The ability to recognize many words by sight during fluent reading depends on what skills?

The ability to recognize many words by sight during fluent reading is fundamentally linked to the development of the ability to map graphemes to phonemes. This mapping is crucial because it allows readers to understand the relationship between letters and their corresponding sounds. When readers encounter words they have not seen before, their skills in decoding — converting written symbols into sounds — enable them to pronounce and eventually recognize these words.

Additionally, strong phonemic awareness supports this process by helping readers break down and manipulate the sounds within words, which is foundational for effective decoding. As readers practice these skills, they develop a bank of words that they can recognize instantly and automatically, contributing significantly to fluent reading.

Visual memory plays a role in recognizing words, but it is closely tied to the understanding of sound-letter correspondence established through phonemic awareness and decoding. Context clues and oral language skills, while beneficial for overall comprehension and vocabulary growth, do not specifically address the mechanism of sight word recognition in the same way that grapheme-phoneme mapping does. Thus, the emphasis on the skills related to grapheme-phoneme relationships in the correct answer underscores their critical role in achieving fluent reading.