Context effects on orthographic learning of regular and irregular words Hua-Chen Wang a,⇑ , Anne Castles a , Lyndsey Nickels a , Kate Nation b a Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia b Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK article info Article history: Received 14 May 2010 Revised 24 November 2010 Keywords: Orthography Reading development Word recognition Orthographic learning Self-teaching hypothesis Word regularity abstract The self-teaching hypothesis proposes that orthographic learning takes place via phonological decoding in meaningful texts, that is, in context. Context is proposed to be important in learning to read, especially when decoding is only partial. However, little research has directly explored this hypothesis. The current study looked at the effect of context on orthographic learning and exam- ined whether there were different effects for novel words given regular and irregular pronunciations. Two experiments were con- ducted using regular and irregular novel words, respectively. Second-grade children were asked to learn eight novel words either in stories or in a list of words. The results revealed no signif- icant effect of context for the regular items. However, in an ortho- graphic decision task, there was a facilitatory effect of context on irregular novel word learning. The findings support the view that contextual information is important to orthographic learning, but only when the words to be learned contain irregular spelling– sound correspondences. Crown Copyright Ó 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction How reading abilities develop has generated immense research interest. A widely accepted conclu- sion from this wealth of research is that, at least in alphabetic writing systems such as English, the ability to match a letter or string of letters to its correct sound is a fundamental skill during the early stage of reading. The importance of this phonological decoding skill in reading has been supported by many studies (e.g., Brady & Shankweiler, 1991; Byrne, 1992, 1998; Goswami & Bryant, 1990). 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Crown Copyright Ó 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.11.005 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: huachen.wang@mq.edu.au (H.-C. Wang). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 109 (2011) 39–57 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp