Children's spelling of syllabic /r/ and letter-name vowels: Broadening the study of spelling development (original) (raw)
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An Analysis of the Spellings of Young Children with Varying Levels of Phonemic Awareness
1989
To examine the effects of phonemic awareness (drfined as "conscious access to the phonemic level of the speech stream and some ability to cognitively manipulate representations at this level") on spelling development and to explore the relationship of phonemic awareness to recognized stages of spelling development, a study collected data on 96 first-grade students and 87 third-grade students attending public school in 3outheast Texas. Children in both grades received traditional reading instruction from basal reading series reflecting a whole-word approach to initial reading instruction. All children in the study spelled the same set of 40 words. Phonemic awareness was measured using tne GKR Test of Phonemic Awar5ness, an oral test consisting of six subtests-phonemic segmentation, blending, deletion of first phoneme, deletion of last phoneme, substitution of first phcieme, and substitution of last phoneme. Word specific information was measured using a test containing 60 two-alternative, forced-choice items. One alternative was a correct spelling for the word. The other was a phonetically legitimate though incorrect spelling. Children were instructed to circle the correct spelling for each word as it was pronounced by the researcher. Findings suggested that in first-graders, phonemic awareness had a more powerful effect, indicating that spelling at this level is more of a sequential, encoding process. By third grade, word-specific informatlon exerted stronger influence on spelling, suggesting that children at this level spell using memorized associations. (MM)
The Development of Spelling Skill
Topics in Language Disorders, 2000
This article reviews the literature on spelling development in alphabetic scripts. Once children begin to learn that the function of alphabetic writing is to represent the sounds of language, they go through the process of learning sound-spelling correspondences in increasingly fine detail, from syllables to phonemes. This process is rooted in the development of phonological representations of words. Continued experience with print allows children to learn about more complex orthographic and morphological conventions of the language. Research and practice must take into account the complexities of phonological, orthographic, and morphological knowledge as they relate to spelling development.
Instruction matters: spelling of vowels by children in England and the US
2012
Letter names are stressed in informal and formal literacy instruction with young children in the US, whereas letters sounds are stressed in England. We examined the impact of these differences on English children of about 5 and 6 years of age (in reception year and Year 1, respectively) and US 6 year olds (in kindergarten). Children in both countries spelled short vowels, as in bag, more accurately than long vowels, as in gate. The superiority for short vowels was larger for children from England, consistent with the instructional emphasis on letter sounds. Errors such as gat for words with long vowels such as gate were more common among US children, reflecting these children's use of vowels' names as a guide to spelling. The English children's performance on a letter knowledge task was influenced by the fact that they are often taught letter sounds with reference to lowercase letters and letter names with reference to uppercase letters, and their spellings showed some effects of this practice. Although emphasis on letter sounds as opposed to letter names influences children's patterns of performance and types of errors, it does not make the difficult English writing system markedly easier to master.
Spelling development in young children: A case of representational redescription?
Journal of Educational Psychology, 2007
Two experiments explored children's spelling development in the context of the Representational-Redescription Model . Fifty-one 5-7 year old children (experiment one) and 44 5-6 year olds (experiment two) were assessed, via spelling production and recognition tasks, for phonological to morphological spelling development and representational levels derived from the RR model respectively.
Effects of morphology on children's spelling of final consonant clusters
1996
Most research on children's spelling has emphasized the role of phonological or sound-based processes. We asked whether morphology plays a part in early spelling by examining how children write words with final consonant clusters. In three experiments, children made different patterns of omission errors on the last two consonants of words such as tuned and bars, in which the consonants belong to different morphemes, and words such as brand and Mars, in which the consonants belong to the same morpheme. These differences emerged even among children reading at the firstgrade level. Effects of morphology appeared whether children spelled single words to dictation (Experiments 1 and 3), finished partially completed spellings (Experiment 2), or wrote sentences containing specified words (Experiment 3). Children did not use morphological relations among words as much as they could have, given their knowledge of the stems, but they did use them to some extent. Although phonology plays an important role in early spelling, young children can also use other sources of information, including certain morphological relationships among words. ᭧ 1996 Academic Press, Inc.
