Retention of visually presented information in children’s spelling

Abstract

One hundred and thirty-six 8-year-old children participated in two studies of their ability to spell familiar or nonsense words which they had seen or heard for 2-5 sec. A visual or auditory task was interpolated for 12-15 sec before spelling began. Spelling of meaningful words was most accurate when words were presented visually. except when the interpolated task was watching random letters of the alphabet. Nonsense spelling did not show a similar pattern. The theoretical implication of this difference is that, under certain conditions. visual word presentation provides more efficient pointers to long-term memory information than auditory presentation does. A model of the facilitation process is offered.Traditional short-term memory research derives from relatively simple models. A set of stimuli are introduced into a buffer of some kind and after an interval are emitted. Research has been concerned with the nature of the material, the nature of the buffer, interval variations, additional demands upon the butler or upon the processor generally, and response conditions (Norman. 1970). It has been assumed that such activity could be distinguished from long-term memory, considered to require more time for both input and output of stimulus materials, and to be organized in ways that are relatively immune to the interval variations or attention stressors affecting short-term memory function.Most real-world tasks, however, require an interplay between the two systems. Spelling is an example. Spelling requires subjects to maintain some portion of a stimulus word in short-term memory, while retrieving and applying information-such as word sounds and orthographic rules-from long-term . memory. Clearly, a model to account for such behavior must be concerned with the active integration and control of information stored in several ways, and resulting from different histories of presentation and rehearsal. Presented here is a set of experimental explorations into the nature of such a model. We studied children because we wanted to investigate the early stages of memory consolidation and activation.

Children's use of analogy in learning to spell

“…However, the difference between the two word types increased at analogy test, which shows that while the children were making some inappropriate analogies, they were making fewer inappropriate than appropriate analogies. The importance of using a visual check to decide between alternative candidate spellings has been emphasized by Farnham-Diggory & Simon (1975).…”

Encountering misspellings and spelling performance: Why wrong isn't right.

“…Furthermore, encountering these incorrect versions of these particular words can interfere with subsequent spelling accuracy. The theoretical position that there exists a single spelling template for all words (Block, 1976; Blumberg, 1976; Farnham-Diggory & Simon, 1975; Simon & Simon, 1973; Smith, 1973; Tenney, 1980) does not appear to be an accurate representation of the realities of spelling memory.…”

Access to the memory trace through orthographic and categoric information.

“…There are other possibilities which one might explore in addition to the speech-production notion. Somewhere in the mental amphitheatre there must be a representation of each item as its spelling (see also Simon, 1976;Farnham-Diggory & Simon, 1975). That this representation is not simply in terms of the item's sound is attested to by the large number of different ways of spelling the same auditory experience, particularly in English.…”