4~6岁幼儿对口语和文字信息的信任及运用

Trust and subsequent use of oral and print information for 4～6 year-old children

研究以混合物分类为实验任务,探讨在面对口语和文字两种信息时,4~6岁中国幼儿的信任特点,在信任任务之后的即时和延时两个时间点上考察幼儿对所信任信息的运用,以及分析阅读水平对幼儿信息信任和运用的影响。研究结果表明:(1)4~6岁中国幼儿对不同类型信息都表现出高度信任,相较于口语信息,阅读水平高的幼儿表现出对文字信息的信任偏好;(2)幼儿在后续任务中较少运用所信任的信息,随着时间的推移,幼儿运用的口语信息持续减少,但文字信息的运用呈现先降后升的特点;(3)阅读水平在不同时间点上影响幼儿对所信任信息的运用,阅读水平低的幼儿在短时间内更多地运用口语信息,而阅读水平高的幼儿在更长时间里显著更多地使用文字信息。未来研究应进一步探究文字意识对幼儿文字信息信任和后续运用的作用。

Children have many opportunities to learn from others through oral and printed sources. A few recent studies investigating children＇s trust in printed versus oral information suggested that as soon as children acquired the basic reading ability, they placed more trust in printed over oral testimony when learning names for unfamiliar objects. Previous studies have shown that a proportion of the information that early readers gained from printed sources might be fragile and lost once the printed label is no longer present, but those studies have not examined young children＇s subsequent use of the accepted oral or printed information. The current experiments examine whether Chinese young children from 4 to 6 years old trust the printed information more than oral information, to what extent the young children extend their new knowledge to subsequent circumstances, and the effects of reading ability on initial trust and subsequent use. In this study, 125 Chinese young children from 4 to 6 years of age were tested. Each child completed four tasks： the reading ability task, the hybrid sorting task, the short-term recognition task of hybrid pictures （3 minutes after the sorting task）, and the long-term recognition task （2 weeks later）. Children＇s reading ability was evaluated by a single-word recognition test involving words from the hybrid sorting task. For the hybrid sorting task, children were presented with pictures of hybrid creatures that looked more like one of two species, and had the opportunity to accept or reject an oral or printed label that referred to the perceptually non-dominant species. For the recognition tasks, children were asked to name the same set of hybrid creatures or sort them to the related locations. We analyzed the experimental data using hierarchical linear modeling （HLM） （score level and individual level） to investigate the contribution of information type, reading ability and age to children＇s initial trust of information, children＇s recognition of hybrid pictures in the short term and in the long term. We found that Chinese young children trusted both oral and printed labels in the original sorting tasks： There＇s no significant main effects of information type, age, or reading ability on children＇s trust in oral or printed information, but the interaction between reading ability and information type predicts children＇s trust. Using simple slope analysis we found that all children trusted the printed information, while higher-level readers were more likely to reject the oral information than lower-level readers. Despite of prior great trust of information in the original sorting tasks, young children seldom applied the information to the subsequent short-term or long-term tasks. However, they tended to apply more printed information than oral information in the long run. There were interaction effects of reading ability and information type on children＇s subsequent use of information both in the short-term and in the long- term. Specifically, lower level readers were more likely to use the oral information than the higher level readers in the short term, while higher-level reader were more likely to use the printed information than the lower-level readers in the long run. The role of print awareness in the relationship between reading ability and children＇s trust and subsequent use of information was discussed.