The Influence Of Digital Language Experience On Word Cognition In Adolescent Students

The practice of human science and technology, on the one hand, is utilizing and remolding the nature, on the other hand, is shaping the human itself. The popularization of contemporary information and communication technology (ICT) represented by computer and Internet network brings convenience to people’s work, study and social interaction and it also shapes the way people live, work and communicate. In the process of information input, storage, transfer and output, language is a major carrier of information. So in the current digital age, two important changes occur in the operational mode of the language as follows:first, digital writing appears as keyboard or screen input replaces the traditional paper-pen writing. Second, traditional oral language, recorded on the keyboard, is combined with written language and then forms the informal net-speak. As a result, digital writing transforms traditional handwriting into typing letters on the keyboard, and net-speak changes the standardized expression style of Chinese semantics. Thus, few issues need to be considered:Will these changes affect teenagers in learning and mastering the standard Chinese with the widespread use of the new language operational mode in youth? And what is the cognitive psychological mechanism of this effect?Taken adolescent students as the objects, this study systematically probes into the relationship between digital language experience and word cognition, and also explores the influencing mechanism by adopting the methods of questionnaires, natural tracking experiments and computer behavior experiments. This study mainly consists of the following parts:the survey about the relationship among digital writing, Pinyin input proficiency, net-speak experience and the performance of standard Chinese words spelling; the comparison between the effects of gap filling and multiple choice questions tests about learning words with keyboard Pinyin input and the effects with traditional handwriting; the influences of Pinyin input experience on RT and the accuracy of judgment about semantic grapheme consistency, semantic phoneme consistency, phoneme consonant or vowel consistency; the effects of net-speak experience on RT and the accuracy of judgment about semantic similarity of net-words traditional semantics and net semantics. The conclusions are as follows:1. Among adolescent students, the relation between digital writing experience and spelling achievement presents various features at different school age. For teenagers, in the early stage of word learning, digital writing has a negative effect on character spelling; At a certain level stage about mastering word after high school, digital writing has not a direct effect on word spelling.2. Pinyin input method is widely used in teenager digital writing activities. Digital writing experience and Pinyin input proficiency has an extremely significant positive correlation. In general, Pinyin input proficiency (or input experience) plays a positive role in words spelling for adolescents.3. Both traditional handwriting practice and keyboard pinyin input have positive effects on Chinese characters learning. Nevertheless, the positive effect of traditional handwriting is greater than Pinyin input, and mainly reflected in learning spelling Chinese characters that have not been mastered.4. Pinyin input experience does not affect the connection strength between semantic and grapheme of the high-frequency familiar words, but affect the connection strength between semantic and phoneme. Individual with high Pinyin-input experience has closer semantic phoneme links than that with low, which is embodied in the link between semantic and syllable, semantic and consonant, semantic and vowel.5. There is no significant correlation between net-speak experience and standard word spelling. But for some net-words with both traditional and cyber semantics, net-speak experience strengthens the links between semantics and graheme of net-speak words, including traditional semantic and grapheme as well as cyber semantic and grapheme.