Reading,spelling and two types of irregularity in word recognition

How do good and poor readers, and good and poor spellers, vary in their decisions about words which have varying spelling-to-sound correspondences? This experiment isolates the effects of visual and phonological characteristics of words with schoolchildren of varying reading and spelling ability, aged between 9 and 11.5 years. Three groups of children were tested: good readers and good spellers, good readers who were poor spellers, and children who were both poor readers and poor spellers. The difference between‘good’and‘poor’was about two years according to the standardised tests which were used. The children performed a lexical decision task, deciding whether each letter-string was a word or not. Response times to three types of words were compared: standard regular words (e.g. SLOT, SPADE), words with common orthography but irregular spelling-to-sound relationships (e.g. HAVE, FEVER), and words with unusual orthography as well as irregular spelling-to-sound relationships (e.g. BISCUIT, ANSWER). The performance of good readers but not of poor readers was impaired on the words which were phonologically irregular (compared with regular words). Poor spellers were worse again on the dually irregular words, although not significantly, while the good spellers performed almost as well on these words as on the regular words. These results have a number of implications: that the regularity effect is phonologically and not orthographically mediated, that good readers use a predominantly phonological strategy in lexical decision while poor readers do not, and that for the best readers/spellers as tested here the orthographically and phonologically irregular words have some sort of special status which allows them to gain fast and accurate responses.