Statistical Learning and Spelling: Older Prephonological Spellers Produce More Wordlike Spellings Than Younger Prephonological Spellers

The authors analyzed the spellings of 179 U.S. children (age = 3 years, 2 months–5 years, 6 months) who were prephonological spellers, in that they wrote using letters that did not reflect the phonemes in the target items. Supporting the idea that children use their statistical learning skills to learn about the outer form of writing before they begin to spell phonologically, older prephonological spellers showed more knowledge about English letter patterns than did younger prephonological spellers. The written productions of older prephonological spellers were rated by adults as more similar to English words than were the productions of younger prephonological spellers. The older children s spellings were also more wordlike on several objective measures, including length, variability of letters within words, and digram frequency.     

Hearing Matters More Than Seeing: A Cross-Modality Study of Statistical Learning and Reading Ability

ABSTRACT

There is growing interest in the link between implicit statistical learning (SL) and reading ability. Although learning to read involves both auditory and visual modalities, it is not known whether reading skills might be more strongly associated with auditory SL or visual SL. Here we assessed SL across both modalities in 36 typically developing children and 36 healthy adults using the classic triplet-learning paradigm. Auditory SL was significantly associated with sentence reading fluency (Woodcock Johnson III Test of Achievement) in the combined sample of children and adults after controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. In further analysis of the child data, auditory SL was significantly associated with nonword reading accuracy (Woodcock Reading Mastery Test), a relationship which appeared to be mediated by phonological processing abilities (Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing). These findings suggest that auditory SL might contribute more strongly to certain aspects of reading development compared to visual SL.     

The Role of Orthographic and Semantic Learning in Word Reading and Reading Comprehension

We tested the theoretically driven hypotheses that children’s orthographic and semantic learning are associated with their word reading and reading comprehension skills, even when orthographic and semantic knowledge are taken into account. A sample of 139 English-speaking Grade 3 children completed a learning task in which they read stories about new inventions. Then they were tested on their learning of the spelling and meaning of the inventions (i.e., orthographic and semantic learning, respectively). Word reading and reading comprehension were assessed with standardised tasks, and orthographic and semantic knowledge were assessed with choice tasks targeting the spelling and meaning of existing words. The results of our structural equation modeling indicated that orthographic learning predicted word reading directly and reading comprehension indirectly via word reading. We also found that semantic learning predicted reading comprehension directly. These findings support integration of the self-teaching hypothesis and the lexical quality hypothesis.     

Learning about Spelling Sequences: The Role of Onsets and Rimes in Analogies in Reading

Children's phonological awareness, especially their awareness of rhyme, is known to be importnat for later reading development. However, the exact nature of the connection between phonological skills and reading is not yet known. One possibility is that when children analyze written words in reading, they find it relatively easy to learn about spelling sequences within these words that reflect phonological categorizations such as rhyme. This hypothesis implies that learning to read words is not a purely visual process. For example, spelling sequences that reflect the intrasyllabic linguistic units of onset (initial consonants) and rime (vowel and final consonants), and thus are connected to rhyme, may be easier to learn about than other spelling sequences. In Experiment 1, children learned more about shared consonant blends at the beginnings of words ( tr im- tr ap), which constituted the onset, than at the ends of words (wi nk -ta nk ), which broke up the rime. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that when words shared a vowel as well as a consonant blend, more was learned about spelling sequences at the ends of words (w ink -p ink ), which now reflected the rime, than at the beginnings of words ( tr im- tr ip), where the vowel extended the onset. So intrasyllabic phonological knowledge does seem to play a role in learning about spelling sequences in reading.     

浅谈英语教学中问答的作用

激励性和试探性的课堂提问能有效地促进学生的课堂学习，活跃课堂气氛，激发学生的学习积极性和自觉性，同时也使教师进一步地了解和把握他们的学习技能水平，从而做到因材施教，提升教学效果。     

The Cognitive Linkage and Divergence of Spelling and Reading Development

This study aimed to investigate to what extent reading and spelling share cognitive processes at different phases of literacy acquisition. The contributions of phonological awareness, letter-sound matching skills, and rapid naming (RAN) to spelling and reading were measured in a large sample with Dutch children (N?=?1,284) covering all primary school grades. The results indicated a different developmental pattern for spelling than for reading. At initial phases of literacy acquisition, phonological awareness and letter-sound matching skills contributed to both reading and spelling performance. However, in contrast to the declining influence of phonological awareness and letter-sound matching skills on fluent word reading (see also Vaessen & Blomert, 2010 Vaessen, A. and Blomert, L. 2010. Long term cognitive dynamics of fluent reading development. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105: 213–231. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.11.005[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), the contributions of these skills to spelling performance were stable over the years, suggesting an ongoing reliance on orthography/phonology mappings during spelling. RAN did not contribute to spelling performance in any of the grades, in contrast to its strong contribution to reading performance, suggesting that RAN captures a cognitive skill that is unique for reading acquisition.     

