Double trouble: Using spellings of different lengths to represent vowel length in English.

Much previous research on spelling and reading development has focused on single-syllable words. Here we examined disyllables, asking how learners of English mark the distinction between short and long first-syllable vowels by use of vowel digraphs and double-consonant digraphs. In a behavioral study, we asked participants in Grade 2 (n = 32, mean age ∼8 years), Grade 4 (n = 33, mean age ∼10 years), Grade 6 (n = 32, mean age ∼12 years), and university (n = 32; mean age ∼20 years) to spell nonwords with short and long first-syllable vowels. We found an increase across grade levels in use of vowel digraphs to represent long vowels, and we also found increasing use of double-consonant digraphs after short vowels. Participants generally avoided using both a vowel digraph and a following consonant digraph. In a vocabulary analysis, we examined use of vowel and double-consonant digraphs in the words to which readers of different grade levels are exposed. Children used vowel digraphs less often than anticipated on the basis of the vocabulary statistics, but university students used them at similar rates. For double-consonant digraphs after short vowels, rates of digraph use were lower in the behavioral data than in the vocabulary data even for university students. These results point to the difficulty of spelling a phoneme with multiple letters when those letters simultaneously spell another sound in a word. We discuss the results in terms of the roles of statistical learning and explicit instruction in the development of spelling.

Predicting Later Spelling from Kindergarten Spelling in U.S., Australian, and Swedish Children.

Purpose: Using data from 1,868 children from the US, Australia, and Sweden who took a 10-word spelling test in kindergarten and a standardized spelling test in Grades 1, 2, and (except for the Australian children) Grade 4, we examined two questions. First, does the quality of a child's errors on the kindergarten test help predict later spelling performance even after controlling for the number of correct responses on the kindergarten test? Second, does spelling develop at a faster pace in Swedish than in English? Method: We measured kindergarten error quality based on the number of letter additions, deletions, and substitutions needed to transform each error into the correct spelling. Using mixed-model analyses, we examined the relationship of this and other variables to later spelling performance. Results: Kindergarten error quality contributed significantly to the prediction of later spelling performance even after consideration of the number of correct spellings in kindergarten and other relevant variables. The Swedish children showed more rapid growth in spelling than the U.S. and Australian children, a difference that may reflect the greater transparency of spelling-to-sound links in Swedish. Conclusion: Information from a spelling test that is typically discarded-information about the nature of the errors-has value.

Prephonological spelling and its connections with later word reading and spelling performance.

Before children are able to invent phonologically plausible spellings of words, they may produce strings of letters that do not seem to be motivated by the sounds in words. To examine the nature of these prephonological spellings and their relationship to later literacy performance, we administered a test in which children spelled a series of words using preformed letters, together with other literacy-related tests, to 106 U.S. 3- to 5-year-olds who had not received formal literacy instruction. We then followed the children into the first years of school, administering standardized spelling and word reading tests yearly for the subsequent 3 years. We used quantitative procedures to identify children who were prephonological spellers at Time 1. Although these children did not use phonologically plausible letters at a rate above that expected by chance, their spellings demonstrated some knowledge about common letters and digrams-graphotactic knowledge. The prephonological spellers also showed some knowledge of the alphabet and some phonological awareness, indicating that these skills do not suffice for phonological spelling. Children who were prephonological spellers at Time 1 were poorer readers and spellers at the later testing points, on average, than children who were not. This result reveals the continuity between children's early spelling attempts and their later literacy skills and the importance of phonology in spelling. We did not find, as Kessler et al. [Journal of Learning Disabilities (2013), Vol. 46, pp. 252-259] did in a study where children wrote words by hand, that better graphotactic knowledge among prephonological spellers is associated with better spelling during later years.

Letter Features as Predictors of Letter-Name Acquisition in Four Languages with Three Scripts.

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters-their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters-relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three distinct scripts (English [N = 318; M age = 4.90], Portuguese [N = 366; M age = 5.80], Korean [N = 168; M age = 5.48], and Hebrew [N = 645; M age = 5.42]). Explanatory item response modeling analysis showed that the frequency of letters in printed materials was consistently related to letter difficulty across the four languages. There were also moderation effects for letter difficulty in English and Korean, and for discriminatory power of letters in Korean. The results suggest that exposure to letters as measured by letter frequency is a language-general mechanism in the learning of alphabet letters.

