Pollo, Tatiana Cury, Cláudia Cardoso-Martins, Brett Kessler & Rebecca Treiman. 2012, July. The structure of prephonological writing as an indicator of later spelling success. Paper to be presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Montréal, Canada. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/PolloSSSR2012

Abstract

Introduction

Young children’s prephonological spellings (e.g., the spelling ‹ORP› for the Portuguese word bicicleta ‘bicycle’) often bear similarities to conventional texts. For example, beginning writers show a strong tendency to draw on the letters in their own names to spell words, and their invented spellings often contain patterns (e.g., letter combinations) present in the texts they see in their environments (Pollo et al., 2009). In the present study we investigated whether young children’s sensitivity to regularities they see in the texts they are exposed to predicts their ability to learn to spell in primary school.

Method

Portuguese-speaking preschoolers in Brazil (M = 4 years, 3 months) were asked to spell 12 words. Monte Carlo tests were used to select the 31 children who had not started to spell phonologically. Their spellings were coded for the frequencies of individual letters (monograms) and pairs of letters (digrams), and correlated with their performance on a standardized spelling test they took 2 ½ years later, at the end of 1st grade.

Results

The more closely the digram (2-letter sequence) frequencies in the preschool spellings correlated with those in children’s books, the better the children performed in conventional spelling in early primary school; on the other hand, the more preschoolers used letters from their own name, the lower their subsequent scores.

Conclusions

Statistical learning is an important component of spelling acquisition. Analytic techniques that draw on this capacity may, therefore, help in the early identification of children at risk for spelling difficulties.

APA citation

Pollo, T. C., Cardoso-Martins, C., Kessler, B., & Treiman, R. (2012, July). The structure of prephonological writing as an indicator of later spelling success. Paper to be presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Montréal, Canada. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/PolloSSSR2012