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，这些规则将口语与打印在页面上的语言联系起来。考虑一下单词魔术师的拼写的经典例子；它的字母大体上反映了单词的组成部分的发音，但它们也反映了它的意义单位(例如，为了保留词根魔力，c被用来代表‘sh’的发音)。目前，我们不理解儿童是如何在拼写中发展出关于意义单位或语素表征的复杂知识的，但很明显，他们在很小的时候就对单词拼写的语素结构敏感。这里概述的一系列研究将测试一种关于这可能发生的新的理论描述，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，在过去十年中，它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，我认为孩子们通过注意字母、声音和意思同时出现的频率来学习拼写的基础。例如，孩子们可能会通过字母-S、复数概念和声音/z/或/S/同时出现的经验来学习用字母-S来表示复数，而不是通过学习一条规则来指定“所有复数都用-S拼写”。这里描述的实验将检验这些共现词的统计学习是否可以解释拼写发展的时间和机制。这些实验对统计学习的性质提供了一个重要的测试，同时，他们将评估一个亟需的新的拼写发展模式的合理性。

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.