Use of Letter Names Benefits Young Children's Spelling.

We studied how children begin to produce spellings that reflect the sounds in words. We asked 75 U.S. preschoolers (mean age = 4 years, 11 months) to participate in two sessions. In one session, the children were asked to spell words (e.g., bead) that begin with a sequence of sounds that matches the name of a letter; in another session, they were asked to spell control words (e.g., bed). The phonological plausibility of children's spellings, particularly their spellings of the words' first phonemes, was higher for letter-name words than for control words. When we categorized spelling performance in a session as prephonological if the child used phonologically appropriate letters no more often than would be expected by chance, we found that children were more likely to be prephonological spellers in the session with control words than in the session with letter-name words. Words with letter names can help children move from prephonological spellings to spellings that symbolize at least some of the sounds in words.

Letter Teaching in Parent-Child Conversations.

Talk about letters is an important part of the home literacy environment. Such talk has been studied primarily through questionnaires, but these are limited in the amount of information they provide. Here we analyzed conversations between 55 U.S. children and their parents who were visited in their homes every 4 months when the child was between 1.2 and 4.8 years old. We examined the aspects of alphabet knowledge that parents and children discussed, the materials they used, and how these varied with the age of the child and the socioeconomic status of the family. Children primarily focused on identifying letters, while parents also emphasized letter writing and spelling. Talk about the associations between letters and sounds, which is critical in learning to read and write, was less common than anticipated based on the results of questionnaire studies. Teachers should thus not overestimate the knowledge of letter sounds that children acquire at home.

Development of context-sensitive pronunciation in reading: The case of and .

Writing systems sometimes deviate from one-to-one associations between letters and phonemes, but the deviations are often predictable from sublexical context. For initial and in English, deviations from the typical /k/ and /g/ pronunciations are influenced by adjacent context (the following vowel, as in center vs. canter) and nonadjacent context (the presence of a Latinate vs. basic suffix, as in gigantic vs. giggling). We conducted two experiments with participants ranging in reading level from early elementary school to university to study the development of context use. Experiment 1 focused on adjacent context, and Experiment 2 also examined nonadjacent context. Use of context developed slowly, and readers at all levels were not as influenced by it as would be expected given the contextual effects in the English vocabulary. We discuss possible reasons for these phenomena and the need to teach children to use context more effectively.

Statistical Learning and Spelling: Older Prephonological Spellers Produce More Wordlike Spellings Than Younger Prephonological Spellers.

The authors analyzed the spellings of 179 U.S. children (age = 3 years, 2 months-5 years, 6 months) who were prephonological spellers, in that they wrote using letters that did not reflect the phonemes in the target items. Supporting the idea that children use their statistical learning skills to learn about the outer form of writing before they begin to spell phonologically, older prephonological spellers showed more knowledge about English letter patterns than did younger prephonological spellers. The written productions of older prephonological spellers were rated by adults as more similar to English words than were the productions of younger prephonological spellers. The older children s spellings were also more wordlike on several objective measures, including length, variability of letters within words, and digram frequency.

Children benefit from morphological relatedness independently of orthographic relatedness when they learn to spell new words.

We examined whether French children in Grades 3 and 5 (aged ∼ 8-11 years) benefit from morphological relatedness beyond orthographic relatedness in the implicit learning of new spellings. Children silently read stories that included two target nonwords. One nonword was in an opaque condition in that nothing in the story could justify the spelling of its final sound. The other nonword was in either a morphological condition (for children in the morphological group) or an orthographic condition (for children in the orthographic group). In the morphological condition, the final spelling of the target nonword was justified by two morphologically related nonwords. For example, coirardage, obtained by adding the suffixage to coirard, designates the coirard's song and justifies the final silentdofcoirard. The orthographic condition included two nonwords that were orthographically but not morphologically related to the target. For example, the coirard's song wascoirardume, obtained by addingume,which is not a suffix, tocoirard. Then, 30 min after reading the stories, children were asked to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g.,coirard, coirars, coirar). In the morphological group, both third and fifth graders more often selected the correct spellings for items presented in the morphological condition than for items presented in the opaque condition. In the orthographic group, the results were very similar in the opaque and orthographic conditions.The findings show that the benefit of morphological relatedness in the implicit learning of new spellings cannot be reduced to orthographic relatedness.

