ABSTRACT

According to a statistical-learning view of literacy development, children begin to learn about the visual characteristics of writing from an early age. We used a delayed copying task to examine U.S. preschoolers’ knowledge about how letters combine with one another. Children (n = 77, mean age 4 years, 8 months) were shown a series of 4-letter strings for 20 seconds each and were asked to reproduce each string after it had been removed from view. Some strings, such as ‹CHED›, included relatively common combinations of letters. In other strings, such as ‹EHDC›, the letters were rearranged so that the strings looked less like English words. When we scored children’s responses for their distance from the presented items, we found better performance on the more wordlike items than the less wordlike items. The results show that preschoolers possess some knowledge about how letters combine, consistent with the statistical-learning view.

摘要

根据读写能力发展的统计学习观点，儿童从很小的时候就开始了解写作的视觉特征。我们使用延迟复制任务来检查美国学龄前儿童关于字母如何相互组合的知识。儿童 ( n= 77，平均年龄 4 岁 8 个月）被展示了一系列 4 个字母的字符串，每个字符串 20 秒，并被要求在将每个字符串从视图中移除后复制每个字符串。一些字符串，例如‹CHED›，包含相对常见的字母组合。在其他字符串中，例如‹EHDC›，字母被重新排列，使字符串看起来不像英语单词。当我们根据儿童与所呈现项目的距离对他们的回答进行评分时，我们发现在更像单词的项目上比在不太像单词的项目上表现更好。结果表明，学龄前儿童掌握了一些关于字母组合的知识，这与统计学习的观点是一致的。