14 DAY TRIAL // A new scientific study comes to show that the age at which children learn to read can be considered an early indicator of their reading habits later on in life. That is to say, the science team behind the research, based at the University of Leicester, believes that kids form their word- and symbol-recognition patterns from a very early age, and that the aforementioned patterns only change when they become adults. By that time, their reading habits are already formed, and the speed and accuracy with which they read can be tied to the age they had when they started taking in their first words.
“Children read differently from adults, but as they grow older, they develop the same reading patterns. When adults read words they learned when they were younger, they recognize them faster and more accurately than those they learned later in life,” UL School of Psychology Dr. Tessa Webb, who has been the leader of the new investigation, said. She added that the study answered a 20-year-old question that psychologists had, which had been prompted by the fact that studies of children's learning habits, conducted on similar populations, yielded very different results.
For the last two decades, whenever researchers tried to study reading patterns in children, they came up with results that were significantly different from others conducted on the same age group, and in similar locations. Some of the previous works seemed to point at the fact that kids had the same reading patterns as adults did, whereas others strongly disagreed, and hinted at the fact that children had their proprietary reading “system.” The differences between these results were very puzzling.
Now, Dr. Webb reveals the fact that most of these studies failed to see eye-to-eye simply because they omitted to take one very important factor into account – the age at which children began to read. For her study, where this factor was key, the researcher asked youngsters to read both common and uncommon words, from sheets of paper where they were written, either respecting the spelling to sound rules, or not at all. She found that kids had a different reading pattern than adults until they were ten, but that, after that age, they developed an adult-like style.
The new study hypothesizes that the only reason why this could be happening is that the children started reading at different ages. Dr. Webb added that, when reading, people tended to recognize words they'd seen before, and to read past them a lot quicker. The speed with which someone reads is entirely dependent on how many words they know, and on how these words are inscribed in their subconscious mind. The results could be used, PhysOrg reports, to develop new treatments for diseases such as dyslexia.