Phonological and graphotactic influences on spellers' decisions about consonant doubling.

Even adults sometimes have difficulty choosing between single- and double-letter spellings, as in spinet versus spinnet. The present study examined the phonological and graphotactic factors that influence adults' use of single versus double medial consonants in the spelling of nonwords. We tested 111 adults from a community sample who varied widely in spelling ability. Better spellers were more affected than less good spellers by phonological context in that they were more likely to double consonants after short vowels and less likely to double consonants after long vowels. Although descriptions of the English writing system focus on the role of phonology in determining use of single versus double consonants, participants were also influenced by graphotactic context. There was an effect of preceding graphotactic context, such that spellers were less likely to use a double consonant when they spelled the preceding vowel with more than one letter than when they spelled it with one letter. There was also an effect of following graphotactic context, such that doubling rate varied with the letters that the participant used at the end of the nonword. These graphotactic influences did not differ significantly in strength across the range of spelling ability in our study. Discussion focuses on the role of statistical learning in the learning of spelling patterns, especially those patterns that are not explicitly taught.

Correction to: Phonological and graphotactic influences on spellers' decisions about consonant doubling.

Please note that, because of an error in the production process, many of the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols were missing from the originally published pdf version of the article, both in the main text and in the Appendix.

Parent-child conversations about literacy: a longitudinal, observational study.

Conversations about literacy-related matters with parents can help prepare children for formal literacy instruction. We studied these conversations using data gathered from fifty-six US families as they engaged in daily activities at home. Analyzing conversations when children were aged 1;10, 2;6, 3;6, and 4;2, we found that explicit talk about the elements and processes of reading and writing occurred even when children were less than two years old and became more common as children grew older. The majority of literacy-related conversations included talk about alphabet letters. Literacy-related conversations occurred in a variety of contexts, not only book-reading. There were few differences as a function of family socioeconomic status in the proportion of utterances during the sessions that occurred in literacy-related conversations. At older ages, however, children in families of lower socioeconomic status bore more of the conversational burden than children in families of higher status.

Learning to spell: Phonology and beyond.

An understanding of the nature of writing systems and of the typical course of spelling development is an essential foundation for understanding the problems of children who have serious difficulties in learning to spell. The present article seeks to provide that foundation. It argues that the dual-route models of spelling that underlie much existing research and practice are based on overly simple assumptions about how writing systems work and about how spelling skills develop. Many writing systems include not only context-free links from phonemes to letters but also context-sensitive phonological patterns, morphological influences, and graphotactic patterns. According to an alternative framework, IMP (integration of multiple patterns), spellers acquire multiple sources of information through use of their statistical-learning skills and through direct instruction. Children learn the spelling of a word most easily when different patterns converge on the spelling, and they have difficulty when patterns conflict. Implications of these ideas for assessment and instruction are considered.

Differentiation of Writing and Drawing by U.S. Two- to Five-Year-Olds.

To investigate preschoolers' knowledge about symbol systems, we compared the written and drawn productions of 2-5-year-old U.S. children. In Study 1, children (N = 88) wrote and drew four targets, including their own name and a picture of themselves. Children differentiated writings from drawings in the implements they used, the size of their productions, and use of recognizable letters. Some distinctions were present in the youngest children and others became more prominent with age. In Study 2, adults (N = 16) who judged whether the productions were writings or drawings performed above the level of chance for all age groups. Adults did better for children's names and self-portraits than for other targets, suggesting that the name plays a leading role in U.S. children's learning about writing. Overall, the results show that children begin to learn about formal differences between writing and drawing at an early age.

Young Children's Knowledge of the Symbolic Nature of Writing.

Two experiments with one hundred and fourteen 3- to 5-year-old children examined whether children understand that a printed word represents a specific spoken word and that it differs in this way from a drawing. When an experimenter read a word to children and then a puppet used a different but related label for it, such as "dog" for the word , children often stated the puppet's label was incorrect. In an analogous task with drawings, children were more likely to state that the puppet was correct in using an alternative label. The results suggest that even young children who cannot yet read have some understanding that a written word stands for a specific linguistic unit in a way that a drawing does not.

Measures of Kindergarten Spelling and Their Relations to Later Spelling Performance.

