Children's sensitivity to rime unit frequency when spelling words and nonwords

This paper presents two experiments investigating 8–9 year old children's sensitivity to rime level sound-spelling correspondence units when spelling words and nonwords. In Experiment 1, children spelled more words correctly if they contained a common rime unit rather than a unique or irregular unit. In Experiment 2, children spelled more words and nonwords correctly if they had many rime unit neighbours; words and nonwords with average or few rime unit neighbours were spelled less well. These findings show that children's spelling can not be described simply according to one-to-one phoneme-grapheme mapping. Instead, children are sensitive to lexical factors such as rime unit sound-spelling correspondence. The findings are interpreted within the framework of a connectionist model of spelling development.     

Frequency analyses of prephonological spellings as predictors of success in conventional spelling

The present study explored how children's prephonological writing foretells differential learning outcomes in primary school. The authors asked Portuguese-speaking preschool children in Brazil (mean age 4 year 3 months) to spell 12 words. Monte Carlo tests were used to identify the 31 children whose writing was not based on spellings or sounds of the target words. Two and a half years later, the children took a standardized spelling test. The more closely the digram (two-letter sequence) frequencies in the preschool task correlated with those in children's books, the better scores the children had in primary school, and the more preschoolers used letters from their own name, the lower their subsequent scores. Thus, preschoolers whose prephonological writing revealed attentiveness to the statistical properties of text subsequently performed better in conventional spelling. These analytic techniques may help in the early identification of children at risk for spelling difficulties.     

Linguistic awareness skills in grade one children in a French immersion setting

This study examined the ability of children in French immersion and English programs to analyze the internal structure of spoken words in relation to their early reading and spelling abilities in English. Thirty-two children in the first grade were given a modified version of the Auditory Analysis Test, and reading and spelling tasks that included both real words and non-words. Results indicated that French immersion children were more proficient than their English program peers at explicitly analyzing spoken words and that the groups did not differ when reading and spelling orthographically regular real words and non-words. The English program children performed better than their French program peers only when reading orthographically irregular English words. These results demonstrate that second language learning enhances metalinguistic awareness and help to explain why children in immersion programs do not experience long-term difficulty in acquiring English written language skills.     

Effects of explicit rules in learning to spell open- and closed-syllable words

Second graders (N = 222; 7.7 years of age) practiced with open- and closed-syllable words in a computer-assisted training program and appropriate spelling rules were either explicitly provided during practice or not. Also, children practiced either with a small set of exemplars or with a large set; the latter condition was expected to promote the use of rules. A control group consisting of 209 second graders, who did not practice in the computer-assisted training program, was also included in the study. Learning effects of practice were established by testing the spelling of practiced words, as well as novel transfer words, in pre-, post-, and retention tests. The results in the posttest showed that with a large set of exemplars during practice explicitly provided spelling rules are supportive for learning to spell novel words but no further effects of explicit rules were found, either for practiced words or in the retention test.     

The relationship between linguistic characteristics and reading/writing performances of Norwegian children

The relations between different word categories and children's reading and writing performances were examined in twenty 9-year-old children. Results indicated for Norwegian, which is more regular than English but less regular than Finnish, that the length and the frequency of words and their interactions are factors substantially related both to children's reading, writing time (writing velocity), and spelling performances, whereas the regularity factor affected children's spelling only. Significant intercorrelations among reading and writing (accuracy and spelling) measures were found.     

How children learn about morphological spelling rules

A 2-year longitudinal study was carried out to test the hypothesis that children's word-specific learning of inflectional spellings is an essential first step in their acquiring an understanding of morphological rules for spelling inflections. Ninety children, who were 6-years-old at the start of the project, were asked to spell pseudowords and real words on three separate occasions. Inflections in pseudowords can be spelled only on the basis of morphological spelling rules, whereas the same inflections in real words can be spelled either through familiarity with the specific words (word-specific knowledge) or through morphological rules. Cross-lagged correlations suggested that the children's initial word-specific learning may be the basis for their later adoption and use of morphological spelling rules.     

