Marinelli Chiara Valeria, Romani Cristina, Burani Cristina, McGowan Victoria A, Zoccolotti Pierluigi
Lab of Applied Psychology and Intervention, Department of History Society and Human Studies, University of Salento, Salento, Italy.
Neuropsychological Research Centre, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome, Italy.
PLoS One. 2016 Jun 29;11(6):e0157457. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0157457. eCollection 2016.
We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, a consistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs later and it is less pronounced. This is demonstrated by larger length effects which remain significant even in older children and by larger effects of a global factor (related to speed of orthographic decoding) explaining changes of performance across ages. Our results show the importance of considering not only overall performance, but inter-individual variability and variability between conditions when interpreting cross-linguistic differences.
我们通过分析反应时间（RTs）和错误情况，将其作为各种心理语言学变量以及因经验导致的变化的函数，对小学高年级之前的英国和意大利儿童的阅读习得情况进行了比较。我们的研究结果表明，随着年龄的增长，阅读越来越依赖更大的处理单元，但这会受到语言一致性的调节。在英语中，拼写不一致，对更大单元的依赖出现得更早，这表现为更快的反应时间、词汇变量的更强影响以及长度效应的缺失（到五年级时）。然而，并非所有英国儿童都能够掌握这种处理模式，从而导致个体间差异更大。在意大利语中，拼写一致，对更大单元的依赖出现得较晚且不太明显。这表现为更大的长度效应，即使在年龄较大的儿童中也仍然显著，以及一个全局因素（与正字法解码速度相关）的更大影响，该因素解释了不同年龄段表现的变化。我们的研究结果表明，在解释跨语言差异时，不仅要考虑总体表现，还要考虑个体间差异以及不同条件之间的差异。