Learning the orthographic forms of words is important for both spelling and reading. To determine whether some methods of scoring children's early spellings predict later spelling performance better than do other methods, we analyzed data from 374 U.S. and Australian children who took a 10-word spelling test at the end of kindergarten (mean age 6 years, 2 months) and a standardized spelling test approximately two years later. Surprisingly, scoring methods that took account of phonological plausibility did not outperform methods that were based only on orthographic correctness. The scoring method that is most widely used in research with young children, which allots a certain number of points to each word and which considers both orthographic and phonological plausibility, did not rise to the top as a predictor. Prediction of Grade 2 spelling performance was improved to a small extent by considering children's tendency to reverse letters in kindergarten.

Parents' Talk About Letters With Their Young Children.

A literacy-related activity that occurs in children's homes-talk about letters in everyday conversations-was examined using data from 50 children who were visited every 4 months between 14 and 50 months. Parents talked about some letters, including those that are common in English words and the first letter of their children's names, especially often. Parents' focus on the child's initial was especially strong in families of higher socioeconomic status, and the extent to which parents talked about the child's initial during the later sessions of the study was related to the children's kindergarten reading skill. Conversations that included the child's initial were longer than those that did not, and parents presented a variety of information about this letter.

Variation and repetition in the spelling of young children.

A number of investigators have suggested that young children, even those who do not yet represent the phonological forms of words in their spellings, tend to use different strings of letters for different words. However, empirical evidence that children possess a concept of between-word variation has been weak. In a study by Pollo, Kessler, and Treiman (2009), in fact, prephonological spellers were more likely to write different words in the same way than would be expected on the basis of chance, not less likely. In the current study, preschool-age prephonological and phonological spellers showed a tendency to repeat spellings and parts of spellings that they had recently used. However, even prephonological spellers (mean age∼4 years 8 months) showed more repetition when spelling the same word twice in succession than when spelling different words. The results suggest that children who have not yet learned to use writing to represent the sounds of speech show some knowledge that writing represents words and, thus, should vary to show differences between them. The results further suggest that in spelling, as in other domains, children have a tendency to repeat recent behaviors.

The influence of graphotactic knowledge on adults' learning of spelling.

Three experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spelling by French university students is influenced by the graphotactic legitimacy of the spellings. Participants were exposed to three types of novel spellings: AB, which do not contain doublets (e.g., guprane); AAB, with a doublet before a single consonant, which is legitimate in French (e.g., gupprane); and ABB, with a doublet after a single consonant, which is illegitimate (e.g., guprrane). In Experiment 1, the nonwords were embedded within texts that participants read for meaning. In Experiment 2, participants read the nonwords in isolation, with or without instruction to memorize their spellings; they copied the nonwords in Experiment 3. In all of these conditions, AB and AAB spellings were learned more readily than ABB spellings. Although participants were highly knowledgeable about the illegitimacy of ABB spellings, the orthographic distinctiveness of these spellings did not make them easier to recall than legitimate spellings. When recalling ABB spellings, participants sometimes made transposition errors, doubling the wrong consonant of a cluster (e.g., spelling gupprane instead of guprrane). Participants almost never transposed the doubling for AAB items. Transposition errors, biased in the direction of replacing illegitimate with legitimate orthographic patterns, show that graphotactic knowledge influences memory for specific items. An analysis of the spellings produced in the copy phase and final recall test of Experiment 3 further suggests that transposition errors resulted not so much from reconstructive processes at the time of recall but from reconstructive processes or inefficient encoding at earlier points.

Writing dinosaur large and mosquito small: Prephonological spellers' use of semantic information.

One influential theory of literacy development, the constructivist perspective, claims that young children believe that writing represents meaning directly and that the appearance of a written word should reflect characteristics of its referent. There has not been strong evidence supporting this idea, however. Circumventing several methodological concerns with previous studies, we examined written spellings of young children who did not yet use letters to represent the sounds of words, that is, prephonological spellers. We identified 38 prephonological spellers (mean age 4 years 2 months) and measured the area of their writing productions. Prephonological spellers made significantly larger productions for words representing large objects than those representing small objects. This effect held true after controlling for the influences of other variables, including size of writing on previous trials and order of trial in a session. Our results suggest that young children sometimes use drawing-like features to communicate the meaning of words when writing.