Premium
Orthographic structures: grapheme patterns in child and adult texts
Author(s) -
Brian Thompson G.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
journal of research in reading
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.077
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9817
pISSN - 0141-0423
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9817.1985.tb00271.x
Subject(s) - bigram , spelling , grapheme , orthographic projection , reading (process) , vowel , linguistics , orthography , psychology , word (group theory) , word lists by frequency , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , consonant cluster , consonant , computer science , speech recognition , sentence , trigram , philosophy , graphene , physics , quantum mechanics
Descriptive statistics of grapheme patterns to which child readers are initially exposed were determined, with the purpose of providing a data source for research on children's knowledge and use of orthographic structures in reading and spelling English. The frequency of occurrence of grapheme patterns in the texts of two series of children's initial reading books were analysed by a classification of bigram components relevant to commonly postulated orthographic structures such as ‘letter cluster’, ‘blend’ and ‘digraph’. Frequencies among both word tokens and word types were tabulated for consonant‐value and vowel‐value bigrams for different spatial positions within words. Initial graphemes of words were also analysed by membership of such bigrams. Comparisons were made with similar tabulations derived from the Solso and Juel (1980) tables for adult texts. Although there was appreciable agreement, there were some notable instances of grapheme patterns which occurred with relatively high frequency in children's initial reading, but relatively low frequency in adult texts.