THE BEGINNING OF DECODING

It is widely agreed that children recognize their first words in a dif ferent way than they later decode. One hypothesis is that sight words are recognized as wholes, another that they are recognized by parts. T wo experiments were devised to compare these hypotheses. In one, child ren were taught a sight word accompanied by a salient extraneous cue a nd then tested for recognition of the word and the cue. In the other, children were taught sight words, then tested for recognition of each half of the word. The children were found to recognize the cue but not the word; they recognized one half of the word but not the other. The results support the idea that first words are recognized by selective association.