I and my colleagues from the Florida Center for Reading Research recently returned from a trip to Rotterdam, The Netherlands for the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. The city is a wonderfully international place and the hosts picked a really enriching location, with so much in the way of street life and culture around the meeting center. I am particularly excited about the conference this year because my wonderful graduate student, Jordyn Thomas, presented her first research at the meeting by delivering a poster entitled: A novel task that taps knowledge about the phonotactic properties of spoken words. This work is being done in collaboration with our colleagues Laura Steacy and Jay Rueckl at the University of Connecticut, Noam Siegelman at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Don Compton at FCRR. The study is being conducted with data recently collected in the P20 project on the Developmental English Lexicon Project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NICHD) led by Don Compton. Jordyn is an early career scholar who is working on topics related to the intersection of language variation (namely variation in spoken language dialect in English, specifically African American English) and reading development. The task that we’ve developed requires child participants to identify which of a pair (2AFC) of aurally delivered nonwords is more “wordlike,” where pairs have been manipulated as a function of the statistical properties of phonotactics contained in thier onset and codas. A set of critical items are manipulated strategically to differentiate according to the African American English and Mainstream American English dialect. We are just starting to analyze the data – so more on the results of the study later.

I am also excited about our RA, Daniela Staton, who has been working in our lab for the last year as a high school student (!). Dani presented her research in a poster session with a presentation called “Implicit representation of letters in early reading development.” Dani’s interests are on the representational properties of early readers that arise from early experiences with print. Her study examines the behavior of Kindergarten and 3rd Grade children in a free sort activity where they are asked to sort the 26 letters of the English alphabet according to their naive intuitions about the “similarity” of the letters. Our results suggest that as children develop reading skills, letters are sorted increasingly in terms of the phonological properties that pairs of letters share (e.g., “f” and “v” become increasingly “similar” as reading experience grows. Daniela is starting her undergraduate career this fall at Stanford. I will disclose that I did not have the permission of the individuals whose (unaffiliated) legs appeared at the bottom of this photo – but I hope that posting it here does not offend anyone.

Colleagues and I recently published an article in Mind, Brain, and Education titled “Pressure Points on Representational Quality: Evolving the Traditional Instructional Model for Dyslexia.” In essence, we argue that traditional dyslexia instruction must evolve by incorporating contemporary findings from developmental science and cognitive psychology.

For decades, standard remediation approaches have relied heavily on explicit, rule-based phonics instruction. While this approach provides a necessary foundation, our contention is that phonics oversimplifies the English writing system at the expense of deeper learning. English is a “quasi-regular” writing system—meaning words don’t cleanly abide by letter-sound correspondences, frequently deviating from phonic rules, as seen in words like cough or tongue. As a result, over-relying on rule memorization leaves critical gaps in a reader’s development.

To address these limitations, we advocate for shifting the instructional focus toward improving representational quality. Drawing from the Lexical Quality Framework and the Triangle Model, we describe a framework for instruction wherein robust reading development relies on forming detailed, tightly integrated mental representations of a word’s spelling (orthography), pronunciation (phonology), and meaning (semantics).

We advocate for incorporating learning tasks that are less commonly associated with reading development, especially in terms of early visual word recognition and naming skills. For example, spelling can be uniquely helpful in developing fully specified orthographic representations, which demands far higher precision than word recognition alone given that it requires producing a word’s visual identity in an act of active written production.

Rather than viewing decoding as a deterministic, step-by-step application of rules, we emphasize that successful reading requires active flexible application of knowledge during word identification. Vocabulary knowledge and engaging a word’s varied semantic context play an active role in this process, helping readers resolve mismatches when strict phonological rules fail.

Ultimately, the article calls for educational and clinical practice to move beyond basic rule-following in reading instruction for children with dyslexia – though the perspectives we share are relevant for typically developing readers as well. Effective dyslexia intervention must explicitly cultivate the application of knowledge beyond simple “decoding” skills based on letter sound rules, leveraging vocabulary knowledge and knowledge about statistical properties of the writing system beyond “rules.” Ultimately we want to ensure that struggling readers build the resilient, high-quality word representations needed for fluent reading and spelling.

