The importance of the first letter in children's parafoveal preprocessing in English: Is it phonologically or orthographically driven?

For both adult and child readers of English, the first letter of a word plays an important role in lexical identification. Using the boundary paradigm during silent sentence reading, we examined whether the first-letter bias in parafoveal preprocessing is phonologically or orthographically driven and whether this differs between skilled adult and beginner child readers. Participants read sentences that contained either a correctly spelled word in preview (identity; e.g., "circus"), a preview letter string that maintained the phonology but manipulated the orthography of the first letter (P + O- preview; e.g., "sircus"), or a preview letter string that manipulated both the phonology and the orthography of the first letter (P- O- preview; e.g., "wircus"). There was a cost associated with manipulating the first letter of the target words in preview for both adults and children. Critically, during first-pass reading, both adult and child readers displayed similar reading times between P + O- and P- O- previews. This shows that the first-letter bias is driven by orthographic encoding and that the first letter's orthographic code in preview is crucial for efficient, early processing of phonology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).