Children's Early Knowledge of Letters and Spelling Across Languages

儿童对跨语言字母和拼写的早期了解

基本信息

批准号：
8112486
负责人：
Rebecca A. Treiman
金额：
$ 27.08万
依托单位：
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2007
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2007-09-30 至 2014-06-30
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

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.

描述（由申请人提供）：这项研究从跨语言的角度考察了儿童对字母和拼写的早期知识，研究对象是来自美国、英国、澳大利亚、巴西和以色列的儿童。由于学习涉及待学习材料与学习者的知识和倾向之间的相互作用，因此一个具体目标是更多地了解这些语言的输入模式。使用儿童读物中的语料库，我们研究了对于年轻学习者来说可能很重要的写作方面，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。还研究了拼写中表示的音素的一致性。这些统计研究与英语、葡萄牙语和希伯来语多种方言学习者早期拼写和字母知识的实验工作相关。行为工作的动机是人类是统计学习者：知识反映了学习者所接触的模式。同样重要的是模式是否适合学习者现有的知识以及模式的复杂性。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运用到识字学习中。该研究的另一个目标是表征拼写相关知识的个体差异，并确定早期差异与以后表现的关系。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尊重各种非语音模式。这些评分系统在纵向研究中进行了测试，研究了儿童早期拼写的特征如何预测以后的拼写和阅读表现。高水平的识字率对于现代技术社会至关重要。研究结果应该有助于及早识别那些在学习拼写和阅读单个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相关。结果应该促进拼写测试的发展，不仅像典型的标准化测试一样考虑响应的正确性，而且还考虑错误的性质。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。