Zhang Lan, Treiman Rebecca
Washington University in St. Louis, Psychology Department, St. Louis, MO, United States.
Washington University in St. Louis, Psychology, St. Louis, MO, United States.
Sci Stud Read. 2015;19(6):434-445. doi: 10.1080/10888438.2015.1072820. Epub 2015 Aug 25.
One influential theory of literacy development, the constructivist perspective, claims that young children believe that writing represents meaning directly and that the appearance of a written word should reflect characteristics of its referent. There has not been strong evidence supporting this idea, however. Circumventing several methodological concerns with previous studies, we examined written spellings of young children who did not yet use letters to represent the sounds of words, that is, prephonological spellers. We identified 38 prephonological spellers (mean age 4 years 2 months) and measured the area of their writing productions. Prephonological spellers made significantly larger productions for words representing large objects than those representing small objects. This effect held true after controlling for the influences of other variables, including size of writing on previous trials and order of trial in a session. Our results suggest that young children sometimes use drawing-like features to communicate the meaning of words when writing.
读写能力发展的一种有影响力的理论，即建构主义观点，认为幼儿相信书写直接代表意义，并且书面单词的外观应该反映其指代对象的特征。然而，目前还没有强有力的证据支持这一观点。为了规避先前研究中的几个方法学问题，我们研究了尚未使用字母来表示单词发音的幼儿的书面拼写，即前语音拼写者。我们确定了38名前语音拼写者（平均年龄4岁2个月），并测量了他们书写作品的面积。前语音拼写者在书写代表大物体的单词时，其作品面积显著大于代表小物体的单词。在控制了其他变量的影响后，这种效应依然存在，这些变量包括之前试验中的书写大小以及一次试验中的试验顺序。我们的研究结果表明，幼儿在书写时有时会使用类似绘画的特征来传达单词的意义。
