Perfetti - Read Write Integration

Read Write Integration

Summary Table

• Node Title: Integrating writing with reading
• Researchers: Qun (Connie) Guan, Fan Cao, Derek Chan, Charles Perfetti
• Others who have contributed 160 hours or more:
• Study Start Date Sep 1, 2009
• Study End Date August 31, 2010
• LearnLab Site and Courses , CMU Chinese (Classroom and Online)
• Number of Students: 30
• Planned Participant Hours for the study: 200
• Data in the Data Shop: Phase-I experiments have completed in fall 2009, Phase-II experiments will start in Spring 2010

Background & Significance

To reach a high level of Chinese proficiency, a learner needs to build robust bidirectional connections between the linguistic constituents. However, the connections are not acquired at the same rate of learning (Liu, Wang, & Perfetti, 2007). We found that the orthographic form knowledge came early, during the first term of a course, but that character meaning and especially pronunciation took longer to acquire. the writing-with-reading procedure is a possible answer to increasing the learner's integration of knowledge components. This idea follow from the close relationship between writing and learning to read in Chinese L1 learners (Tan, Spinks, Eden, Perfetti, & Siok, 2005).

In an initial in-vivo study in whcih students wrote briefly viewed characters while learning to read them, we found evidence for facilitation of writing on some measures of character learning (such as meaning acquistion and the character form recognition, but not phonological measures). In the Spring of 2009, we carried out a second major study, in which pinyin-typing and handwriting both were used as procedures that would build character knowledge. The hypothesis was that writing would behefit character-to-meanign learning while pinyin typing would benefit character-to-pronunciation learning. Generally speaking, we found across 2-day writing training, there was a writing effect on some orthographic-based task performance; and pinyin-typing facilitated character-to-sound learning only after Day-1 training.

Research questions

Do learning to write while learning to read support learning to read? If so, is the effect only on form recognition or does meaning and pronunciation access also benefit? If this learning is character by character (word by word), how much writing practice is needed for robust learning effects. Do writing-on-reading effects reflect the establishment of neural-motor representation that becomes part of a word recognition network?

Independent Variables

• Handwriting vs. Pinying-writing [See the Interface in a related study: http://www.learnlab.org/research/wiki/index.php/Integration_of_reading%2C_writing_and_typing_in_learning_Chinese_words]
• Practice Values (i.e., the number of practice trials per day, day 1 to day 3)

Dependent Variables

• Constituent Learning (character form, pinyin, tone, and the English meaning)
• Visual recognition (lexical decision, partial character recognition )

Hypotheses

Phase I Hypothesis

Writing characters helps reading the characters.

Phase II Hypothesis

A perceptual motor trace that interacts with visual recognition components would strengthen the representation of the character.

Explanation

Our prior work in neuroimaging of Chinese (e.g., Siok, Perfetti, Jin, & Tan, 2004) has identified frontal recognition areas (specific to Chinese) that are close to motor cortex and thus are candiates for becoming part of a word recognition network with writing practice.