Derrick C. Bourassa

the Development of Spelling Skill

. By the time the children were 4, adults could easily tell which of the children’s productions were meant as writing and which were meant as drawing. The 4-year-olds’ writings generally consisted of linearly arranged strings of units separated by blanks. The writings tended to be smaller than the drawings. When writing, 3-year-olds either used characters of unidentifiable origin, mostly undifferentiated into units, or nonletters that bore some resemblance to Hebrew letters. Four-year-olds used a combination of real Hebrew letters, digits, and letters of the Roman alphabet, which these children had probably seen in addition to Hebrew letters. It was not until age 5 that children predominantly used real Hebrew letters in their writing. Still, these letters were often not the ones found in the conventional spelling of the utterance. The majority of 5-year-olds wrote in the direction that is standard for Hebrew, from right to left. Although children as young as 3 or 4 know that writing looks different than drawing, they do not yet understand that the function of alphabetic writing is to represent the sounds of language. Instead, young children seem to believe that the written forms of words reflect their meanings. Children think that

Use of morphology in spelling by children with dyslexia and typically developing children

In English and some other languages, spelling problems that arise at a phonological level can sometimes be solved through consideration of morphology. For example, children could infer that tuned should contain ann and thatfighting should contain a t because their stems include these letters. Children could thus avoid misspellings that might otherwise occur, such as “tudrd and “fiding.” We used a spelling-level match design to examine the extent to which children with dyslexia and younger typical children use morphology in this way. Both groups of children benefited from morphology to some extent, but not as much as they could have given their knowledge of the stems. Our results suggest that the spellings produced by older children with dyslexia are similar to those of younger normal children in their morphological characteristics, as well as in other ways.

Children's written and oral spelling

For adults, written spelling is generally superior to oral spelling. To determine whether the same holds true for children in kindergarten through second grade, we compared children’s ability to spell real words (Experiment 1) and nonsense words (Experiment 2) orally and in writing. Building on the work of Tangel and Blachman (1992, 1995) and others, we developed a reliable system to assess the overall quality of the children’s spellings. We also examined the phonological and orthographic legality of the spellings. By first and second grade, written spellings were superior to oral spellings in both overall quality and representation of phonological form. This held true for both words and nonwords. The results suggest that children, like adults, more accurately analyze the linguistic structure of a spoken item when they can represent the results in a lasting, visible form than when they cannot. Historically, research on spelling has lagged behind research on reading. The gap has narrowed somewhat in recent years with studies that have described the course of spelling development in English and other languages (e.g., Perfetti, Rieben, & Fayol, 1997) and studies that have examined the effects of phonemic analysis instruction on spelling achievement (e.g., Tangel & Blachman, 1992, 1995). However, we still know less about how children learn to spell than about how they learn to read. The present study was designed to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge about spelling. We sought to provide information that would add to our theoretical understanding of the spelling process and, more practically, that could be used in the design and scoring of spelling tests for children. In most classroom spelling tests and in all standardized spelling tests of which we are aware, children’s spellings are scored simply as correct or incorrect. However, research on emergent spelling (e.g., Henderson & Beers, 1980; Read, 1986; Treiman, 1993) has revealed large differences within young children’s incorrect spellings. Stage theories of spelling development (e.g., Ehri, 1986; Gentry, 1982; Henderson & Beers, 1980) explain these differences by postulating that children go through a series of qualitatively different stages during the course of learning to spell. The earliest spellings bear no relationship to the

Children's own names influence their spelling

We analyzed spellings that were produced by children in kindergarten (N = 115), first grade (N = 104), and second grade (N = 77) in order to determine whether children’s own names influence their spellings of other words. Kindergartners overused letters from their own first names (or commonly used nicknames) when spelling. Kindergartners with longer names, who had more own-name letters available for intrusions, tended to produce longer spellings than did children with shorter names. Moreover, the spellings of kindergartners with long names tended to contain a lower proportion of phonetically reasonable letters than did the spellings of children with short names. These effects appeared to be confined to children who read below the first grade level. The results support the view that children’s own names play a special role in the acquisition of literacy. They further show that children choose letters in a way that reflects their experience with the letters.

Word-learning performance in beginning readers.

This investigation examined word-learning performance in beginning readers. The children learned to read words with regular spelling-sound mappings (e.g., snake) more easily than words with irregular spelling-sound mappings (e.g., sword). In addition, there was an effect of semantics: Children learned to read concrete words (e.g., elbow) more successfully than abstract words (e.g., temper). Trial-by-trial learning indicated that children made greater use of the regularity and semantic properties at later trials as compared with early trials. The influence of cognitive skills (paired associate learning and phonological awareness) on word-learning performance was also examined. Regression analyses revealed that whereas paired associate learning skills accounted for unique variance in the childrens learning of both regular and irregular words, phonological awareness accounted for unique variance only in the acquisition of regular words.