Spanish dyslexic spelling abilities: the case of consonant clusters

This paper investigates Spanish dyslexic spelling abilities: specifically, the influence of syllabic linguistic structure (simple vs consonant cluster) on children's spelling performance. Consonant clusters are phonologically complex structures, so it was anticipated that there would be lower spelling performance for these syllabic structures than in simple ones, because of the poor phonological processing of dyslexic children. The participants were 31 dyslexic children, 31 chronological age‐matched children and 31 reading level‐matched children. A dictation task with words and pseudowords (with and without consonant clusters) was used. Word lexical frequency was controlled. The results show that the spelling of consonant clusters presents difficulties for dyslexic spelling performance despite this structure being orthographically consistent. Dyslexic children present a higher performance difference in items with consonant clusters than in simple items, compared with typically developing children. The work raises questions about the items used for the identification of dyslexic children's difficulties.     

Development of orthographic skills in Chinese children

This study investigates possible developmental trends in children's invented spelling (or spelling errors) in Chinese elementary schools. The entire study consists of two substudies, Study A and Study B. Study A analyzes over 7000 invented spellings collected from the writing samples of 1200 children. Study B analyzes 3995 invented spellings that were collected from the spelling tests of 300 children. These invented spellings are sorted initially according to emerging patterns according to the way the invented spellings deviate from standard spellings; they are then further subsumed into three general categories according to the linguistic principles of Chinese characters - phonologically based spelling errors, graphemic spelling errors, and semantic spelling errors. Qualitative analysis of the invented spellings of these three categories indicates that children's spelling errors are not random; rather they reflect the development of children's orthographic knowledge. Regression analysis for linear trend shows that a developmental trend in the use of spelling strategies exists: at the lower elementary level, phonological strategies predominate; as grade level advances, the use of graphemic and semantic strategies increases.     

The relationship between rapid naming and word spelling in English

A study of the concurrent relationships between naming speed, phonological awareness and spelling ability in 146 children in Years 3 and 4 of state‐funded schools in South‐East England (equivalent to US Grades 2 and 3) is reported. Seventy‐two children identified as having normal phonological awareness but reduced rapid automatised naming (RAN) performance (1 standard deviation below the mean) participated in the study. A group of 74 children was further identified. These children were matched on phonological awareness, verbal and nonverbal IQ and visual acuity, but all members of this group showed normal RAN performance. RAN made a significant unique contribution to spelling performance. Further analyses showed that participants with low naming performance were significantly poorer spellers overall and had a specific difficulty in spelling irregular words. The findings support the view that RAN may be indexing processes that are implicated in the establishment of fully specified orthographic representations.     

Don't just look,listen: uncovering children's cognitive strategies during spelling-related activities

This paper reports on a study that used verbal protocols to uncover the cognitive strategies of children from Sydney, Australia, aged 8- to 9-years-old, when they were engaged in a range of word sorting and editing activities. The children's cognitive strategies have been analysed in terms of a developmental stage theory of spelling. The findings are contrasted with the skills and characteristics of competent spellers at each recognised stage of spelling development. The paper considers the orthographic knowledge and spelling strategies of children that are evident when they are asked to ‘think aloud’ about English words and contrasts this with what is (or is not) captured through the developmental stage theory of spelling. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for the findings on classroom practice.     

Spelling without phonology: A study of deaf and hearing children

To what extent does phonology play a role in spelling English words? The written responses of deaf students and groups of hearing children to five tasks were subjected to quantitative and qualitative analyses. The first three tasks were used to see if deaf students utilized phonology when they generated their own words and to compare their spelling performance with that of hearing subjects. The fourth and fifth tasks were designed to compare the spelling performance of deaf and hearing subjects when they were required to reproduce visually presented common words. Results showed that deaf students, who were chronologically much older, were not better spellers than hearing children from the fifth grade. Analysis of data revealed little evidence that the deaf students involved in the present study utilize phonology in spelling. Nor did word-specific visual memory for entire words appears to play a role in spelling by deaf students. Rote visual memory for letter patterns and sequences of letters within words, however, appears to play a role in the spelling by deaf students. It is concluded that sensitivity to the stochastic-dependent probabilities of letter sequences may aid spelling up to certain point but phonology is essential for spelling words whose structure is morphophonemically complex.

