Facilitating word learning in different writing systems by metacognitive enhancement

Objetivo temático: Quality Education

Área Científica: Educational Sciences

Síntese do Projeto: The writing system – the transparency of orthography in alphabet-based systems and differences between logographic and phonetic-based systems – can affect the efficiency of inferential word learning when words are introduced visually. It can also shape how people self-evaluate their learning success (we refer to such type of self-evaluation as metacognitive monitoring of word learning). Writing systems differ in the size of the unit that is coded by one symbol (a discrete semantic concept in logographic systems, a syllable in syllabic systems, and phonemes in alphabetic systems).

Alphabetic systems also differ in terms of syllabic complexity and orthographic depth, both of these factors affect the sound-to-symbol mapping. In languages with transparent orthography, the sound-to-symbol correspondence in explicit, while in languages with opaque orthography, the relations between symbols and sounds are not consistent. Syllabic complexity reflects the phonotactic rules, or possible constraints on how many consonants can make a single syllable, and depending on the orthographic depth, the syllabic complexity may differ across visual and auditory modalities (in spelling, the words may have many consonants, which are not pronounced or heard in spoken speech). Hence, alphabetic languages can be syllabically complex and transparent vs. opaque (German vs Danish, correspondingly) and syllabically simple and transparent vs. opaque (Spanish vs French, correspondingly).

In the proposed project, we will first explore how experience with different writing systems modulates metacognition during language tasks that involve versus those do not involve the processing of written information. To this end, we will administer an inferential word learning task in the auditory and visual modalities to native speakers of the following alphabetic languages: German, Danish, Spanish and French (to explore the effect of orthographic depth in syllabically complex and simple languages). Further, we will administer the task to Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and Hindi speakers, to explore the effect of the unit size that is coded by each symbol. Chinese has a purely logographic writing system, Japanese speakers are familiar both with logographic (kanji) and syllabic (kana) writing, Hindi speakers use syllabic script, and Arabic speakers use abjad script, which is a transition between purely syllabic and purely alphabetic systems, and each symbol codes a consonant, while vowels are sometimes represented by adding diacritics to the consonantal symbols, and sometimes omitted.

Participants will learn the pseudowords that are phonetically and phonotactically possible in their native languages, and we will test how well they have learnt new words in the visual and auditory modality, and how precisely they can monitor and evaluate the learning process. Preliminary work already showed that the writing system affects efficiency and metacognition of word learning in the visual modality, but not in the auditory modality, however we do not know which aspects of the writing system (unit size, orthographic depth or syllabic complexity) affect metacognition of word learning in the native language, and how these aspects interact during the learning process. Second, we will test how writing system of a target language affects word learning by native Portuguese speakers who learn a foreign language with different writing systems. The observed differences between populations using different writing systems and between perceptual modalities may potentially modulate the effectiveness of vocabulary acquisition activities during foreign language learning. The third objective of the proposed project will be aimed at developing audio-visual aids to help word learning by Portuguese speakers depending on the writing system in their target language. This is the foundation for applied research in educational psychology, aimed to design optimal methods for vocabulary building. The fourth objective is to explore the causal relations between metacognition and learning outcome.

Earlier studies that showed the effect of metacognition on learning are purely correlational. In the proposed project, we will use non-invasive highdefinition tDCS to modulate activity in the neural substrates that underpin metacognitive processing. We will explore if the changes in metacognitive sensitivity, induced by tDSC during the experiment, will also lead to changes in the visual and auditory word learning in a foreign language.

Investigador Responsável na UC: Leona Polyanskaya

Instituições participantes no projeto: Universidade de Coimbra (UC)

Instituição Financiadora/Gestora: FCT-Fundação p/a Ciência e Tecnology

Programa de Financiamento: Concurso de Projetos Exploratórios em Todos os Domínios Científicos 2023

Período de execução: 01/02/2025 a 31/07/2026

Custo total elegível (EUR): 49925.98

Apoio financeiro público nacional: 49925.98

Técnico do projeto: Sónia Branco

Contacto: +351 239 247 019 | sonia.branco@uc.pt