Pollo, Tatiana Cury, Rebecca Treiman, & Brett Kessler. 2005, June. Beginning spellers exploit inexact letter-name matches. Poster presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Toronto, Canada.
We studied how spelling is affected by letter-name knowledge when the match between a letter name and a phoneme sequence is imperfect. We examined 75 Portuguese-speaking preschoolers’ use of H (which is named /aˈga/ but never represents those sounds) when spelling words beginning with /ga/ or variants of /ga/. Children used H for 15% of words beginning with /ga/ and 11% of those with /ka/, but rarely for words with syllables having other vowels, e.g., /ge/. Thus, when using letter names to spell consonants, children attended to adjacent vowels much more than to exact match of consonants.
Children are known to exploit letter names when attempting to spell. Sometimes letters are used to spell their letter name in entirety, as in CR for "car", where R spells /ɑr/ (Treiman, 1994). In most cases, conventional spellings are more closely approximated when only part of the letter name is used, such as the /r/ of /ɑr/. Little is known about how beginning spellers select letters on the basis of partial or inexact matches between letter names and words being written. Research is made difficult by the fact that almost all letter names contain the letter's conventional sound; children who spell R for /r/ may have been taught the letter-sound association explicitly, or may have previously seen the word in print. These issues do not apply to the Portuguese letter H, which never spells, in whole or part, any of the sounds in its name, /aˈga/. In the present study, we examined how children used H in spelling Portuguese words that begin with the stressed syllable of its name, /ga/, or variants, where any systematic use of the letter is necessarily due to letter-name strategy.
Seventy-five preschoolers spelled 24 words. Words varied in initial consonant phoneme (/g/ and /k/) and vowel phoneme (/a/ or other). /k/ is similar to /g/, differing from it in being voiceless. Control words included words beginning with phonemes other than /g/ and /k/ and words in which the standard spelling requires silent H.
The use of H was the most common mistake for words beginning with /ga/ (where H was used 15% of the time) and /ka/ (11% H spellings). Children did not use H for words beginning with /g/ or /k/ followed by another vowel. Children used H less than 3% of the time for other words, even when the words contain /a/ or when H appears in their standard spelling. (Difference between /ga/–/ka/ conditions and others significant at p < .05.)
These results corroborate findings that early literacy development is affected by letter-name knowledge in Portuguese as well as English (e.g., Cardoso-Martins, Resende, & Assunção, 2002). The results build on previous work by showing that children use letter-name knowledge even when the match between a letter name and a phoneme sequence is inexact. This study also provides new information about how young children match letter names to sound sequences in target words. Our participants strongly preferred to use letters when CV sequences from the letters' names matched the target, for which purpose exact matches of the vowel were of paramount importance, but voicing in the consonant was of minor importance.
Cardoso-Martins, C., Resende, S. M., & Rodrigues, L. A. (2002). Letter name knowledge and the ability to learn to read by processing letter–phoneme relations in words: Evidence from Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children. Reading and Writing, 15, 409–432.
Treiman, R. (1994). Use of consonant letter names in beginning spelling. Developmental Psychology, 30, 567–580.
Poster in Microsoft PowerPoint format (.ppt).
Pollo, T. C., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2005, June). Beginning spellers exploit inexact letter-name matches. Poster presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Toronto, Canada.
Last change 2009-08-07T11:09:46-0500