Introducing BITTSy: The Behavioral Infant & Toddler Testing System.

This manuscript introduces BITTSy, the Behavioral Infant & Toddler Testing System. This software system is capable of running the headturn preference procedure, preferential looking, conditioned headturn, and visual fixation/habituation procedures. It uses only commercial-off-theshelf (COTS) hardware to implement the procedures in an affordable and space-efficient setup. The software package, example protocols and data sets, and manual are freely available and downloadable from go.umd.edu/BITTSy, making this entire set of procedures available to resource-limited labs. Researchers can easily use BITTSy at multiple sites in a uniform manner, resulting in a standardized, powerful research tool that can enhance cross-site research collaborations.

Children's phonological awareness: confusions between phonemes that differ only in voicing.

Given the role of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell, it is important to examine the linguistic factors that influence children's performance on phonemic awareness tasks. We found that, contrary to some previous claims, children did not perform better with fricative consonants (e.g., /z/) than with stops (e.g., /d/) in a phoneme recognition task. However, preschoolers and kindergartners were more likely to mistakenly judge that a syllable began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme of the syllable differed from the target only in voicing (e.g., /t/ for the target /d/) than when it differed in place of articulation (e.g., /b/-/d/) or in both place and voicing (e.g., /p/-/d/). These results shed light on the organization of children's phonological systems. They also have implications for the design and interpretation of phonemic awareness tasks.

The foundations of literacy: learning the sounds of letters.

Learning the sounds of letters is an important part of learning to read and spell. To explore the factors that make some letter-sound correspondences easier for children to learn than others, we first analyzed knowledge of letters' sounds (and names) by 660 children between 3 1/2 and 7 1/2 years old. A second study examined pre-schoolers' (M age 4 years, 11 months) ability to learn various sound-letter mappings. Together, the results show that an important determinant of letter-sound knowledge is whether the sound occurs in the name of the letter and, if so, whether it is at the beginning or the end. The properties of the sound itself (consonant versus vowel, sonorant versus obstruent, stop versus continuant) appear to have little or no influence on children's learning of basic letter-sound correspondences. The findings show that children use their knowledge of letters' names when learning the letters' sounds rather than memorizing letter-sound correspondences as arbitrary pairings.

The Fragility of the Alphabetic Principle: Children's Knowledge of Letter Names Can Cause Them to Spell Syllabically Rather Than Alphabetically

The present research was designed to investigate how children's early-acquired knowledge of letter names affects their spelling. Specifically, we asked whether kindergartners and first graders sometimes spell a sequence of phonemes such as /bi/ (the name of the letter b) or /zi/ (the name of the letter z) with the corresponding consonant letter rather than spelling the sequence alphabetically, with a consonant letter followed by a vowel letter. Children made a number of letter-name spelling errors, especially when the consonant and vowel formed a complete syllable. These results show that children's knowledge of letter names can cause them to deviate from the alphabetic principle-the principle that each phoneme should be represented with a single grapheme. The findings further suggest that syllables play a special role in early writing.

Phonology and spelling: the case of syllabic consonants.

Two experiments were performed to explore the effects of one aspect of English phonology, syllabic consonants, on children's spelling. In Experiment 1, kindergarteners (age 6), first graders (age 7), and second graders (age 8) spelled words with stressed syllabic /r/, such as sir, and words with medial vowels, such as wet. Vowel omissions (e.g., "sr") and vowel misorderings (e.g., "sre") were more common for the syllabic /r/ words than for the comparison words. In Experiment 2, first and second graders spelled words with unstressed syllabic /r/, such as wander, unstressed syllabic /l/, such as easel, and unstressed syllabic nasals, such as carton. Words with unstressed vowels in the second syllable, such as bandit, were also included. For first graders, vowel omissions and misorderings occurred primarily for syllabic /r/ and /l/. By second grade, only orthographically influenced errors on syllabic /l/ remained. The results show that phonology plays an important role in early spelling. They also shed light on the nature of children's phonological representations.