to begin and end with consonants,except for final e, which is not pronounced.For example, when the letters a, e, i, o, u, andy occur in five-letter words, they occur in

, first position only 9% of the time. The let-ters a, i, o, and u are found in final positionin five-letter words on only 1% of their oc-currences. If the orthography were un-structured, then the expected occurrence atone of the five positions would be 20%.Therefore, since most words contain at leastone vowel, vowel letters can be expectedmore often in the medial positions than inthe initial and final positions (except for eand y, which are relatively frequent in finalposition; when these two letters occur infive-letter words, they occur 35% of the timein final position). The digraph vowels, ea,ee, ie, oa, and oo also occur most often inmedial positions. Similarly, in short wordsthat are usually monosyllabic, consonantsare more likely to be found in initial and finalpositions.

Consonant clusters are another key fea-ture of English orthography. There aregreat constraints on the frequency and lo-cation of these clusters in English words.Table 2 presents the most frequently oc-curring bigram consonant clusters in initial


Table 2Most Frequently Occurring ConsonantClusters in Word-Initial and Word-FinalPositions in English Words of 4-7 Letters

Word initial Word final

thwhstfrshprchgrtrpiclspbrkndrsccrblsmfl

ngthstchId11ndntrstshtdsssckrtrdnsShctIs

Note. Consonant clusters are listed in order of fre-quency of occurrence.

and final position in English words of fourthrough seven letters. The clusters th, st,and ch are frequent in both initial and finalpositions. The cluster sh occurs about fourtimes more often in initial than in final po-sitions. However, all other clusters frequentin one position are relatively infrequent oractually illegal and nonoccurring in theother. Of the 20 frequent consonant clustersin initial position, 13 of them do not occur atall in final position. Three others (sp, sc,and sm) seldom occur in final position. Ofthe 20 frequent consonant clusters in finalposition, 14 of them never occur in initialposition. Three others (II, ts, and gh) onlyoccur a few times and might be consideredillegal in initial position. In this way, thereis extremely high predictability with regardto where most consonant clusters can befound in English words. It should be notedthat the final cluster ht derives solely fromght and probably should be taught on thisbasis.

The implications of the fact that manyconsonant clusters in initial and final posi-tions are illegal if the letters are reversed inorder are interesting. All of the initial con-

sonant clusters in Table 2 are illegal if theletters are reversed. The clusters th and whare frequent in initial position, but ht and hwcannot occur in initial position. Similarly,many of the clusters in final position are il-legal and do not occur when the letter orderis reversed. This constraint could nicelycompensate for a potential visual difficultyin reading. There is some evidence thatreaders may correctly recognize the lettersin a string but mistake their relative posi-tions. These transposition errors, have beenobserved in experiments by Estes, Allmeyer,and Reder (1976) and others. Transposi-tions of letters have even been proposed asone of the primary causes of dyslexia—thechild reading the word was as saw (Orton,1925). Utilization of the constraints onletter clusters could conceivably compensatefor difficulty in resolving the relative spatialposition of letters. A reader having resolvedthe letters c and h would know they mustoccur in the order ch and not in the order he.Similarly, the vowel clusters ea and oa canbe clarified on recognition of the letters,since ae and ao seldom occur in English.

Children should be able to learn some ofthe constraints in English orthography atabout the same time that they usually learnphonics. Instead of drill and practice, agame format could be employed to teachvarious aspects of orthographic structure.We present only a few possible games, sinceteachers will probably prefer to develop theirown variations. The goal of the games is toteach children common letter patterns andwhere in words these patterns are most likelyfound.

One possible game is very similar to theexperiments presented here. Studentscould be asked to search for letters and letterclusters in common English words. It is notnecessary (and, in fact, not desirable) that allof the words be in the child's written vocab-ulary. Students could be given a vertical listof words and asked to search the list from thetop down, checking each word that containsa particular letter or cluster of letters. Astopwatch could be used to measure thesearch time, and some score could be givenin terms of the number of letters found andthe search time. Following the game, thechildren can discuss where they have found


certain letters and clusters and what generalrules of thumb might be helpful. The ben-efits of learning the rules should be readilyapparent to the children. Knowing that theconsonant cluster wh must occur at the be-ginning of a word would greatly facilitatesearching a list of words for this cluster. Theword lists could be varied to teach many ofthe constraints we have discussed. Thedifferences between vowels and consonants,the common consonant and vowel clusters,the positions in which letters and letterclusters are usually found, and the uniqueordering of the letters in most clusters can beilluminated in the target search game.

Letter strings can also be created by ar-ranging and rearranging a small number ofletters and letter clusters on a magneticboard. Here the game could be made moreinteresting by having the children create newwords to describe certain events. The goalwould be to create the word visually ratherthan orally, although the child could alsoattempt to pronounce the new word duringor after it is spelled. Students also could beasked to categorize letter strings as possibleor impossible sequences. If the string iscalled impossible, the student could furtherindicate what is wrong with it and how itmight be corrected.

A well-known game currently available onmany hobby computers and on the TexasInstrument's Speak and Spell computer is"Hangman." The child (or adult) is givena mystery word of a certain length. Theletters that make up the word are guessedone at a time. A correct guess is rewardedwith the letter in the position(s) in which itappears in the mystery word. To win, theparticipant must guess all of the letters be-fore making a certain number of incorrectguesses. Obviously, guesses should not berandom but can be optimized on the basis ofthe structure of English spelling. Discussionof good and bad guesses might providevaluable insights into the structure of writ-ten language.

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive listof games and we are confident that teacherswill want to develop others. Initial reactionsof reading teachers have been very enthusi-astic. It is generally accepted that childrenshould be made increasingly aware of lan-

guage, and although orthographic structureis just one small attribute of written lan-guage, it will be to a student's advantage tounderstand and utilize this structure inreading and writing.

Reference Note

1. Massaro, D. W., & Taylor, G. A. Reading ability andthe utilization of orthographic structure in reading.(Tech. Rep. No. 515). Madison: Wisconsin Re-search and Development Center for IndividualizedSchooling, University of Wisconsin, July 1979.

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Received May 29,1979 •

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