Children's Early Knowledge of Letters and Spelling Across Languages

描述(由申请者提供)：这项研究从跨语言的角度考察了来自美国、英国、澳大利亚、巴西和以色列的儿童的早期字母和拼写知识。由于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，一个具体的目标是更多地了解这些语言的输入模式。使用儿童书籍中的语料库，我们检查了写作中可能对年轻学习者突出的方面，包括单词的长度、字母的频率，以及口语单词包含音素和与字母名称匹配的音素序列的程度。此外，还研究了音素在拼写中的一致性。这些统计研究与几种英语方言以及葡萄牙语和希伯来语学习者的早期拼写和字母知识的实验工作有关。行为工作的动机是人类是统计学习者的想法：知识反映了学习者所接触到的模式。同样重要的是模式是否与学习者现有的知识和模式的复杂性相匹配。行为工作的进一步动机是儿童将其他领域涉及的技能和能力带到识字学习中。这项研究的另一个目标是描述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。开发计算机化评分系统是为了评估幼儿的拼写在多大程度上反映了口语单词的音系结构，以及他们的拼写在多大程度上符合各种非音系模式。这些评分系统在纵向研究中进行了测试，这些研究考察了儿童早期拼写的特点如何预测未来的拼写和阅读表现。在现代技术社会中，高识字率是必不可少的。这些结果应该有助于及早识别在学习拼写和阅读个别单词方面存在问题的儿童--这些问题通常与理解和写作方面的问题有关。这些结果应该会促进拼写测试的发展，这些测试不仅要像典型的标准化测试那样考虑答案的正确性，而且还要考虑错误的性质。这些发现将帮助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.