Relations Between Children's Invented Spelling and the Development of Phonological Awareness
Educational Psychology, 2003
The objective of this study was to assess the impact on phonological skills of a training program that was intended to lead preschool children to move from prephonetic spellings to early phonemic spellings. The participants were 30 preschool children who were divided into two groups (experimental and control groups) that were equivalent in terms of the children's intelligence, the number of letters with which they were familiar and the nature of their invented spelling. The intervention proved effective, inasmuch as the children in the experimental group moved to early phonemic spellings, whereas those in the control group did not. This conceptual evolution entailed enhanced performance in phonemic classification, segmentation and deletion tests, in which the children in the experimental group displayed a degree of progress which differed significantly from that achieved by the members of the control group.
1997
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.
Children's spelling errors on syllable-initial consonant clusters
1991
discovered that children sometimes fail to spell consonants when the consonants occur in clusters at the ends of words. For example, children may spell sink as "sek," leaving out the /n/. The present research shows that children also omit consonants in clusters at the beginnings of words. For example, children may spell play as "pay." Some 1st graders make these errors in their classroom writings; some kindergarteners and 1st graders make them in experimental tasks. Second-consonant omissions occur whether the cluster is at the beginning of a word, as in play, or at the beginning of a syllable within a word, as in diploma. Although children sometimes add an / to their spelling of play when shown that they have written play and pay alike, they do not always do so. The linguistic basis of the omission errors and their educational implications are discussed.
In Peter Jurgec, Liisa Duncan, Emily Elfner, Yoonjung Kang, Alexei Kochetov, Brittney K. O’Neill, Avery Ozburn, Keren Rice, Nathan Sanders, Jessamyn Schertz, Nate Shaftoe, and Lisa Sullivan (eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 Annual Meeting on Phonology. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America., 2022
This paper examines the written productions of first and second grade Catalan children in an attempt to tap into their understanding of the underlying forms of Catalan unstressed vowels for which alternations are not present (and for which multiple inputs are thus possible). The paper also explores the differences in spelling between alternating and non-alternating [ə] and [u], in order to find out whether morphophonemic alternations are taken into consideration in children’s spellings choices, as well at which stage these start to be considered. The results for first graders show generalized misspellings in which schwa and [u] are systematically associated with the graphemes a and u, regardless these vowels alternate with vowels in stressed position or do not. This behavior clearly supports the Lexicon Optimization Hypothesis, according to which there is a first stage in language acquisition in which, from all possible input candidates (Richness of the Base), the learner selects the one that matches the adult output representation as the optimal input (Smolensky 1996). The results for second graders show a noticeable decline in misspellings for alternating schwa and [u]. This leads to think that morphophonemic alternations are progressively incorporated and taken into account in the process of UR construction. Of course, this better performance in the spelling of alternating vowels might also be a consequence of a better familiarity with conventional spelling. Importantly, though, the decline in misspellings for alternating schwa and [u] coincides with an increase in spelling mistakes for non-alternating vowels. In our view, this undescores the influence of conventional orthography in children’s spelling choices, points to the influence of phonology, and more specifically to a stage of vacillation with respect to the UR of non-alternating forms, with apparent overgeneralizations. This behavior, thus, may support the free-ride approach to morphophonemic learning (McCarthy 2005). The results for both first graders and second graders show differences in the spelling between back vowels (with fewer mistakes) and non-back vowels (with more mistakes), and we argued this might be related to the fact that the children have to deal with a more reduced typology of output-input alternations for back vowels (two-to-one) than for non-back vowels (three-to-one). This is evidence, again, for the role of morphophonemic alternations (i.e. morphology) in children’s spelling choices. The results for both graders also reveal that more productive alternations, such as the ones found between a base and the diminutive, are more transparent to the kids than others: whereas diminutives were generally spelled correctly, non-diminutives were not, giving support again to the influence of morphophonemic alternations, and their transparency, in children’s spelling choices.