THE EFFECT OF WORD LENGTH ON ITS RECOGNITION AMONG CHILDREN WITH DIFFERENT READING SPEED LEVELS

When acquiring reading skills, a child must be able to decode the visual properties that characterize each letter, as well as the letters and written words as a whole.Phonological encoding enables recognition and construction of the sound structure of written symbols and word as a whole (Vellutino et al., 2004).When reading unfamiliar words, they are initially processed sequentially, letter by letter or syllable by syllable, through phonological processing.To successfully recognize a word, at least 10-20 ms is required for the perception and identification of each letter.This word recognition model is primarily used when attempting to recognize an unfamiliar or new word or when learning to read.In contrast, an experienced reader uses their accumulated knowledge of word forms, vocabulary, and meaning, processing graphemes in parallel through lexical processing (Coltheart et al., 2001).The main aim of the study was to investigate how word length affects its recognition in different groups of readers, categorized by their reading speed.Twenty-eight second-grade and twenty-seven third-grade children completed a word recognition test with 105 words of varying length and phonetic complexity, selected by the school speech therapist based on consonant cluster properties.The words consisted of 4-10 letters.For each word length, 15 words were presented in random order for 533 ms each.The analysis used the percentage of correctly answered words for each corresponding word length.Based on reading speed, the second-grade children were divided into two groups: one with an average reading speed of 505 wpm (n=14) and the other with an average reading speed of 784 wpm (n=14).The third-grade children were divided into a group with an average reading speed of 677 wpm (n=13) and a group with an average of 1136 wpm (n=14).The results indicate that word length affects word recognition accuracy.This relationship is described by linear regression analysis.A more significant relationship is observed in the slower-reading groups.The slope coefficients of the relationship differ significantly between faster and slower readers -in the second-grade group (p<0.012), and in the third-grade group (p<0.001).