Children's Early Knowledge of Letters and Spelling Across Languages

描述（由申请人提供）：本研究从跨语言的角度考察了美国、英国、澳大利亚、巴西和以色列的儿童对字母和拼写的早期知识。因为学习涉及到要学习的材料与学习者的知识和倾向之间的相互作用，一个具体的目标是学习更多关于这些语言输入的模式。使用儿童读物中的语料库，我们研究了对年轻学习者来说可能很突出的写作方面，包括单词的长度，字母的频率，以及口语中包含与字母名称匹配的音素和音素序列的程度。音素在拼写中的一致性也被研究。这些统计研究与几种英语方言、葡萄牙语和希伯来语学习者早期拼写和字母知识的实验工作有关。行为研究的动机是人类是统计学习者的想法：知识反映了学习者接触到的模式。同样重要的是，模式是否适合学习者现有的知识和模式的复杂性。行为研究的进一步动机是，儿童在学习识字的过程中会用到其他领域的技能和能力。该研究的另一个目标是描述与拼写相关知识的个体差异，并确定早期差异与后来的表现之间的关系。计算机评分系统的开发是为了评估幼儿的拼写在多大程度上反映了口语单词的语音结构，以及他们的拼写在多大程度上遵循了各种非语音模式。这些评分系统在纵向研究中进行了测试，研究儿童早期拼写的特征如何预测以后的拼写和阅读表现。在现代技术社会中，高水平的读写能力是必不可少的。这些结果对于早期识别在学习拼写和阅读单个单词方面有问题风险的儿童是有用的，这些问题通常与理解和写作方面的问题有关。这些结果应该促进拼写测试的发展，这种测试不仅要考虑答案的正确性，就像在典型的标准化测试中一样，还要考虑错误的性质。这些发现将有助于教育工作者和研究人员利用儿童拼写提供的信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This research examines children's early knowledge about letters and spelling from a cross-linguistic perspective, looking at children from the U.S., Britain, Australia, Brazil, and Israel. Because learning involves an interplay between the to-be-learned material and the knowledge and predispositions of the learner, one specific aim is to learn more about the patterns in the input for these languages. Using corpora from children's books, we examine aspects of writing that are likely to be salient for young learners, including the lengths of words, the frequencies of letters, and the extent to which spoken words contain phonemes and phoneme sequences that match letter names. The consistency with which phonemes are represented in spelling is also studied. The statistical studies are linked to experimental work on early spelling and letter knowledge in learners of several dialects of English, as well as Portuguese and Hebrew. The behavioral work is motivated by the idea that humans are statistical learners: Knowledge reflects the patterns to which learners have been exposed. Also important are whether a pattern fits with the learner's existing knowledge and the complexity of the pattern. The behavioral work is further motivated by the idea that children bring to bear skills and abilities that are involved in other domains to the learning of literacy. An additional goal of the research is to characterize individual differences in spelling-related knowledge and to determine how early differences relate to later performance. Computerized scoring systems are developed to assess the extent to which young children's spellings reflect the phonological structure of spoken words and the extent to which their spellings honor various nonphonological patterns. These scoring systems are tested in longitudinal studies that examine how characteristics of children's early spellings predict later spelling and reading performance. High levels of literacy are essential in modern technological societies. The results should be useful in the early identification of children who are at risk of problems in learning to spell and read individual words-problems that are often associated with problems in comprehension and written composition. The results should promote the development of spelling tests that consider not only the correctness of the responses, as in typical standardized tests, but also the nature of the errors. The findings will help educators and researchers take advantage of the information that children's spellings provide.