RUNNING HEAD: ORTHOGRAPHY AND VOCABULARY ACQUISITION Orthographic facilitation in oral vocabulary acquisition

An experiment investigated whether exposure to orthography facilitates oral vocabulary learning. Fifty-eight typically developing children aged 8-9 years were taught 12 nonwords. Children were trained to associate novel phonological forms with pictures of novel objects. Pictures were used as referents to represent novel word meanings. For half of the nonwords children were additionally exposed to orthography, although they were not alerted to its presence, nor were they instructed to use it. After this training phase a nonword-picture matching post-test was used to assess learning of nonword meaning and a spelling post-test was used to assess learning of nonword orthography. Children showed robust learning for novel spelling patterns after incidental exposure to orthography. Further, we observed stronger learning for nonword-referent pairings trained with orthography. The degree of orthographic facilitation observed in post-tests was related to children’s reading levels, with more advanced readers showing more benefit from the presence of orthography.