Exposure to dialect variation in an artificial language prior to literacy training impairs reading of words with competing variants but does not affect decoding skills.
Glenn Patrick Williams, Nikolay Panayotov, Vera Kempe · Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · 2021
words in those learners who had successfully acquired the dialect variants prior to literacy training. This effect was exacerbated when literacy training also included dialect variation. Crucially, although no benefits from the interventions were found, dialect exposure did not affect reading and spelling of untrained words suggesting that phonological decoding skills can remain unaffected by the existence of multiple word form variants in a learner's lexicon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).