Published in

Wiley, Reading Research Quarterly, 3(58), p. 361-372, 2022

DOI: 10.1002/rrq.492

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

The Effect of Spacing Versus Massing on Orthographic Learning

This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

Full text: Unavailable

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Orange circle
Postprint: archiving restricted
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

AbstractDistributing study opportunities over time typically improves the retention of verbal material compared to consecutive study trials, yet little is known about the influence of temporal spacing on orthographic form learning specifically. This experiment sought to obtain and compare estimates of the magnitude of the spacing effect on written word form learning across three different outcome measures, administered between participants. Skilled adult readers (N = 120) read aloud 16 sentences containing an embedded pseudoword a total of four times. Half of the items were temporally distributed (appearing once in each of four blocks), while half were massed (read on four consecutive trials within a block). After a short delay, learning was assessed using tests of recognition (orthographic choice) or recall (spelling to dictation or letter cue spelling). There was a significant effect of spacing across all outcome measures (all p < .001). When the magnitude of the spacing effect was compared across these three measures, letter cue spelling showed a significantly larger spacing effect than spelling to dictation (p = .039) while orthographic choice did not significantly differ from either (both p > .05). These findings indicate that temporal spacing influences the learning of orthographic form, regardless of the outcome measure used.