Action Learning: More Than Just A Task Force

Action learning, as it is often implemented in the U.S., differs little from a typical cross-functional task force. Those characteristics of action learning that originated with Reginald Revan's work and that have such potential to change both organizations and participants are often absent in the Americanized version of action learning. Outlined here are the principles that underlie Revan's work as well as an explanation of why they are so critical to both individual development and organizational problem resolution. These principles are then contrasted with a case study of a Fortune 500 company which implemented the more Americanized version. The benefits of that implementation are explored as well as a discussion of the learning difficulties the teams experienced.     

读《书目答问补正》后

《书目答问补正》是清末民国初重要的目录学书。本文就其编目思想、正补相续俱进及所录皖人书目作一综述。该书对初学者有引导读书之助,对编目有借鉴作用。     

Seeing More Than Right and Wrong Answers: Prospective Teachers' Interpretations of Students' Mathematical Work

Listening to students' mathematical thinking is one of the trademarks of reform-minded visions of mathematics teaching. The questions of when, where, how, and what might help prospective teachers learn to do so,however, remain open. This study examines how a mathematics letter exchange with Grade 4 students provided an occasion for prospective teachers to learn about students' mathematical thinking and to examine their interpretive practices. Analysis of the interactions between students and prospective teachers, and of the reflective writing of the latter,revealed changes in the patterns of their interpretations. I characterized these as changes in the focus of interpretation, from correctness to meaning, and in the interpretive approach, from quick and conclusive to thoughtful and tentative. I also discuss factors associated with these interpretive turns. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

语音意识在单词拼写中的作用

英语学习者能否有效地拼写,记忆单词以及其阅读能力的高低与语音意识有着直接的关系。语音意识独立发展假设认为,语音意识结构中各成份的发展取决于儿童在某方面所接受的语言训练,即语音意识的发展与学习者的特殊语言经历有关。语音意识可以培养,语音意识的提高有益于单词拼写能力的提高。该文以语音意识在单词拼写中的作用为核心,着重论述语音意识在单词拼写过程中的影响作用;同时,文章还以辩证唯物主义观点出发,指出单词拼写能力的提高反过来也可以促进语音意识的提高。     

Statistical and Cooperative Learning in Reading: An Artificial Orthography Learning Study

This article reports two experiments in which the artificial orthography paradigm was used to investigate the mechanisms underlying learning to read. In each experiment, participants were taught the meanings and pronunications of words written in an unfamiliar orthography, and the statistical structure of the mapping between written and spoken forms (O-P) was manipulated independently of the mapping between written forms and their meanings (O-S). Our results support three main conclusions. First, the statistical structure of O-P and O-S mappings determined how easily each of those mappings was learned, suggesting that the learning of both mappings engages a common statistical learning mechanism. Second, learning to read is a cooperative process, in that learning in any particular component of the reading system is influenced by knowledge stored in the rest of the system. Finally, knowledge of sublexical regularities can be acquired as the result of exposure to words embodying those regularities.     

The Role of Discourse Novelty in Early Word Learning

2 studies of word learning are reported. In Study 1, 24-month-old children and 2 adults played with 3 nameless objects. These objects were placed in a clear box along with a novel nameless object. The adults then displayed excitement about the contents of the box and modeled a new word. Comparison with a control condition indicated significant learning of the new word for the novel object. Study 2 followed the same procedure with one difference: the children played with the novel object while the adults were absent. Thus, at the time of the language model the target object was novel only to the adults, not to the children. Again subjects displayed significant learning of the new word. This last finding suggests that 24-month-old children understand that adults use language for things that are novel to the discourse context and that this novelty is determined from the speaker's point of view.     

