Pollo, Tatiana Cury, Rebecca Treiman & Brett Kessler. 2008, July. The nature of young children’s nonphonological spellings. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Asheville, NC.
Before children learn how letters correspond to sounds, their writing is often characterized as random (Gentry, 1982). We evaluated this characterization by analyzing the productions of prephonological spellers (mean age 4.8; 35 in Brazil, 23 in the US), who were identified by using string-edit techniques and randomization tests to ascertain that their productions were no closer to phonologically plausible spellings of the target words than to those of other words. Instead of being random, the spellings reflected the texts children experience: children’s books, their own names, and alphabet listings. The frequency of the letters they produced correlated with their frequency in books from the child’s country, over and above an effect whereby children favored letters from their own name. In addition, children’s use of letter bigrams correlated with their frequency in text and with whether the bigram appears in alphabetical order. Doubled letters were avoided more by Brazilian than US children, reflecting their rarity in Portuguese but not English text. No evidence was found for reportedly universal prephonological patterns such as minimum word length. Our findings suggest children’s prephonological writing is neither random nor universal, but reflects statistical learning of the visual patterns children encounter in text.
Pollo, T. C., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (July, 2008). The nature of young children’s nonphonological spellings. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Asheville, NC.
Last change 2008-01-25 21:22:11-06:00