Pollo, Tatiana Cury, Cláudia Cardoso-Martins, Rebecca Treiman & Brett Kessler. 2011, July. A longitudinal evaluation of the syllabic spelling hypothesis in Portuguese. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), St. Pete Beach, FL. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/PolloSSSR2011

Abstract

Purpose

This study of Portuguese-speaking children investigated the prevalence of spellings in which symbols putatively represent entire syllables. Such spellings are a hallmark of Ferreiro and Teberosky’s (1982) constructivist theory of spelling development, which has influenced early literacy education in many countries.

Method

Participants were 76 children in Brazil. We maximized the chance of observing children at a syllabic stage of development by testing them every 3 months from the age of 4 years to approximately 6 years. At each time, children spelled 12 words ranging from 1 to 4 syllables. Children were classified as syllabic at a test date if the number of symbols they wrote for a word corresponded to the number of its syllables significantly (at .05 level) more frequently than predicted by a permutation test. Children were classified as phonological if the letters they wrote were plausible spellings of the word’s phonemes significantly more frequently than predicted by a Monte Carlo test.

Results

Of the 454 testing sessions during which a child could have been classified as a syllabic speller, only 24 (.053) were so classified. This number is not significantly higher than expected by chance. Furthermore, in contrast to Ferreiro’s claim that syllabic spellings are common among children who don’t yet spell alphabetically, only 2 of these observations involved children classified as nonphonological spellers.

Conclusions

The results fail to support the influential idea of a syllabic stage in the development of spelling in learners of alphabetic writing systems.

APA citation

Pollo, T. C., Cardoso-Martins, C., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2011, July). A longitudinal evaluation of the syllabic spelling hypothesis in Portuguese. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, St. Pete Beach, FL. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/PolloSSSR2011