Psychological Sciences Research Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France.
Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Research Unit, Université de Liège, Boulevard du Rectorat, 3 (B33), 4000 Liège, Belgium.
Cognition. 2021 Jan;206:104479. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104479. Epub 2020 Nov 3.
Compared to most human language abilities, the cognitive mechanisms underlying spelling have not been as intensively investigated as reading and therefore remain to this day less well understood. The current study aims to address this shortcoming by investigating the contribution of serial order short-term memory (STM) and long-term learning (LTL) abilities to emerging spelling skills. Indeed, although there are several reasons to assume associations between serial order memory and spelling abilities, this relationship has hardly been investigated empirically. In this study, we hypothesized that serial order STM plays an important role in spelling novel words, for which children are supposed to rely on a sequential nonlexical spelling procedure. Serial order LTL was hypothesized to be involved in the creation of more stable orthographic representations allowing children to spell (regular and irregular) words by using a lexical spelling strategy based on the direct access to orthographic representations stored in long-term memory. To assess these hypotheses, we conducted a longitudinal study in which we tested a sample of 116 French-speaking children at first grade and two years later at third grade of primary school. At first grade, we administered tasks that were specifically designed to maximize STM and LTL abilities for serial order information. At third grade, we assessed spelling abilities using irregular word, regular word, and pseudoword writing-to-dictation tasks. Bayesian regression analyses showed that pseudoword, but also irregular word spelling was best predicted by serial order STM, while regular word spelling was similarly predicted by both serial order STM and LTL.
与大多数人类语言能力相比，拼写的认知机制尚未像阅读那样得到深入研究，因此至今仍不太为人理解。本研究旨在通过研究序列顺序短期记忆 (STM) 和长期学习 (LTL) 能力对新兴拼写技能的贡献来弥补这一不足。事实上，尽管有几个理由假设序列顺序记忆与拼写能力之间存在关联，但这种关系几乎没有在实证研究中得到调查。在这项研究中，我们假设序列顺序 STM 在拼写新单词中起着重要作用，因为孩子们应该依赖于顺序非词汇拼写程序。序列顺序 LTL 被假设参与创建更稳定的正字法表示，允许孩子们通过使用基于直接访问存储在长期记忆中的正字法表示的词汇拼写策略来拼写（规则和不规则）单词。为了检验这些假设，我们进行了一项纵向研究，其中我们在一年级和两年后的小学三年级测试了 116 名说法语的儿童样本。在一年级，我们进行了专门设计的任务，以最大限度地提高序列顺序信息的 STM 和 LTL 能力。在三年级，我们通过不规则单词、规则单词和伪单词听写任务评估拼写能力。贝叶斯回归分析表明，伪单词，但也不规则单词拼写最好由序列顺序 STM 预测，而规则单词拼写则由序列顺序 STM 和 LTL 相似地预测。
