Theories of Reading Development

Orthographic mapping (OM) involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings to the pronunciations and meanings of specific words in memory. It explains how children learn to read words by sight, to spell words from memory, and to acquire vocabulary words from print. This development is portrayed by Ehri (2005a) as a sequence of overlapping phases, each characterized by the predominant type of connection linking spellings of words to their pronunciations in memory. During d