A connectionist approach to making the predictability of English orthography explicit to at-risk beginning readers: Evidence for alternative, effective strategies

A case is made (and illustrated with empirical data with children) for conn ectionist models that are not only computationally explicit but also instru ctionally explicit. First-graders (N = 128) at the bottom of their classes in reading (average 11.5 percentile on nationally normed tests) participate d in a 3-layer intervention. In the first layer, kept constant for all trea tment groups, the alphabet principle was taught, making functional spelling units and alternations explicit. In the second layer, which varied systema tically across treatment groups, children received different kinds of tutor modeling in learning a set of words of varying spelling-sound predictabili ty, using different connections between printed and spoken words, singly or in combination. in the third layer, also kept constant, children read and discussed illustrated books. Over the 4-month, 24-lesson intervention, all 7 treatment groups in the second layer improved more in word-specific learn ing than a contact control group that received phonological and orthographi c awareness training without explicit instruction on orthographic-phonologi cal connections. Of these 7, only 3 kinds of explicit modeling (whole word, letter-phoneme, and combined whole word and letter-phoneme) resulted in gr eater transfer to untrained words than the contact control or the other 4 k inds of explicit modeling. Results are discussed in reference to the contro versy over whether dual route or connectionist models best account for the acquisition of reading.