Increasing the Naming Speed of Poor Readers: Representations Formed across Repetitions

In three experiments we examined the effect of repetition practice on the acquisition, retention, and generalization of children's skill in rapidly naming visually presented words. Experiment 1 showed that naming times decrease rapidly with practice. Retention of this newly acquired skill in rapid naming was a function of the degree of learning during training. "Overlearning" was necessary to prevent forgetting of the skill. Experiment 2 indicated that the rate at which the naming gains were acquired, and the amount of forgetting, was unrelated to the specific orthographic to phonological correspondences among the trained words. Experiment 3 suggested that even when the spelling/sound regularities were used to facilitate learning, there was no generalization of the naming time skill to new words that share the same spelling/sound relations. The results were discussed in terms of the nature of the representation that underlies rapid naming.