Production and Preschoolers: Is There a Benefit and Do They Know?

Although the production effect is well-established in undergraduates, limited research has examined this effect in children. The primary goal of the current study was to replicate the production effect in preschoolers. In Experiment 1, one group studied all items silently or aloud (pure lists) and another group studied half of the items silently and said half aloud (mixed lists).

Orthographic texture effects during spelling are due to variations in representational strength.

In this study, we investigated the source of the orthographic texture effect during familiar word spelling. Orthographic texture refers to the differential strength that individual letters in a word may be activated for output. Prior work indicates that strongly activated letters are more accurately produced than weakly activated ones (Jones, Folk, & Rapp, 2009, All Letters are not Equal: Sub-Graphemic Texture in Orthographic Working Memory.