From Spelling to Reading: Onset-Rime Representations as a Neural Link

Abstract

Visual orthographic knowledge may provide a shared foundation for reading and spelling, yet the nature of its underlying representations remains debated. Behavioral measures offer indirect evidence and may be influenced by other metalinguistic processes. It remains unclear whether early readers encode larger orthographic structures, such as onset-rime units, beyond individual letters and letter combinations, and whether neural sensitivity to these structures helps explain the relationship between spelling and reading. To address these questions, we used a a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) paradigm to contrast pseudowords constructed with the typical ordering of onset followed by rime elements (i.e., onset-rime) against matched strings in which the same elements appeared in the reverse order (i.e., rime-onset). Neural sensitivity to onset-rime orthographic structure was associated with both spelling ability and word-reading efficiency and, critically, mediated the relationship between these two literacy skills. These relationships remained significant after controlling for age and removing influential observations, and sensitivity to onset-rime orthographic structure explained additional variance in word-reading efficiency beyond spelling ability and age. Together, these findings provide neurophysiological evidence that sensitivity to onset-rime structure may reflect an intermediate orthographic representation, with neural sensitivity to this structure mediating the relationship between spelling and reading.