The Development of Word‐decoding Skills in Young Readers

Most of the research on the acquisition of word‐decoding skills has almost exclusively focused on the ability to read words in isolation. The purpose of this article is to extend our knowledge to the independent role of phonological and orthographic word‐decoding skills in the reading tasks which children encounter in school. The data were quite consistent with the general core of models suggesting that children first become proficient in phonological decoding then gradually shift towards a more direct orthographic‐decoding strategy. As such, these findings have helped to generalize models of the acquisition of word‐decoding skills to reading comprehension.