ABSTRACT
My purpose is to review how reading and spelling capabilities develop in children in order to show how print works its way into the minds of learners to influence their knowledge of words and phonemes. When experienced readers read familiar words, they process letter cues rather than shape cues. Seeing words activates fairly complete information about the letters stored in memory. What sort of process accounts for readers’ ability to remember letter information for a huge number of words? Contrary to traditional views that sight words are learned as non-phonological, visual, rote memorized forms, my theory and evidence suggest that sight words are learned by the application of systematic knowledge about grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Connections between graphemes seen in spellings and phonemes detected in pronunciations of words are formed and stored in memory for individual words. As beginners learn to read words and also to spell them, the conventional writing system shapes their awareness of the lexical and phonemic structure of language.