Learning From Our Mistakes: Improvements in Spelling Lead to Gains in Reading Speed

The present study tested the hypothesis that underlying orthographic representations vary in completeness within the individual, which is manifested in both spelling accuracy and reading speed. Undergraduate students were trained to improve their spelling of difficult words. Word reading speed was then measured for these same words, allowing for a direct evaluation of whether improvements in spelling would bring about faster reading speeds. Results were clear: Spelling accuracy and reading speed were strongly related across and within participants. Most important, words that improved in spelling accuracy were read more rapidly at posttest than words that did not show improvement in spelling. These results provide direct evidence showing that the quality of orthographic representations, as indexed by spelling accuracy, directly relates to reading speed. This is consistent with the lexical quality hypothesis and highlights the relevance of spelling in literacy acquisition.     

The Role of Instruction for Spelling Performance and Spelling Consciousness

This study examined the role of instruction for spelling performance and spelling consciousness in the Dutch language. Spelling consciousness is the ability to reflect on one's spelling and correct errors. A sample of 115 third-grade spellers was assigned to a strategy-instruction, strategic-monitoring, self-monitoring, or control condition representing different types of metacognitive aspects. The results showed that students in all three training conditions made more progress in both spelling performance and spelling consciousness than students in the control condition. With respect to spelling consciousness, only students in the strategy-instruction condition made significant improvement between pretest and posttest. Students made more progress in spelling performance on regular words than on loan words. Students in all four conditions became more accurate at assessing which words they could spell correctly. Students in the control condition more frequently overestimated their spelling ability.     

Phonological Spelling and Reading Deficits in Children With Spelling Disabilities

Spelling errors in the Wide Range Achievement Test were analyzed for 77 pairs of children, each of which included one older child with spelling disability (SD) and one spelling-level-matched younger child with normal spelling ability from the Colorado Learning Disabilities Research Center database. Spelling error analysis consisted of a percent graphotactic-accuracy (GA) score based on syllable position and existence in English, and a phonological accuracy score (PA). The SD group scored significantly worse in the PA measure and nonsignificantly better than controls on the GA measure. The Group × Measure interaction was significant. Spelling matched pairs had very similar scores for word recognition and orthographic coding, but the SD group exhibited significant deficits in reading measures of phonological decoding and in language measures of phonological awareness.     

The Role of Set for Variability in Irregular Word Reading: Word and Child Predictors in Typically Developing Readers and Students At-Risk for Reading Disabilities

ABSTRACT

In a quasiregular orthography like English, children inevitably encounter irregular words during reading. Previous research suggests successful reading of an irregular word depends at least partially on a child’s ability to address the mismatch between decoded form and stored word pronunciation, referred to as a child’s set for variability, and the word’s relative transparency, measured here using a spelling to pronunciation transparency rating. Item-level analyses were used to explore the relationship between general child performance on the set for variability mispronunciation task, word specific set for variability (predicting reading of that word), spelling to pronunciation transparency rating, and irregular word reading. Significant predictors included general word reading, general set for variability performance, and item-specific set for variability performance; word frequency and spelling to pronunciation transparency rating; and an interaction between word reading and the transparency rating. Results underscore the importance of considering both general and item-specific factors affecting irregular word reading.     

The Highly Lawful Relationships Among Pseudoword Decoding,Word Identification,Spelling, Listening,and Reading

It has been theorized that there are highly lawful relationships among levels of pseudoword decoding, word identification, spelling, listening, and reading that can be represented by relatively simple mathematical formulas. This theory was tested by reanalyzing data collected from 55 parochial school students in Grades 3 to 6 (Study I) and 83 public school students in Grades 4 and 5 (Study II). These students were given a battery of reading-related tests that included measures relevant to the theory noted previously. The results from Study II replicated those from Study I, indicating that (a) level of word identification and level of spelling are equal, (b) level of pseudoword decoding (or word attack) and level of ability to pronounce unknown real words are equal, (c) level of word identification equals the average of the level of reading and the level of pseudoword decoding, and (d) level of reading equals the average of the level of listening and the level of word identification. These data, along with previously collected data, suggest that measures of the aforementioned reading-related variables are so closely connected that (a) highly reliable measures of spelling level and word attack level for a student could be used to estimate or predict that student's levels of reading, listening, and word identification, and (b) highly reliable measures of reading level and word identification level for a student could be used to estimate or predict that student's levels of listening, spelling, and word attack.     

当前研究生实验技能培养的若干问题及其对策

研究生科研工作实践性很强，研究生实验技能的高低，将决定其科技创新的水平的高低．当前研究生技能课程教学和实践中还存在重视不够、渠道不畅、管理机制封闭落后、实验室队伍不强等问题．为此，应从以下方面加以改善：一是改革研究生实验课程设置和教学方式；二是改革实验室管理机制；三是不断改善实验技术人员待遇；四是不断调整充实实验技术队伍．