The article can be found in open access here.

I recently published a paper called “Which Words Are Special? Identification of “Sight” Words in Educational Resources” in Reading Research Quarterly with Lauren Schilling, a current graduate student at Harvard and former research assistant of mine at the University of Wisconsin, and Mark Seidenberg, my graduate adviser.

Early reading instruction typically prioritizes a set of “special” words (often called “sight,” “trick,” “snap,” or “high frequency” words) that are deemed instructionally important based on some combination of factors related to their irregularity/ inconsistency (in terms of orthographic-phonological structure) and/ or their frequency (a property that is related to consistency but most often conceptualized as something that is theoretically distinct). Importantly, there has historically been a lack of consensus on which words actually belong in this category and the properties that should constitute a word’s putative status as one that deserves special attention.

The study analyzes six influential early reading resources: the Dolch list, the Fry list, Fountas & Pinnell’s “Words to Know,” Fundations’ “Trick Words,” Wonders’ “High-Frequency Words,” and Kilpatrick’s “Irregular Words.”

There is substantial disagreement across these six lists, a total of 973 unique words were identified. Remarkably, only 28 words (3%) appeared in all six lists, while more than half of the words appeared in only a single resource. The word lists differ significantly in terms of a number of lexical properties, including frequency, spelling-sound consistency, age of acquisition, imageability, and word length. For example, Kilpatrick’s list is an outlier featuring lower-frequency, later-acquired, and longer words, while others like Fry focus tightly on very high-frequency terms. However, the differences go well beyond this.

We provide a number of ideas in closing the article that attempt to move away from solutions that rely primarily on intuition rather than explicit, scientific theories of learning, as well as proposing an alternative, reproducible method that jointly evaluates word frequency and spelling-sound consistency using Euclidean distance to select the most instructionally valuable words. Instead of requiring children to memorize rule-violating “sight words” by rote, we advocate for instruction that groups words in a way that highlights overlapping statistical patterns (e.g., “have,” “had,” and “has”) even when the overlap doesn’t fall under classic “phonic” type patterns associated with them. This approach will engage children’s natural statistical learning mechanisms, making early reading acquisition more efficient and mutually supportive of word learning in other modalities (in spoken language comprehension and production, writing, or otherwise).

The article is open access and can be found here.

In our recent paper published in The Reading Teacher [link], Prof. Kearns and I outline the essential aspects of the triangle model (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; see Seidenberg, Cooper Borkenhagen, & Kearns, 2020 for a review) – a seminal theory of learning that explains a range of underlying cognitive processes related to reading development. The theory is explained especially with respect to the fact that printed English is a system that contains many atypical forms in terms of the relationship between letters and sounds. This type of system is often referred to as quasiregular – meaning that it appears to be rule governed, but often permits exceptions.

New practitioner oriented publication out with Devin KearnsRead More »

Next week I will be chairing a symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading in Copenhagen, Denmark. The symposium is titled “The bases of representation in the reading system”, and will host talks from myself and three other researchers: Valeria Rogobon, Signy Wegener (Australian Catholic University and the Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy), and Laura Steacy (from Florida State and FCRR). Don Compton is the discussant. The abstract for the symposium is listed below. To anyone attending SSSR this year, we hope to see you there.

Welcome to my new spot. This is my first time transmitting from my new site and I’m thrilled to be in my new academic home, the Florida State University and the Florida Center for Reading Research. For someone who is interested in reading, including the educational extensions of reading science, I can think of few better places for me to call home.

The history of reading and education research at FSU and FCRR is very rich, and it is a humbling experience to be allowed to be a part of this. For those interested, you can find a brief history of the center here.

You can find updates about my work here in the Research tab, and feel free to reach me using the contact information below.