     

Learning to spell in Hebrew: Phonological and morphological factors

This paper investigates children's developingknowledge of the Hebrew spelling system in view of theclaim that language-specific typology affects the rateand the pattern of development of orthographicspelling. Hebrew is a morphologically syntheticlanguage with a phonologically ``deep' orthography, onthe one hand, and a consistent representation ofmorphology in the spelling system, on the other. Thispaper focuses on the difference between representingcontent words versus grammatical words, and rootsversus morphemic and attached function letters inwritten Hebrew. The paper describes two studies. InStudy 1, compositions from gradeschool children (grade1 through 6) were analyzed for types of spellingerrors; in Study 2, children from grades 2–4 wereadministered a spelling task. Results indicate thatgrammatical words are spelled correctly before contentwords, and that within content words, the correctspelling of function letters precedes that of rootletters. These differences are attributed to factorsof transparency, consistency and frequency, coupledwith gradeschoolers' growing perception ofphonological and morphological patterning in Hebrew.     

Computer-based reading and spelling practice for children with learning disabilities.

To examine the effects of computer-based reading and spelling practice on the development of reading and spelling skills, a pretest-training-posttest experiment was conducted in The Netherlands. Eleven girls and 17 boys with written language disorders (on the average, 9 years, 7 months old and performing 2 grades below age expectancy) practiced hard-to-read words under three conditions: reading from the computer screen, copying from the screen, and writing from memory after presentation on the screen. For all words, whole-word sound was available on call during practice. To assess learning effects, both a dictation and a read-aloud task were administered in which nonpracticed control words were also presented. During training, the computer kept record of several aspects of the pupils' learning behavior. It was found that copying words from the screen resulted in significantly fewer spelling errors on the posttest than writing words from memory, and that both forms of spelling practice led to fewer spelling errors than only reading words during practice. All three forms of practice improved to the same degree both the accuracy and fluency of reading the practiced words aloud. The way in which spelling and reading practice, in combination with speech feedback, support the development of phonological skills in children with written language disorders is highlighted in the discussion.     

The relations between children's linguistic awareness and spelling: The case of the apostrophe

In a longitudinal study, we looked at the link between children'sunderstanding of a morphemically-based orthographic rule and theirawareness of morphemic distinctions. The orthographic rule in question wasthe use of the apostrophe to denote possession in English. Early on in thestudy, we gave the children phonological, semantic/syntactic and morpho-syntactic awareness tasks, and later we gave them a spelling task in whichthey had to write words which were either genitives (e.g., `boy's') ornominative or accusative plurals (e.g., `boys'). Eight- to 10-year-oldchildren found this task difficult, but their performance improved to someextent with age. The morpho-syntactic, but not the phonological orsemantic/syntactic, awareness tasks predicted how well the children placedapostrophes in genitive words and omitted them from plural words. Weconclude that different forms of linguistic awareness affect differentaspects of reading and spelling. Learning about spelling patterns based onmorphemes is heavily influenced by children's morpho-syntactic awarenessbut not, apparently, by other forms of linguistic awareness.     

The initial development of spelling in Spanish: From global to analytical

During a school year, samples of words written by three groups of children of successive ages were collected. Two groups of children were in first and second year of Kindergarten (4 and 5 years of age), when alphabetic rules were not taught in a systematic way. The third group was in first year of Primary School (6 years of age), and was being taught to read and spell in a systematic way. After classifying the words written by the children, seven categories of spelling were obtained, which may represent different stages in their learning process. Their analysis showed that they are related to different types of knowledge and processes, mainly phonological ones. The results show that the development of spelling in Spanish does not qualitatively differ from that of children who learn to spell in opaque writing systems. The differences mainly involve the time it takes to learn, and the rate of acquisition.     

