Children are powerful statistical spellers, showing sensitivity to untaught orthographic patterns. They can also learn novel written patterns with phonological counterparts via statistical learning processes, akin to those established for spoken language acquisition. It is unclear whether children can learn written (graphotactic) patterns which are unconfounded from correlated phonotactics. We address this question by inducing novel graphotactic learning under incidental versus explicit conditions. Across three artificial lexicon experiments, we exposed children and adults to letter strings ending either in singlets or doublets (that share the same pronunciation, e.g., s vs. ss) depending on the preceding vowel. In post-tests, children and adults incidentally generalized over such context-based constraints that varied in complexity. Explicit instruction further benefitted pattern generalization, supporting the practice of teaching spelling patterns, and there was a relationship between explicit learning and literacy scores. We are first to demonstrate that statistical learning processes underlie graphotactic generalizations among developing spellers.

儿童是强大的统计拼写者，对未学过的正字法模式表现出敏感性。他们还可以通过统计学习过程与语音对应物一起学习新的书面模式，类似于为口语习得建立的那些。目前尚不清楚儿童是否可以学习与相关音标无关的书写（字形）模式。我们通过在偶然和显性条件下引入新的图形学习来解决这个问题。在三个人工词典实验中，我们让儿童和成人接触以单连音或双连音结尾的字母串（具有相同的发音，例如s与ss) 取决于前面的元音。在后测中，儿童和成人偶然地概括了这种复杂性不同的基于上下文的约束。显式教学进一步有利于模式泛化，支持拼写模式的教学实践，显式学习与读写分数之间存在关系。我们首先证明了统计学习过程是发展中拼写者之间的graphotactic概括的基础。