The willingness to learn is key to building the “orthographic skeleton” of new vocabulary
A new study by the research centre BCBL reveals that imagining how a word is spelt when hearing it for the first time requires a conscious effort
The research shows that the creation of this representation in the brain is not automatic, but depends directly on explicit learning
The findings, published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, may help optimise educational strategies for reading and writing
When people hear a word for the first time, the brain tends to imagine how it is spelt, generating a preliminary mental representation known as an “orthographic skeleton”. Until now, previous studies suggested that children exposed to a greater volume of words formed these representations automatically, gaining a competitive advantage in the learning process.
However, a new research study conducted by the Donostia-San Sebastián-based Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), the results of which have been published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, qualifies this assumption.
The study demonstrates that the generation of “orthographic skeletons” requires a willingness to learn, rules out the idea that it is an automatic process, and opens up new avenues for improving teaching strategies.
Online experiment
To assess the degree of automaticity involved in this cognitive process, the BCBL research team designed an online behavioural experiment involving healthy young Spanish-speaking adults aged between 18 and 35. Participants listened to invented words with either unique spellings (such as “dalu”) or ambiguous spellings (such as “bamu” or “vamu”), without ever seeing them written down.
The sample was strategically divided into two groups. One group was aware that they were expected to learn the terms while performing the task, a process known as “explicit learning”. The second group was not instructed to learn the new words and therefore engaged in “implicit learning”. As a result, both groups were required to pay attention to the words, but only one group had the explicit objective of learning them, while the other merely listened attentively.
By analysing subsequent reading reaction times, the research team tracked the brain’s expectations and confirmed that only the first group successfully generated these orthographic traces during the auditory phase.
This is the first scientific study to examine this phenomenon by directly comparing both learning pathways, explicit and implicit, and it forms part of the doctoral research project of researcher Mina Jevtović, supervised by Professor Clara Martin and Dr Efthymia Kapnoula.
“These findings represent a major step forward in understanding how the human brain acquires new vocabulary. Understanding the conditions under which we create these orthographic representations may enable us to design and optimise teaching strategies, providing much more effective support for children in developing their reading and writing skills,” explains Efthymia Kapnoula.
Building on these openly accessible data, the research opens the door to further studies. For example, BCBL’s next objective will be to investigate whether factors such as sleep-based consolidation help to build these mental representations, even when the initial encounter with a new word has been purely implicit.