How poor readers and spellers use interactive speech in a computerized spelling program

The ‘Spello’ program was designed to use interactive speech feedback on a talking-computer system to improve children's spelling and phonological skills. In two versions of the program, the synthesizer pronounced the word to be spelled and the student tried to type in the word correctly. Both versions of the program showed the students which letters were correct in their spelling attempts. One version pronounced only the target word, as often as the child requested. The other version also provided intermediate speech feedback for children's spelling attempts, so they could hear how their own attempts sounded, and compare them to the target word. Twenty-eight children aged seven to fourteen studied 16 words they had misspelled on pretests and 16 words of related word structure. For children ten years or older, training with intermediate speech feedback led to greater benefits in phonological coding skills than training with word-only feedback, reflected in the ability to read nonsense words related in structure to the trained words. Intermediate speech feedback also led to a marginally significant advantage in spelling the trained words. When the groups switched conditions, however, there was no difference in their tested skills after a second week of training.     

Predictive text entry with PAL and children with learning difficulties

Nine case studies were conducted to evaluate the usefulness of a predictive text entry program within a classroom environment. The program, PAL, was found to be very successful in eight of the cases. For children with poor motor control, the key-saving aspects speeded up text creation. Of even greater significance was the extent to which children with severe spelling problems were helped. They were able to produce much higher quality written work with a substantial reduction in the number of spelling errors. This provided great motivation for the children, and teaching staff commented on their improved confidence and attention span, as well as stimulation of language and vocabulary development. One of the children was on the verge of being classified as a non-reader and, although progress was slow, a significant improvement in the child's work was observed.     

Lexical and nonlexical processes in the skilled reading and spelling of Persian

The objective of the present study was to examine the contribution of lexical and nonlexical processes to skilled reading and spelling in Persian. Persian is a mixed orthography that allows one to study within one language characteristics typically found in shallow orthographies as well as those found in deeper orthographies. 61 senior high-school students (mean age = 17; 8, SD = 4 months) attending schools in Iran were tested on reading and spelling of words and nonwords. The word stimuli differed in terms of reading transparency (transparent when all phonemes have corresponding letters vs. opaque when short vowels were not marked with a letter) and spelling polygraphy (nonpolygraphic phonemes vs. polygraphic phonemes). The nonwords were transparent and nonpolygraphic. The reading results showed that both transparent and opaque words were read faster than nonwords, and that transparent words were read faster than opaque words. Moreover, both transparent and opaque words were affected by word frequency. These findings suggest that skilled readers of Persian relied on lexical processes to read words. In contrast, the spelling results failed to show a word-advantage effect suggesting that skilled spellers of Persian rely on nonlexical processes to spell words. Moreover, orthographic complexity also affected spelling. Specifically, nonpolygraphic words were spelled faster than polygraphic words for both transparent and opaque words. Taken together, the findings showed that skilled reading and spelling in Persian rely on different underlying processes.     

What Types of Linguistic Information Do Children Use in Spelling? The Case of Flaps

We sought to determine what types of linguistic information children represent in their spelling by examining their performance on the flaps of words such as city and lady . In 4 experiments, children often misspelled flaps as d . This d bias was common until at least second grade, with few children showing a bias toward t . We found no evidence that children have an underlying representation of city as containing /t/, for children said such words with /d/ when speaking very slowly. Even kindergartners were more accurate at spelling the flaps of words such as dirty , which have a stem ending with /t/, than the flaps of words such as city . Thus, children use meaning relations among words to aid their spelling before they have formally been taught to do so. The results show that young children are not purely phonetic spellers as they are often portrayed. The results further suggest that phonology and orthography are closely related systems that interact during development.