We find that illiterates produce speech differently. Here we analyse the temporal structure of ADS spoken by illiterate, low literate (4 years of literacy) and highly literate (! 12 years of literacy) adults. Whether temporal features of ADS vary with the skills of the speaker, for example literacy skills, is currently unknown.

To date, however, all neural studies have investigated adult-directed speech (ADS) as produced and perceived by highly literate adults. Amplitude modulations (AMs, quasi-rhythmic changes in signal energy or intensity) in speech are encoded by neuronal oscillations (rhythmic variations in neural excit-ability in large cell networks) that oscillate at matching temporal rates. These findings demonstrate the significant potential advantages of utilizing self-referential encoding in the classroom.The temporal modulation structure of speech plays a key role in neural encoding of the speech signal. Experiment 2 ( N = 32) replicated this pattern in real-word learning. Results showed that children in this self-referent condition produced longer sentences and increased spelling accuracy by more than 20%, relative to those in an other-referent condition. Half of the children were asked to include themselves as a subject in each sentence. In Experiment 1, seven-to nine-year-old children ( N = 47) were asked to learn the spelling of four nonsense words by copying the vocabulary and generating sentences. A self-referential modification of literacy tasks (vocabulary spelling) was tested in two experiments. The current inquiry tested an educational application of this ‘self reference effect’ (SRE) on memory.

Self-referencing (i.e., thinking about oneself during encoding) can increase attention toward to-be-encoded material, and support memory for information in adults and children.

Encoding in literacy