Study title

This deposits refers to data from three studies, all conducted to investigate the development of expertise in word reading skill. Study 1 contains two experiments, reported in full by Tamura, Castles and Nation (2017). Children learn new words via their everyday reading experience but little is known about how this learning happens. Study 2 is an experiment reported by Pagan and Nation (2019). This examined whether variations in contextual diversity, spacing and retrieval practice influenced how well adults learned new words from reading experience. Study 3 is an experiment reported by Pagan et al. (under review). It investigated semantic diversity – a metric that captures variations in previous contextual experience with a word – influences children’s lexical decision and reading aloud. The written word is arguably the greatest cultural invention. Orthography (the conventional writing system of a language) provides a set of tools that allows us to write words so that others who share our tools can also share our thoughts, ideas, and dreams. The written word allows us to create narratives that play to our imaginations or teach us about the world; the written word transcends space and time and it is almost impossible to imagine the world without it. For skilled readers, the connection between the letters on the page and the image they construe in our minds is so fast, so rich in content and so automatic, we rarely stop to think of the underlying complexities of what we do as we read. Yet, learning to read is hard. It takes time and requires instruction. Reading is a skill and like other skills, practice is critical to making the transition from novice-to-expert. The scientific study of reading has taught us a good deal about the early stages of reading development. We know that children need to acquire the "alphabetic principle" - the fundamental insight that in a language like English, letters code for meaning via sound. This allows children to decode - to...