Developmental Changes In Word Superiority And Its Correlation With Reading Fluency.

Background: Normal adult readers are capable of recognizing words in conditions where
they are unable to accurately recognize the sequence of letters– termed the word
superiority effect (WSE). It is hypothesized that the recognition of words, as opposed to
random letter strings, are facilitated by contributions from a well-developed lexical bank
thereby producing the WSE. It follows that those readers without an adequately developed lexical bank may fail to show the WSE, and therefore may rely more on letter sequence recognition when recognizing words. This study explored the possible correlation between the emergence of the WSE and reading efficiency in 3rdgrade students.
Methods: The visual span was measured for random trigrams and high frequency three letter words in twenty-three 3rd grade students using high contrast (0.8) Courier text presented on an LCD monitor at various eccentricities relative to fixation using the method proposed by Legge et. al. (2007). Reading speed and grade-level reading ability data was collected from school-based assessments (STAR assessments) for each subject. The size of the visual spans for trigrams and words were computed for each subject. The difference in visual spans for trigrams and words was taken as a measure of the magnitude of the Word Superiority Effect (WSE).
Results: While trigrams were less easily recognized at increasing eccentricities, three lettered words were more consistently identified regardless of eccentricity. Students with greater grade equivalents tended to have larger visual spans for trigrams and words. Those students who were performing above a fourth grade level in school produced results comparable to adult levels.
Conclusion: This study demonstrates that the WSE has emerged in third and fourth graders; however, further testing with larger sample sizes across all school grades would need to be conducted to thoroughly test the interaction between visual span size, the WSE and grade level reading efficiency.