The effect of spacing versus massing on orthographic learning

Signy Wegener*, Hua-Chen Wang, Elisabeth Beyersmann, Erik D. Reichle, Kate Nation, Anne Castles

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
59 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Distributing 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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)361-372
Number of pages12
JournalReading Research Quarterly
Volume58
Issue number3
Early online date28 Dec 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jul 2023

Bibliographical note

Copyright the Author(s) 2022. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.

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