Nigro Natale, L. . , Jiménez Fernández, G. , Simpson, I. & Defior Citoler, S.
Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Universidad de Granada. Granada, Spain.
Our study aims to explore the contribution of implicit learning (i.e. the ability to learn from a structured material without intention) to spelling acquisition. We studied the ability of Spanish children (8 and 9 years-old) to implicitly learn artificial spelling rules. A learning experiment with an exposure and a test phase was designed and administered to 25 3rd grade students. During the exposure phase participants were shown a set of 108 stimuli which complied with a series of positional rules; these stimuli consisted of CVCV pseudowords where only three consonants could be used in the first syllable and other three in the second syllable. After this exposure, the occurrence of implicit learning was assessed during the test phase, in which participants were presented with pairs of pseudowords (one of them being consistent with the positional rules and the other being inconsistent) and were asked to choose which of them was consistent with the artificial rules. The results showed that children were able to learn the positional rules after a brief exposure. Participants were also assessed with reading and spelling tests of real words and pseudowords. A correlation analyses also showed a significant relation between the ability to learn artificial rules and the spelling ability of the students, though this link was not found with reading ability. These results suggest that implicit learning mechanisms play an important role in spelling acquisition.