Pollo, Tatiana Cury, Rebecca Treiman, & Brett Kessler. 2008. Three perspectives on spelling development. In E. L. Grigorenko & A. J. Naples (eds.), Single-word reading: Behavioral and biological perspectives, 175−189. New York, NY: Erlbaum.
Learning how to read and write can be one of the biggest challenges in children’s lives. One of the most important components of writing at the single-word level is spelling. Although interest in spelling development has increased in recent years, the study of spelling has still not attracted as much attention as the study of reading (Caravolas, Hulme, & Snowling, 2001; Treiman, 1998). Studies of spelling development are important not only because of the pedagogical interest in understanding how children acquire this major facet of literacy, but also because children’s early spellings provide information about their initial knowledge of the graphic and phonological characteristics of writing that could not be obtained in other ways.
Rather than exhaustively review the literature on the topic, we present in this chapter three current approaches to the study of early spelling development in alphabetic writing systems: the phonological, constructivist, and statistical-learning perspectives. We devote special attention to studies that have examined spelling development crosslinguistically, because such studies are crucial for differentiating universal properties of spelling development from those that are adaptations to specific features of the child’s language or target writing system.
Unofficial submitted manuscript, in PDF format.
Pollo, T. C., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2008). Three perspectives on spelling development. In E. L. Grigorenko & A. J. Naples (Eds.), Single-word reading: Behavioral and biological perspectives (pp. 175−189). New York, NY: Erlbaum.
Last change 2009-08-06T09:35:04-0500