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Abstract
Purpose: Self-teaching is one mechanism known to facilitate orthographic and semantic learning of unknown words, primarily via phonological recoding during independent reading. However, the extent to which students with dyslexia acquire lexical representations via self-teaching is unclear. To that end, this study employed the self-teaching paradigm to investigate word-learning outcomes of Grade 3 students with dyslexia. Method: Fifty-seven students with dyslexia read eight short stories with pseudoword targets embedded four or eight times. Immediately following independent reading, and 3–7 days later, students completed nine word-learning tasks (e.g., orthographic choice, semantic choice, pronunciation choice, spelling, definition production, picture naming, word naming, picture spelling, word-picture matching) to measure the extent (i.e., quality) of lexical representations acquired for the eight target pseudowords.
Results: There was clear evidence that students with dyslexia acquired orthographic and semantic knowledge of words following independent reading. However, students did not acquire high-quality lexical representations. Quality was affected by weaker development of phonological form knowledge. The number of exposures to target words in the text did not affect word learning outcomes. Text reading fluency, but not target decoding accuracy significantly predicted the quality of lexical representations acquired.
Conclusion: Although observed gains in orthographic and semantic knowledge suggest some ability to develop lexical representations, the lack of strong phonological learning, evidenced by weak target decoding accuracy and poor performance on the pronunciation choice task, indicates that the reliance on phonological recoding impairs lexical learning for students with dyslexia.