Proactive Interference Effects In Children With Spelling Difficulties Encoding Chinese Characters

The performance of children with spelling difficulties is poor on the Chinese characters dictation memory task. Working memory capacity is considered to be a reason for individual differences in performance on different cognitive tasks, and proactive interference(PI) has a robust impact on the working memory capacity. This study included 3serial experiments, using self-created fake Chinese characters as experimental materials, selecting 60 subjects from primary school, and applying the modified recent-probes task, andinvestigated whetherPIaffected the global Chinese characters encoding, partial Chinese characters encoding or Chinese characters components binding in children with spelling difficulties or not. The results showed that:(1) children with spelling difficultieshave defect in processing global Chinese characters encoding; the control group could realize thePI and be affected by it, revealed by decreased accuracy;(2) children with spelling difficulties showed defects in partial Chinese characters encoding, included glyph and pronunciation, and the glyph encoding was affected by PI, while the control group successfully resolvedPI;(3) When children with spelling difficulties were binding Chinese character components, they also subjected to PI, but the control group were not bothered. It suggests that children with spelling difficulties have defects in Chinese character encoding process, becausetheyfailed to effectively solve the PI. This enlightens the clinical intervention for children with spelling difficulties.