Abstract

Individuals vary in the speed with which they read printed text. Each person has words in his or her mental lexicon that are of low, intermediate, and high quality. These representations are said to be developed through self-teaching as students are reading text (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1990; Share, 1995). According to the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (LQH), a word with a higher quality mental representation should be accessed more efficiently than a word with a lower quality representation. This ease of access can be observed via faster reading times. However, direct comparison between reading times of words progressing from low to high quality has yet to be studied. Here, reading times were measured for single words and analysed within-participant and within-word, according to orthographic quality (measured through spelling accuracy and stability). The data from this study show that teenagers who read more for pleasure have faster reading times and higher spelling scores. Furthermore, single-word reading speed gets faster as the orthographic quality of single words progresses from low to intermediate to high quality. Therefore, spelling is important; increasing spelling accuracy and stability is a worthwhile way to efficiently access mental representations of words, and thus increase reading speed. Reading for pleasure can help improve spelling abilities and should be an indispensible part of classroom and home activities.