Ricketts Jessie, Dockrell Julie E, Patel Nita, Charman Tony, Lindsay Geoff
Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK.
UCL Institute of Education, University College London, London, WC1H 0AL, UK.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2015 Jun;134:43-61. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2015.01.015. Epub 2015 Mar 19.
This experiment investigated whether children with specific language impairment (SLI), children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and typically developing children benefit from the incidental presence of orthography when learning new oral vocabulary items. Children with SLI, children with ASD, and typically developing children (n=27 per group) between 8 and 13 years of age were matched in triplets for age and nonverbal reasoning. Participants were taught 12 mappings between novel phonological strings and referents; half of these mappings were trained with orthography present and half were trained with orthography absent. Groups did not differ on the ability to learn new oral vocabulary, although there was some indication that children with ASD were slower than controls to identify newly learned items. During training, the ASD, SLI, and typically developing groups benefited from orthography to the same extent. In supplementary analyses, children with SLI were matched in pairs to an additional control group of younger typically developing children for nonword reading. Compared with younger controls, children with SLI showed equivalent oral vocabulary acquisition and benefit from orthography during training. Our findings are consistent with current theoretical accounts of how lexical entries are acquired and replicate previous studies that have shown orthographic facilitation for vocabulary acquisition in typically developing children and children with ASD. We demonstrate this effect in SLI for the first time. The study provides evidence that the presence of orthographic cues can support oral vocabulary acquisition, motivating intervention approaches (as well as standard classroom teaching) that emphasize the orthographic form.
本实验研究了特定语言障碍（SLI）儿童、自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童和发育正常的儿童在学习新的口语词汇时，正字法的偶然呈现是否会对他们有所帮助。选取了年龄在8至13岁之间的SLI儿童、ASD儿童和发育正常的儿童（每组27名），将他们按年龄和非语言推理能力进行三人一组匹配。向参与者教授12个新的语音串与所指对象之间的映射关系；其中一半的映射关系在有正字法呈现的情况下进行训练，另一半在没有正字法呈现的情况下进行训练。尽管有迹象表明ASD儿童识别新学项目的速度比对照组儿童慢，但各小组在学习新的口语词汇的能力上并无差异。在训练过程中，ASD组、SLI组和发育正常组从正字法中受益的程度相同。在补充分析中，将SLI儿童与另一组年龄较小的发育正常的儿童进行配对，以进行非单词阅读方面的比较。与年龄较小的对照组相比，SLI儿童在口语词汇习得方面表现相当，并且在训练过程中从正字法中受益。我们的研究结果与当前关于词汇条目如何习得的理论观点一致，并重复了之前的研究，这些研究表明正字法对发育正常的儿童和ASD儿童的词汇习得有促进作用。我们首次在SLI儿童中证明了这种效应。该研究提供了证据，表明正字法线索的存在可以支持口语词汇习得，这为强调正字法形式的干预方法（以及标准课堂教学）提供了依据。
