Intralist Similarity and Acquisition and Generalization of Word Recognition.
Beth A. McCutcheon, Eugene E. McDowell · The Reading Teacher · 1969
it is noteworthy that all words are not equally difficult for begin ning readers to learn. One factor affecting the difficulty in learning to read a list of words is the discriminability of the words composing the list. The discriminability of a list of words to be learned is related, in part, to the intralist similarity of the words composing the list. The variety of letters contained in a list of words defines the extent of one dimension of intralist similarity. A list of words which includes a large number of different letters for a constant number of words is regarded as having low intralist similarity; correspondingly, a list which contains only a small number of dif ferent letters for the same number of words is characterized as