Mechanisms of spelling development

拼写发展机制

• 批准号: 293300-2008
• 负责人: Deacon, Hélène
• 金额: $ 1.16万
• 依托单位: Dalhousie University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2011-01-01 至 2012-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=480564
• 关键词: Mechanisms; spelling; development

Learning to spell is a particularly challenging cognitive activity. This is in part because spelling in English is based on several levels of regularities that connect spoken language to print on the page. Consider the classic example of spelling of the word magician; its letters roughly reflect the word's component sounds, but they also reflect its units of meaning (e.g., c is used to represent the 'sh' sound in order to retain the root magic). Currently, we do not understand how it is that children develop sophisticated knowledge of the representation of units of meaning, or morphemes, in spelling, and yet it is clear that they are sensitive to the morphemic structure of word spellings at an early age. The set of studies outlined here will test a new theoretical account of how this might happen, in which I apply the ideas of statistical learning to spelling development Statistical learning is a concept that, over the last decade, has revolutionised the study of child development, and the time is ripe for its application to spelling development. In brief, I argue that children learn about the basis of spelling by attending to the frequency with which letters, sounds and meaning co-occur. For example, children might learn to represent plurality with the letter -s (as in the word final -s in dogs) through their experience of the simultaneous occurrence of the letter -s, the concept of plurality and the sound /z/ or /s/, rather than by learning a rule specifying that "all plurals are spelled with -s". The experiments described here will examine whether statistical learning of these co-occurrences can account for the timing and mechanisms of spelling development. The experiments provide an important test of the nature of statistical learning and, at the same time, they will assess the plausibility of a much-needed new model of spelling development.

学习拼写是一项特别具有挑战性的认知活动。这部分是因为英语的拼写是基于连接口语和页面上打印的几个层次的语法。考虑单词magician的经典拼写例子;它的字母大致反映了单词的组成声音，但它们也反映了它的意义单位（例如，c用于表示'sh'音，以保留根魔法）。目前，我们还不明白儿童是如何发展出复杂的意义单位或词素的知识的，但很明显，他们在很小的时候就对单词拼写的词素结构很敏感。这里概述的一组研究将测试一个新的理论帐户，这可能是如何发生的，其中我应用的想法，统计学习拼写发展统计学习是一个概念，在过去的十年中，已经彻底改变了儿童发展的研究，时机已经成熟，其应用到拼写发展。简而言之，我认为孩子们通过关注字母、声音和意义共同出现的频率来学习拼写的基础。例如，孩子们可能会通过同时出现字母-s、复数概念和声音/z/或/s/的经验来学习用字母-s表示复数（如狗的单词final -s），而不是通过学习指定“所有复数都用-s拼写”的规则。这里描述的实验将检查这些同现的统计学习是否可以解释拼写发展的时机和机制。这些实验提供了一个重要的测试的性质，统计学习，在同一时间，他们将评估一个急需的拼写发展的新模型的可行性。