Salins Andrea, Cupples Linda, Leigh Greg, Castles Anne
Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Macquarie University Centre for Reading, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2023 May;76(5):1045-1056. doi: 10.1177/17470218221102916. Epub 2022 Jun 20.
Children's oral vocabulary acquisition is an important aspect of language development that plays a crucial role in reading and literacy development and subsequent academic success. Therefore, it is important to identify and implement evidence-based effective strategies of vocabulary instruction for primary school children. Orthographic facilitation refers to the benefit afforded to word learning by incidentally presenting spellings when new words are introduced. This study aimed to replicate the orthographic facilitation effect in primary school (Grades 1-6) children and further assess whether children in different grades benefitted differently from the presence of orthography during spoken word learning. To do this, 91 children from Grades 1 to 6 were taught novel picture-word pairs with or without spellings. Word learning was assessed during and after training using behavioural and eye-tracking data from picture-naming and picture-word-matching (PWM) tasks. Irrespective of grade, all children experienced a significant orthographic facilitation effect during training. The post-training results were more task dependent with all grades showing a significant orthographic facilitation effect on the picture-naming task, and only Grades 1 to 4 showing a facilitation effect on the PWM task. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
儿童的口语词汇习得是语言发展的一个重要方面，在阅读和读写能力发展以及随后的学业成就中起着至关重要的作用。因此，识别并实施基于证据的针对小学生的有效词汇教学策略非常重要。正字法促进是指在引入新单词时通过附带呈现拼写为单词学习带来的益处。本研究旨在在小学（1至6年级）儿童中复制正字法促进效应，并进一步评估不同年级的儿童在口语单词学习过程中因正字法的存在而受益程度是否不同。为此，对91名1至6年级的儿童进行了教学，教授他们带有或不带有拼写的新颖图片 - 单词对。在训练期间和训练后，使用来自图片命名和图片 - 单词匹配（PWM）任务的行为和眼动追踪数据对单词学习进行评估。无论年级如何，所有儿童在训练期间都经历了显著的正字法促进效应。训练后的结果更依赖于任务，所有年级在图片命名任务上都显示出显著的正字法促进效应，只有1至4年级在PWM任务上显示出促进效应。本文讨论了这些发现的理论和实践意义。
