Abstract:
Throughout their lifetime, adults learn new words in their native lannguage, and potentially also in a second language. However, they do so with variable levels of success. In the auditory word learning literature, some of this variability has been attributed to phonological skills, including decoding and phonological short-term memory. Here I examine how the relationship between phonological skills and word learning applies to the visual modality. I define the availability of phonology in terms of (1) the extent to which it is biased by the learning environment, (2) the characteristics of the words to be learned, and (3) individual differences in phonological skills. Across these three areas of research, visual word learning improves when phonology is made more available to adult learners, suggesting that phonology can facilitate learning across modalities. However, the facilitation is largely specific to alphabetic languages, which have predictable sublexical correspondences between orthography and phonology. Therefore, I propose that phonology bootstraps visual word learning by providing a secondary code that constrains and refines developing orthographic representations.
摘要:
在他们的一生中,成年人在他们的母语中学习新单词,也可能是第二语言。然而,他们这样做的成功程度各不相同。在听觉词学习文献中,其中一些可变性归因于语音技能,包括解码和语音短时记忆。在这里,我研究语音技能和单词学习之间的关系如何适用于视觉模态。我根据(1)学习环境对语音的偏见程度来定义语音的可用性,(2)要学习的单词的特点,(3)语音技能的个体差异。在这三个研究领域,当语音学向成人学习者提供时,视觉单词学习会有所改善,这表明语音可以促进跨模态的学习。然而,这种促进在很大程度上是特定于字母语言的,在拼字法和语音之间具有可预测的亚词汇对应关系。因此,我建议语音学通过提供辅助代码来约束和完善正在开发的拼字表示来引导视觉单词学习。