School of Life and Health Sciences, Psychology, Aston University, Birmingham, UK.
School of Social Sciences, Psychology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK.
Dev Sci. 2021 Jan;24(1):e12986. doi: 10.1111/desc.12986. Epub 2020 Jun 28.
We reconcile competing theories of the role of phonological memory in reading development, by uncovering their dynamic relationship during the first 5 years of school. Phonological memory, reading and phoneme awareness were assessed in 780 phonics-educated children at age 4, 5, 6 and 9. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that phonological memory loaded onto two factors: verbal short-term memory (verbal STM; phonological tasks that loaded primarily on serial order memory) and nonword repetition. Using longitudinal structural equation models, we found that verbal STM directly predicted early word-level reading from age 4 to 6, reflecting the importance of serial-order memory for letter-by-letter decoding. In contrast, reading had no reciprocal influence on the development of verbal STM. The relationship between nonword repetition and reading was bidirectional across the 5 years of study: nonword repetition and reading predicted each other both directly and indirectly (via phoneme awareness). Indirect effects from nonword repetition (and verbal STM) to reading support the view that phonological memory stimulates phonemically detailed representations through repeated encoding of complex verbal stimuli. Similarly, the indirect influence of reading on nonword repetition suggests that improved reading ability promotes the phoneme-level specificity of phonological representations. Finally, the direct influence from reading to nonword repetition suggests that better readers use orthographic cues to help them remember and repeat new words accurately. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LZfTR0BjE.
我们通过揭示语音记忆在学校前 5 年发展中的动态关系，调和了语音记忆在阅读发展中作用的竞争理论。在 4 岁、5 岁、6 岁和 9 岁时，对 780 名接受自然拼读教育的儿童进行了语音记忆、阅读和音位意识评估。验证性因子分析表明，语音记忆分为两个因素：言语短期记忆（verbal STM；主要加载于序列记忆的语音任务）和非词重复。使用纵向结构方程模型，我们发现言语短期记忆直接预测了从 4 岁到 6 岁的早期单词阅读水平，反映了序列记忆对逐字母解码的重要性。相比之下，阅读对言语短期记忆的发展没有相互影响。在 5 年的研究中，非词重复和阅读之间的关系是双向的：非词重复和阅读直接和间接（通过音位意识）相互预测。非词重复（和言语短期记忆）对阅读的间接影响支持这样一种观点，即语音记忆通过对复杂语音刺激的重复编码，激发了音位详细的表示。同样，阅读对非词重复的间接影响表明，阅读能力的提高促进了语音表示的音位水平特异性。最后，阅读对非词重复的直接影响表明，更好的读者利用正字法线索来帮助他们准确地记住和重复新单词。本文的视频摘要可在 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LZfTR0BjE 观看。
