In a modern society, strong literacy skills are critical to educational attainment and employment outcomes. Many pre-literacy skills are typically acquired before the start of formal education. Reducing the number of children who enter school with inadequate literacy-related knowledge and skills is an important societal goal. This project focuses on children before they enter kindergarten. It examines how children learn about one set of literacy skills: those involved in the reading and spelling of individual words, prior to explicit instruction.
The project investigates the types of information that young children acquire through implicit learning prior to formal instruction regarding spelling and reading conventions. The goal is to characterize the types of information that children acquire (e.g., writing conventions dictate that words are written from left to right in English) prior to formal schooling and investigate how individual differences in acquisition of this knowledge corresponds to later reading and spelling abilities. The studies involve both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs and a wide array of tasks. The prevailing hypothesis is that children utilize the statistical structure of patterns in their environments to extract information about conventions that lend support to the subsequent, more explicit task of learning to read and write.
Broader impacts of this research include the capacity to identify children who are at risk of literacy problems early on so that intervention can be provided from the onset of formal schooling. This project will support the research community by developing and disseminating a computerized scoring tool to be used with many conventional tasks that will provide a nuanced analysis of the nature and degree of children's accuracy and errors, rather than simply scoring responses as either correct or incorrect as is the prevailing convention in early literacy assessments.
