Spelling Sensitivity in Russian Speakers Develops by Early Adolescence
Scientists at the RAS Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology and HSE University have uncovered how the foundations of literacy develop in the brain. To achieve this, they compared error recognition processes across three age groups: children aged 8 to 10, early adolescents aged 11 to 14, and adults. The experiment revealed that a child's sensitivity to spelling errors first emerges in primary school and continues to develop well into the teenage years, at least until age 14. Before that age, children are less adept at recognising misspelled words compared to older teenagers and adults. The study findings have been published in Scientific Reports.
By the time they finish primary school, children's reading of high-frequency words becomes automated. Behavioural studies measuring parameters like reaction time and error rates show that children at this age can reliably distinguish between words and letter strings resembling words.
The event-related potential (ERP) method is a promising approach to examining the reading process in neurophysiological research. Event-related potentials are the brain's electrophysiological responses to perceptual events (such as specific sensations), cognitive events (like decision-making), or motor events (such as pressing a button).
The ERP method allows for assessing the brain's response to verbal stimuli and identifying time intervals—components within the ERP—associated with their processing. In primary school-age children, the ERPs in response to words and strings of non-letter symbols differ at 200 ms after presentation, but distinctions between words and meaningless strings of actual letters are detected much later, only after 400 ms. This indicates that such stimuli are more challenging for young children to process.
However, sensitivity to spelling patterns is not limited to the ability to distinguish words from meaningless letter sequences but also involves more complex skills related to recognizing spelling errors. The issue is that the neural bases underlying the development of orthographic sensitivity remain poorly understood.
Scientists at the RAS Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology and the Centre for Cognition and Decision Making of the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate event-related potentials associated with spelling error recognition. The study involved children aged 8 to 10, early adolescents aged 11 to 14, and adults aged 18 to 39, all of them native speakers of Russian. None of the subjects experienced spelling difficulties.
The subjects were presented with words on a screen, some of which were spelled correctly while others were misspelled. The task was to determine whether the word on the screen was spelled correctly.
The experiment showed that all the groups successfully identified both correctly spelled and misspelled words. The average error rate, even among children aged 8 to 10, did not exceed 14%, although children had more incorrect answers and longer reaction times compared to early adolescents and adults.
Early adolescents and adults showed similar, though not identical, behavioural results. The response time to both types of stimuli and the percentage of erroneous responses to correctly spelled words did not differ between these groups. However, early adolescents were worse than adults at recognising misspelled words.
In adult participants, differences in ERPs between correctly and incorrectly spelled words were observed in two distinct time windows. This indicates that the recognition of spelling correctness by adults involves two ERP components: an early component around 400 ms and a later one of up to 600 ms, probably related to re-checking the spelling for errors.
In children aged 8 to 10, there were no differences in ERPs between correctly spelled and misspelled words. According to the researchers, this suggests that the ability to quickly recognise correct spelling is just beginning to develop at this age. Interestingly, in early adolescents, spelling recognition was reflected only at the later stage corresponding to the 600 ms component, ie they did not exhibit early differences related to automated spelling recognition.
The experiment revealed that a child's orthographic sensitivity first emerges in primary school and continues to develop well into the teenage years, at least until age 14. These findings contribute to our understanding of the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the mastery of Russian spelling and how these mechanisms evolve with age.
Leading Research Fellow, Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience
In our study, adults and adolescents did not differ in their reaction times to any of the stimuli: both groups recognized correctly and incorrectly spelled words at similar speeds. This suggests that they likely employed similar reading and spelling recognition strategies. Nevertheless, the percentage of misidentified misspelled words was higher in early adolescents compared to adults, suggesting that spelling sensitivity is still developing at this age.
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