Cunningham, A. &Stanovich, K. (1993). Children's literacy environments and early word recognition subskills. Reading and Writing: An Interdiciplinary Journal , 5, 193-204

Cunningham and Stanovich’s research enhances Cassar’s by trying to separate phonological and orthographic processing skills in word recognition during the very earliest stages of reading acquisition.  They also asked if print exposure predicted variance in orthographic knowledge.
Using several different measures, including the Stanford Achievement Test, phoneme deletion, phoneme transpostion, experimental spelling tasks, letter-string choice tasks, and Title Recongition Test, Cunningham and Stanovich proved there was a 40% correlation between exposure to print and orthographic knowledge for early readers.
Stanovich and Cunningham confirm that exposure to print will build orthographic conventions.  Students should read high interest, easy material to help build their processing skills.