Neuroimaging evidence for sensitivity to orthography-to-phonology conversion in native readers and foreign learners of Chinese

Yu, Anya; Chen, Makayla S.; Cherodath, Sarika; Hung, Daisy L.; Tzeng, Ovid J.L.; Wu, Dazhong

doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2018.07.002

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Individual‐differences studies from recent years confirm this prediction, suggesting that individual SL performance in fact predicts variability in linguistic outcomes. In this vein, individual differences in SL performance among both children and adults were shown to correlate with abilities such as syntactic processing (Kidd, ; Kidd & Arciuli, ; Misyak, Christiansen, & Tomblin, ), lexical knowledge and vocabulary size (Mainela‐Arnold & Evans, ; Shafto, Conway, Field, & Houston, ; Singh, Steven Reznick, & Xuehua, ; Spencer, Kaschak, Jones, & Lonigan, ), speech perception (Conway et al, ; Conway, Karpicke, & Pisoni, ; Lany, Shoaib, Thompson, & Estes, ), and literacy acquisition in first language (Arciuli & Simpson, ; Tong, Leung, & Tong, ; Torkildsen, Arciuli, & Wie, ) as well as second language (Frost, Siegelman, Narkiss, & Afek, ; A. Yu et al, ; see Arciuli, for a review). More direct evidence comes from a handful of longitudinal studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical learning abilities and their relation to language

Siegelman

2019

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Numerous studies on statistical learning (SL) have demonstrated humans' sensitivity to complex statistical properties in their sensory environment. These observations have had a profound impact on the study of language, highlighting statistical aspects of the linguistic input that can be learned from experience, leading to the widespread claim that SL plays a key role in language acquisition and processing. But how can this theorized link be experimentally demonstrated? One increasingly popular avenue comes from studies of individual differences, which tie individual variability in SL to variance in linguistic behavior. This review presents the theoretical advances stemming from this line of research, as well as some of the challenges it currently faces. It contends that while previous studies had an important role in establishing the existence of some coarse‐grained link between SL and language, recent developments in SL research suggest that the exact nature of this relationship is more complex than originally conceived and is still far from being fully understood. I specifically discuss three outstanding challenges: (a) understanding individual differences in light of the componential nature of SL, (b) mapping the full array of SL processes given the complexity of real‐world statistics, and (c) estimating the strength of current empirical evidence while taking into account both positive and null findings. Confronting these issues, I argue, is a necessary step towards a full theory of the role of SL across language.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical learning abilities and their relation to language

Siegelman

2019

Language and Linguist. Compass

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“…Like the children in Chen et al's (2019) study, children in this region have very little experience with desktop computers. The vast majority of households we have polled in our study region report owning basic mobile phones (92%), and 63% of households reported owning one or more smartphones.…”

Section: Statistical Learning In Cȏte D'ivoirementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several studies support this connection between performance on SL tasks and literacy achievement for both adults and school-aged children using non-linguistic visual SL (sequences of images, e.g., Arciuli & Simpson, 2012;Qi et al, 2019;Torkildsen et al, 2019), non-linguistic auditory SL (sequences of pure tones, e.g., Qi et al, 2019), and word sequencing tasks (Bogaerts et al, 2016). The SL-literacy relationship is also preserved in second language literacy acquisition, but to date, the correlation of SL with L2 literacy has only been tested in adults (Frost et al, 2013;Yu, 2016;Yu et al, 2019).…”

Section: Statistical Learning and Literacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

Zinszer¹,

Hannon²,

Kouadio³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Children around the world learn to read across radically different educational systems and communities. In the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, children enter the fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying literacy skills in French, the official language for primary education. Previous studies have often linked performance in statistical learning tasks with differences in children’s and adults’ literacy outcomes, mainly in Western and high-income educational contexts. We asked whether Ivorian children’s individual differences in emergent second language literacy skills and analogous first language skills could also be explained by their performance in non-linguistic visual statistical learning (VSL). Across three iteratively-developed tasks, 157 children in rural communities surrounding the Adzópe region in Côte d’Ivoire completed a VSL task on touchscreen tablets. We found strong group-level evidence that children exploited the statistical regularities in the image sequence to decrease their response times, but in a post-test, their discrimination between valid and invalid sequences did not exceed chance. Overall, their responses were slower than U.S. children completing a similar task (Qi et al., 2019), and these individual differences in processing speed both confounded statistical learning and predicted second language emergent literacy skills. Moreover, the weak correlation to analogous skills in their first language further suggests that this task did not measure the same skills for the Ivorian children as in previous samples. We recommend adaptations to the statistical learning paradigm that may improve its generalizability across the wider global population.

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“…Extension of these findings to L2 literacy remains limited, but the availability of statistical learning mechanisms throughout the lifespan and their importance in L1 learning suggest a contribution to L2 literacy as well. A few studies find that outcomes for adult L2 learners are predictable based on their performance in visual statistical learning tasks (Frost et al., 2013; Yu, 2016) and that compensatory brain activity during L2 reading is inversely related to visual statistical learning performance (Yu et al., 2018). Frost et al.’s (2013) study of adult L2 Hebrew learners found that the relationship between visual statistical learning and Hebrew literacy was similar in adult L2 learners to that previously described for L1 readers of Hebrew, and the pattern‐learning ability measured by this visual statistical learning task was not a strong correlate of other variables that might have explained such a correlation (i.e., general cognitive abilities).…”

Section: Background Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Does Nonlinguistic Segmentation Predict Literacy in Second Language Education? Statistical Learning in Ivorian Primary Schools

Zinszer,

Hannon,

Kouadio

et al. 2023

Language Learning

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Statistical learning is a learning mechanism that does not directly depend on knowledge of a language but predicts language and literacy outcomes for children and adults. Research linking statistical learning and literacy has not addressed a common educational context in primary schools worldwide: children who first learn to read in their second language (L2). Several studies have linked statistical learning with childhood literacy in Australia, China, Europe, and the United States, and we preregistered an adaptation for Côte d'Ivoire, where students are educated in French and speak a local language at home. We recruited 117 sixth‐graders from primary schools in several villages and tested for correlations greater than .30 between statistical learning and literacy with 80–90% power. We found no evidence for these correlations between statistical learning and literacy, but visual statistical learning was correlated with L2 phonological awareness, a crucial emergent‐literacy skill. This finding underscores the need to include L2 acquisition contexts in literacy research.

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Neuroimaging evidence for sensitivity to orthography-to-phonology conversion in native readers and foreign learners of Chinese

Cited by 7 publications

References 42 publications

Statistical learning abilities and their relation to language

Statistical learning abilities and their relation to language

Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

Does Nonlinguistic Segmentation Predict Literacy in Second Language Education? Statistical Learning in Ivorian Primary Schools

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