Mechanisms of spelling development

学习拼写是一项特别具有挑战性的认知活动。这在一定程度上是因为英语的拼写是基于几个层次的规则，这些规则将口语和打印在纸上的文字联系起来。考虑一下单词“魔术师”的拼写的经典例子；它的字母大致反映了这个单词的组成音，但它们也反映了它的意义单位（例如，c被用来代表“sh”的音，以保留词根的魔力）。目前，我们还不明白儿童是如何在拼写中发展出对意义单位或语素表示的复杂知识的，但很明显，他们在很小的时候就对单词拼写的语素结构很敏感。这里概述的一系列研究将测试一种新的理论解释，说明这种情况是如何发生的，其中我将统计学习的思想应用于拼写发展统计学习是一个概念，在过去的十年里，它已经彻底改变了儿童发展的研究，现在将其应用于拼写发展的时机已经成熟。简而言之，我认为孩子们通过关注字母、声音和意义同时出现的频率来学习拼写的基础。例如，儿童可能通过同时出现字母-s、复数概念和/z/或/s/音的经验，而不是通过学习“所有复数都拼写为-s”的规则，学会用字母-s来表示复数（如狗的单词final -s）。这里描述的实验将检查这些共现的统计学习是否可以解释拼写发展的时间和机制。这些实验为统计学习的本质提供了一个重要的测试，同时，它们将评估一个急需的拼写发展新模型的可行性。

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.