联结竞争对听写困难儿童形音联结编码的影响

听写困难是一种发生率较高的儿童学习障碍现象。听写困难的认知机制,主要包括语音加工缺陷、字形表征缺陷以及形音联结编码缺陷。本研究通过两个实验,考察了整字语音竞争和部件语音竞争,对听写困难儿童形音联结编码的影响。结果发现,在不同条件下,听写困难儿童的形音联结水平都落后于正常儿童;整字语音竞争显著干扰了正常儿童的形音联结编码,但对听写困难儿童的影响并不明显;与之相反的是,部件语音竞争对听写困难儿童的干扰更为明显。研究结果支持听写困难儿童的形音联结编码缺陷理论。在此基础上,听写困难儿童的形音联结较少受到整字语音的竞争干扰,但更容易受到部件语音的竞争干扰,这可能是因为,他(她)们的整体字形加工或表征存在缺陷,导致原生字字形和语音信息难以被激活,以及合体字的部件信息得到更多的加工所致。

The connecting competition effect on the orthographic-phonological connection coding for children with spelling difficulties

Spelling difficulty is a common phenomenon;it is one of the major types of learning disorder.An extensive amount of research has yielded considerable evidence that children with spelling difficulties have impairments in orthographic-phonological connections.However,there still remains equivocal about the mechanism of grapheme-sound connection deficits.In the present study,we aimed to investigate the competition interference effect of global phonology and radical phonology on grapheme-sound connection coding for children with spelling difficulties.The first experiment involved artificial single characters as orthographic material,requiring all participants to remember the correspondence between the grapheme and the sound.The grapheme-sound connecting level of children with spelling difficulties was compared across two conditions:competitive phonological condition and control condition.In the competitive phonological condition,pseudo-words with high phonological accessibility were used as experimental material.In the control condition,the phonological accessibility of pseudo-words was low.In the second experiment,artificial compound characters of left-right structure were used as experimental material.All participants were asked to remember the association between the grapheme and the sound.As the same as the first experiment,there were two different conditions:competitive phonological condition and control condition.In the competitive phonological condition,the radical phonology was different from the global phonology,which caused competition interference with global grapheme-sound connecting.In the control condition,no competition interference would be induced since the phonetic components were not into the word.Results of the first experiment found that the children with spelling difficulty showed a lower rate of accuracy of the grapheme-sound connection than the control group,but no significant differences were found between two groups on the response time.In addition,the control group obtained significant lower accuracy in the competitive condition than in the control condition,whereas children with spelling difficulties showed no significant differences between the competitive and control conditions (neither accuracy nor response time).Results of the second experiment indicated that the children with spelling difficulties showed a lower rate of accuracy and a longer response time than the control group.Furthermore,the response time in the competitive condition was longer than that in the control condition for the two groups,which suggested that the two groups were both effected by the competition interference,but according to the results,the effect was more significant for the children with spelling difficulties.Generally,concerning the grapheme-sound connection coding,it was found,as in previous studies,that children with spelling difficulties performed worse than normal children.But the competition of global phonology had no effect on the grapheme-sound connecting for the children with spelling difficulties.One reason for this finding,we suspect,is that children with spelling difficulties mainly depend on visual processing,and lack sensitivity to phonological information.As a result,the phonological information of characters with similar form is hard to be automatically activated by global orthography.As for another finding that the competition interference effect of radical phonology on the grapheme-sound connection is more significant for the children with spelling difficulties,there may be two explanations:(1) children with spelling difficulties have impairments in grapheme-sound connecting,and they are easily interrupted by activated radical phonology;(2) the grapheme-sound connection representations stored in the working memory of the children with spelling difficulties are more likely to be influenced by the proactive interference of activated radical phonology.