Sébastien Pacton

Implicit learning out of the lab: the case of orthographic regularities

Childrens (Grades 1 to 5) implicit learning of French orthographic regularities was investigated through nonword judgment (Experiments 1 and 2) and completion (Experiments 3a and 3b) tasks. Children were increasingly sensitive to (a) the frequency of double consonants (Experiments 1, 2, and 3a), (b) the fact that vowels can never be doubled (Experiment 2), and (c) the legal position of double consonants (Experiments 2 and 3b). The latter effect transferred to never doubled consonants but with a decrement in performance. Moreover, this decrement persisted without any trend toward fading, even after the massive amounts of experience provided by years of practice. This result runs against the idea that transfer to novel material is indicative of abstract rule-based knowledge and suggests instead the action of mechanisms sensitive to the statistical properties of the material. A connectionist model is proposed as an instantiation of such mechanisms.

An attention-based associative account of adjacent and nonadjacent dependency learning.

In 5 experiments, results showed that when participants are faced with materials embedding relations between both adjacent and nonadjacent elements, they learn exclusively the type of relations they had to actively process in order to meet the task demands, irrespective of the spatial contiguity of the paired elements. These results are consonant with current theories positing that attention is a necessary condition for learning. More important, the results provide support for a more radical conception, in which the joint attentional processing of 2 events is also a sufficient condition for learning the relation between them. The well-documented effect of contiguity could be a by-product of the fact that attention generally focuses on contiguous events. This reappraisal considerably extends the scope of approaches based on associative or statistical processes.

How specific is the connection between morphological awareness and spelling? A study of French children.

This study examined the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. We show that French children in Grades 3 and 4 appear to use morphological information in spelling; spelling of sounds for which there are several alternatives was more accurate in derived than in nonderived words. The link between morphological awareness and spelling seems to be general, given that morphological awareness correlated with multiple spelling scores, including those that did not involve morphology. Further, the relationship between spelling and morphological awareness seems to be affected by both the developmental level of the child and the phonological structure of the items in the morphological awareness task. We discuss the implications of this research for clarifying the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling.

Learning to spell from reading: general knowledge about spelling patterns influences memory for specific words.

Adults often learn to spell words during the course of reading for meaning, without intending to do so. We used an incidental learning task in order to study this process. Spellings that contained double n, r and t which are common doublets in French, were learned more readily by French university students than spellings that contained less common but still legal doublets. When recalling or recognizing the latter, the students sometimes made transposition errors, doubling a consonant that often doubles in French rather than the consonant that was originally doubled (e.g., tiddunar recalled as tidunnar). The results, found in three experiments using different nonwords and different types of instructions, show that people use general knowledge about the graphotactic patterns of their writing system together with word-specific knowledge to reconstruct spellings that they learn from reading. These processes contribute to failures and successes in memory for spellings, as in other domains.

Do distractors interfere with memory for study pairs in associative recognition

In an associative recognition task, distractors generally consist of a rearrangement of the items composing the study pairs. This makes it possible that processing the distractors generates retroactive interference on memory for the study pairs. In Experiment 1, we explored this possibility in ayes/no recognition test concerning previously learned arbitrary associations between visual symbols and auditory syllables. Rearranged pairs had a deleterious impact on the accuracy and the speed of responses to related correct pairs. This effect did not vary as a function of the number of training blocks, and furthermore, in Experiment 2, the same effect was observed for overlearned small multiplication facts. These results suggest that exposure to potentially confounding information generates interference even if this information is known to be incorrect. Some implications are outlined, especially with regard to the widespread use of multiple-choice tests in knowledge evaluation.

How does graphotactic knowledge influence children's learning of new spellings?

Two experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spellings by French third graders is influenced by two graphotactic patterns: consonants cannot double in word-initial position (Experiment 1) and consonants cannot double after single consonants (Experiment 2). Children silently read meaningful texts that contained three types of novel spellings: no doublet (e.g., mupile, guprane), doublet in a legal position (e.g., muppile, gupprane), and doublet in an illegal position (e.g., mmupile, guprrane). Orthographic learning was assessed with a task of spelling to dictation. In both experiments, children recalled items without doublets better than items with doublets. In Experiment 1, children recalled spellings with a doublet in illegal word-initial position better than spellings with a doublet in legal word-medial position, and almost all misspellings involved the omission of the doublet. The fact that the graphotactic violation in an item like mmupile was in the salient initial position may explain why children often remembered both the presence and the position of the doublet. In Experiment 2, children recalled non-words with a doublet before a single consonant (legal, e.g., gupprane) better than those with a doublet after a single consonant (illegal, e.g., guprrane). Omission of the doublet was the most frequent error for both types of items. Children also made some transposition errors on items with a doublet after a single consonant, recalling for example gupprane instead of guprrane. These results suggest that, when a doublet is in the hard-to-remember medial position, children sometimes remember that an item contains a doublet but not which letter is doubled. Their knowledge that double consonants can occur before but not after single consonants leads to transposition errors on items like guprrane. These results shed new light on the conditions under which children use general knowledge about the graphotactic patterns of their writing system to reconstruct spellings.

