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The progress to skilled reader requires establishing memories of visual word forms – orthographic memories. The ability to access a word memory rapidly is critical to fluent reading. The comprehension system depends on rapid and effortless input from the lexicon, and this, in turn, depends on rapid and effortless access to a word meaning from its form.

The importance of orthographic learning has been recognized in English reading research for some time (e.g., Ehri, 1992; Perfetti, 1992). As developed by Share (1995, 2004) in the self‐teaching hypothesis, decoding a word supports the establishment of its orthographic memory (see Castles & Nation, this volume). Ehri (2005, 2014) describes overlapping phases of development that move toward a skilled phase characterized by orthographic mappings at morpheme and syllable levels.

This movement from decoding words to effortlessly identifying them can be expressed as a general operating principle (Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2017b): Word identification shifts from computation to memory‐based retrieval for individual words as they become familiar, although sublexical procedures continue to be involved. Word reading speed becomes the distinguishing marker of skill once children reach a threshold level of word reading accuracy. The frequency effect in word reading is evidence that readers retrieve word identities (pronunciation, meaning) more quickly as word forms become more familiar. Developing readers, as they increase their skill at decoding, also increasingly use a rapid retrieval or “look‐up” procedure when a word becomes sufficiently familiar. Moreover, the effect of experience is not merely on access to word forms. By encountering words in varying contexts, meaning aspects of lexical quality are refined and reading comes to reflect a rich experience‐based lexical legacy (Nation, 2017).

How this development happens is simple: through practice. Experience in reading – effective experience in which children read words successfully and achieve comprehension – is the only certain path to establishing rapidly accessible orthographic representations. Beginning reading instruction supports this process only when it establishes the mapping foundations that allow this path to be used.