Word Experience Effects On Development Of Perceptual Expertise

Reading is a unique human activity.During the childhood,experiences of words increase as a result of literacy learning,which enable rapid and automatic recognition of words,i.e.,expertise of word perception.Face is another kind of familiar object.With the increase of face experience,we can also reach the expertise of face perception.The neuronal recycling hypothesis proposes that the development of words and faces expertise is not separate.On the contrary,there is a close relationship between the two.In recent years,a series of illiterate studies have confirmed the effect of word experience on words and face expertise.However,it is not clear whether children with different word experiences in elementary school will have different levels of visual expertise of words and faces after controlling age.As the massed literacy teaching emerged in some primary schools recently,children can learn a large number of Chinese characters in a short period of time.,who possess significantly larger words experience than their peers under the normal literacy teaching.These two different teaching methods provide us a good chance to explore the effect of different words experience on development of perceptual expertise of children with the same age.Therefore,the current study adopts matching paradigm(Exp.1A and Exp.1B),composite paradigm(Exp.2A and Exp.2B)and spatial manipulation task(Exp.3A and Exp.3B)of Chinese characters and faces to reveal the effect of word experience on the development of perceptual expertise by comparing the second-and third-grade children under the two teaching methods.Results:(1)Two groups of concentrated literate children with large literacy have a composite effect of Chinese characters,while two groups of deconcentrated literate children with a small literacy have no composite effect.These results suggest that the increase in word experience in the primary school stage has the effect on the development of Chinese character perceptual expertise enhancement.(2)All children have a significant faces composite effect and the composite effect of each group is similar,which indicates that the overall face processing of children in the second and third grades of primary school is a stable feature,and the development of this feature is not modulated by the words experience.(3)In the matching tasks,composite tasks and spatial manipulation tasks of faces and Chinese characters,it was found consistently that the processing performance of the third grade children with less literacy(deconcentrated literacy)was fast than that of children with more literacy in the same grade(concentrated literacy).Which shows that the acquisition of short-term word experience can modulate cognitive development.