Children benefit from morphological relatedness when they learn to spell new words

Use of morphologically related words often helps in selecting among spellings of sounds in French. For instance, final /wa/ may be spelled oi (e.g., envoi “sendoff”), oit (e.g., exploit “exploit”), ois (e.g., siamois, “siamese”), or oie (e.g., joie “joy”). The morphologically complex word exploiter “to exploit”, with a pronounced t, can be used to indicate that the stem exploit is spelled with a silent t. We asked whether 8-year-old children benefited from such cues to learn new spellings. Children read silently stories which included two target nonwords, one presented in an opaque condition and the other in a morphological condition. In the opaque condition, the sentence provided semantic information (e.g., a vensois is a musical instrument) but no morphological information that could justify the spelling of the target words final sound. Such justification was available in the morphological condition (e.g., the vensoisist plays the vensois instrument, which justifies that vensois includes a final silent s). 30 min after having read the stories, childrens orthographic learning was assessed by asking them to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g., vensois, vensoit, vensoie). Children chose correct spellings more often in the morphological condition than the opaque condition, even though the root (vensois) had been presented equally often in both conditions. That is, children benefited from information about the spelling of the morphologically complex word to learn the spelling of the stem.

The influence of graphotactic knowledge on adults' learning of spelling.

Three experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spelling by French university students is influenced by the graphotactic legitimacy of the spellings. Participants were exposed to three types of novel spellings: AB, which do not contain doublets (e.g., guprane); AAB, with a doublet before a single consonant, which is legitimate in French (e.g., gupprane); and ABB, with a doublet after a single consonant, which is illegitimate (e.g., guprrane). In Experiment 1, the nonwords were embedded within texts that participants read for meaning. In Experiment 2, participants read the nonwords in isolation, with or without instruction to memorize their spellings; they copied the nonwords in Experiment 3. In all of these conditions, AB and AAB spellings were learned more readily than ABB spellings. Although participants were highly knowledgeable about the illegitimacy of ABB spellings, the orthographic distinctiveness of these spellings did not make them easier to recall than legitimate spellings. When recalling ABB spellings, participants sometimes made transposition errors, doubling the wrong consonant of a cluster (e.g., spelling gupprane instead of guprrane). Participants almost never transposed the doubling for AAB items. Transposition errors, biased in the direction of replacing illegitimate with legitimate orthographic patterns, show that graphotactic knowledge influences memory for specific items. An analysis of the spellings produced in the copy phase and final recall test of Experiment 3 further suggests that transposition errors resulted not so much from reconstructive processes at the time of recall but from reconstructive processes or inefficient encoding at earlier points.

Children benefit from morphological relatedness independently of orthographic relatedness when they learn to spell new words

We examined whether French children in Grades 3 and 5 (aged ∼ 8-11 years) benefit from morphological relatedness beyond orthographic relatedness in the implicit learning of new spellings. Children silently read stories that included two target nonwords. One nonword was in an opaque condition in that nothing in the story could justify the spelling of its final sound. The other nonword was in either a morphological condition (for children in the morphological group) or an orthographic condition (for children in the orthographic group). In the morphological condition, the final spelling of the target nonword was justified by two morphologically related nonwords. For example, coirardage, obtained by adding the suffixage to coirard, designates the coirards song and justifies the final silentdofcoirard. The orthographic condition included two nonwords that were orthographically but not morphologically related to the target. For example, the coirards song wascoirardume, obtained by addingume,which is not a suffix, tocoirard. Then, 30 min after reading the stories, children were asked to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g.,coirard, coirars, coirar). In the morphological group, both third and fifth graders more often selected the correct spellings for items presented in the morphological condition than for items presented in the opaque condition. In the orthographic group, the results were very similar in the opaque and orthographic conditions.The findings show that the benefit of morphological relatedness in the implicit learning of new spellings cannot be reduced to orthographic relatedness.