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Statistical learning and spelling: Evidence from Brazilian prephonological spellers
Rebecca Treiman1, Cláudia Cardoso-Martins2, Tatiana Cury Pollo3
1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, United States.
Cognition
|September 11, 2018
Summary
Young children learning to write, even before mastering sounds, develop word-like spellings. Older children in this prephonological stage produce longer, more sophisticated spellings, showing early statistical learning in writing development.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Prephonological spelling is an early stage where children write without representing specific sounds.
- Children's statistical learning abilities are thought to play a role in acquiring writing conventions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test if prephonological spellers use statistical learning to approximate word appearance.
- To investigate if older prephonological spellers produce more wordlike spellings than younger ones.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of spelling attempts by Brazilian children aged 3 years, 3 months to 6 years, 0 months.
- Categorization of children as prephonological spellers based on their writing.
Main Results:
- Older prephonological spellers produced longer spellings than younger ones.
- Older children's spellings more closely matched the frequency of letters and digrams in Portuguese.
- Age-related differences were observed in the use of letters from children's own names.
Conclusions:
- Findings support the role of statistical learning in early writing development, even in the prephonological stage.
- Results indicate that exposure to writing influences the sophistication of prephonological spellings.
- The study extends prior research on English orthography to a more transparent writing system (Portuguese).
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