LAUSR

As skilled readers, we are able to recognize printed words with apparent ease. Indeed, you are most likely to find reading this text now to be far from an arduous process, and it has thus far taken only seconds of your time. Yet when children first begin down the pathway to becoming literate, the task of word reading is often far from an effortless one. And, of course, for some individuals the process of reading can remain challenging throughout life. In our attempts to describe and explain skilled reading, to better understand development, and to account for individual differences, many researchers are focusing on word representations, both in terms of delineating their role in literacy and explaining how they are acquired or learned. In this special issue, the topic of orthographic representations and learning is explored in considerable detail, through six studies employing diverse research methods with varying samples and languages. When young children are first learning to read and spell, the process can be slow and laborious. As they apply their growing knowledge and awareness of the alphabet, letters are sounded out and blended together in serial decoding of printed words, a process that consumes considerable cognitive resources. Matching individual sounds with letters during spelling can also be time-consuming and fraught with error. Much developmental research has focused on this early entry into learning to read and spell, and our knowledge of the importance of the alphabet and awareness of speech sounds (phonology) has grown exponentially as a result. Yet as children become more adept at reading, they begin to recognize words rapidly and with seemingly less conscious effort. In spelling, word-specific patterns are reproduced, testimony to having fully specified orthographic representations. There thus seems to be a transition on the pathway to literacy, where children progress from sounding out words to being able to more effortlessly recognize and spell print, implicating the importance of orthographic learning. Ehri (2005, 2014) eloquently described this development in literacy as a progression to being able to utilize memory representations for longer letter strings and entire words and proposed that children store or learn these representations as they progress in their developmental proficiency with processing written text. In essence, they become able to store longer and longer letter strings in memory through experience with, and exposure to, printed language. This storing of representations, or orthographic learning, is further detailed in Share’s (1995, 1999, 2004) oft-cited self-teaching hypothesis. Share proposed that a reader’s own independent attempts to decode print allow the reader to store longer and more detailed orthographic representations (i.e., more fully specified as per Perfetti, 1992). These representations then become available to the individual for future encounters with these words, providing a more direct route to fluent word reading. This connection between orthographic learning and efficient literacy is made explicit in other prominent developmental theory as well, in that more advanced word recognition and spelling skills are linked to better specified orthographic representations (e.g., Castles, Davis, Cavalot, & Forster, 2008; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Indeed, the common element among leading developmental reading theories appears to be a critical role attributed to orthographic learning and representations in helping