Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Younger readers, mean age 6;11, and older readers, mean age 8;7, matched on IQ and SES, read 18 consonant phonemes embedded in nonsense CVCs. Results indicated that (a) within groups, younger readers made significantly more errors on digraphs than graphs; (b) younger readers made significantly more errors on graphs in the final position; (c) there was no position effect for either group in reading digraphs. Analysis of errors based on the number of distinctive features shared within stimulus-response pairs revealed that (a) on graphs, both groups made significantly more errors that shared two distinctive features; (b) on digraphs, the majority of errors for younger readers shared one distinctive feature; (c) the predominant strategy on digraphs for both groups was to read one letter. These findings demonstrate that most oral reading errors produced by beginning readers are not random, but rather are systematically related to the stimulus.