ABSTRACT
Word recognition develops with such remarkable speed that, by the end of eighth grade, we expect children learning to read English to know and recognize over 80,000 words (Adams, 1990). At a basic level, beginning readers must establish a system of mappings or correspondences between the letters or graphemes of written words and the phonemes of spoken words (Ehri, 1992), and it is generally thought that this alphabetic decoding system is underpinned by phonological skills (Brady & Shankweiler, 1991; Byrne, 1998; Goswami & Bryant, 1990). To become accurate and efficient readers of the English language, however, children need to do more than assemble or decode pronunciations on the basis of spelling-sound mappings. They need to acquire a rapid and flexible word-recognition system that embodies knowledge of both the regularities and the irregularities of the English orthography.
