"Can you use it in a sentence?": Establishing how word-production difficulties shape text formation

“你能在句子中使用它吗？”：确定词语生成困难如何影响文本形成

• 批准号: ES/W011832/1
• 负责人: Jens Roeser
• 金额: $ 31.07万
• 依托单位: Nottingham Trent University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FW011832%2F1
• 关键词: use; sentence; Establishing; how; word

Being able to communicate ideas in writing is a critical part of people's social and professional life. Underdeveloped literacy skills are likely to result in lower grades, diminished job prospects, and a lower quality of life. Yet over half a million UK adults have underdeveloped literacy skills which is more prevalent in groups from socio-economically deprived areas (Department for Education and Skills, 2007; PIAAC, 2013). My research will shape our understanding of how we communicate in writing, provides a foundation to isolate the needs of struggling writers, and hence will inform new ways how literacy difficulty in learners and struggling adults (with, for example, dyslexia) can be measured and how people with difficulty can be supported to provide equal opportunities for everyone. Even though we typically don't struggle to formulate a sentence in spoken conversation, struggling with word spelling can, literally, result in you forgetting what it was that you were going to say and how you were going to say it. This thinking is frequently advanced in the educationally-focussed writing literature. Surprisingly though, the evidence that this is the case - poor spellers often produce lower quality texts - is equivocal and explanations are limited.From a theoretical viewpoint, writing involves a cascade of mental processes that flows from our mind into our fingers. This cascade starts with an intended message, moves on to coming up with suitable words and a grammatically correct order, before finding the right spelling for these words, and finally outputting them onto paper or screen. When things are going well - when the writer knows what they want to say, has the vocabulary in which to say it, knows how the words are spelled, and has many hours practice at typing or handwriting - then this cascade permits remarkably fluent output. However, it is also relatively common for this smooth flow to be disrupted. This might happen, for example, when a writer struggles to remember the spelling for a word. This typically delays output or results in an incorrect word appearing on the screen. Arguably, neither of these are particularly serious issues. Much more serious is the possibility that spelling difficulty has knock-on effects for what we want to say and how we plan to put it. Anecdotally, at least, hesitating to output a word can, literally, result in you forgetting what it was that you were going to say.The proposed research will (a) advance our understanding of how we coordinate the mental processes that allow us to express meaning in writing, and (b) inform the hypothesis that struggling with word spelling negatively impacts on our ability to formulate ideas in writing by (c) explaining in what way spelling difficulty reduces text quality. The project aims will be achieved by (1) establishing whether a fundamental property of sentences, namely word order, is used to accommodate writing hesitations, (2) assessing whether the use of sentence syntax is a direct result of spelling difficulties, and (3) exploring how these processes differ in young adults with genuine spelling difficulty. To draw conclusions about these objectives the project will conduct three series of experimental studies: I will ask participants to describe simple arrangements of pictures and relate their keyboarding (what is typed when) and eye-movement behaviour (which pictures are people looking at when they type what) to gain insight into the timecourse of how we encode what we see in writing. These data will be analysed with cutting edge statistical models to understand under which conditions text formulation is directly impacted by difficulty with word spelling. The PI is in an exceptional position to conduct this work because he have pioneered the research methods to do this (Roeser et al., 2019; Roeser, De Maeyer et al., 2021).

能够用写作交流思想是人们社会和职业生活的重要组成部分。识字能力不足可能导致成绩下降，就业前景黯淡，生活质量下降。然而，超过50万英国成年人的识字能力不发达，这在社会经济贫困地区的群体中更为普遍（教育和技能部，2007年; PIAAC，2013年）。我的研究将塑造我们如何在写作中沟通的理解，提供了一个基础，以隔离挣扎的作家的需求，因此将告知新的方法如何识字困难的学习者和挣扎的成年人（与，例如，阅读障碍）可以测量，以及如何困难的人可以得到支持，为每个人提供平等的机会。尽管我们通常不会在口语对话中费力地形成一个句子，但从字面上看，拼写单词的努力可能会导致你忘记你要说的是什么以及你要怎么说。但令人惊讶的是，这种情况的证据--糟糕的拼写者通常会产生质量较低的文本--是模棱两可的，解释也是有限的。从理论的角度来看，写作涉及一系列从我们的头脑流向我们手指的心理过程。这个级联从一个预期的消息开始，然后是合适的单词和语法正确的顺序，然后找到这些单词的正确拼写，最后将它们输出到纸上或屏幕上。当事情进展顺利时--当作者知道他们想说什么，有足够的词汇来表达，知道单词的拼写，并且有很多小时的打字或手写练习--那么这种级联就允许非常流畅的输出。然而，这种平稳的流动被打乱也是相对常见的。例如，当一个作家努力记住一个单词的拼写时，可能会发生这种情况。这通常会延迟输出或导致屏幕上出现错误的单词。可以说，这两个问题都不是特别严重的问题。更严重的是，拼写困难可能会对我们想说的话以及我们打算如何表达产生连锁反应。有趣的是，至少，犹豫输出一个单词会导致你忘记你要说的是什么。拟议中的研究将（a）促进我们对我们如何协调心理过程的理解，使我们能够用书面表达意思，（B）通过（c）解释拼写困难是如何降低文本质量的，来说明单词拼写困难对我们在写作中表达思想的能力有负面影响的假设。该项目的目标将通过以下方式实现：（1）确定句子的基本属性，即词序，是否用于适应写作犹豫，（2）评估句子句法的使用是否是拼写困难的直接结果，以及（3）探索这些过程在真正有拼写困难的年轻人中有何不同。为了得出关于这些目标的结论，该项目将进行三个系列的实验研究：我将要求参与者描述图片的简单排列，并将他们的键盘输入（什么时候输入什么）和眼动行为（当人们输入什么时，他们正在看哪些图片）联系起来，以深入了解我们如何在写作中编码我们所看到的内容的时间过程。这些数据将使用最先进的统计模型进行分析，以了解在哪些条件下文本表述会受到单词拼写困难的直接影响。PI处于一个特殊的位置来进行这项工作，因为他开创了这样做的研究方法（Roeser等人，2019; Roeser，De Maeyer等人，2021年）。