Many theories of spelling development claim that, before children begin to spell phonologically, their spellings are random strings of letters. We evaluated this idea by testing young children (mean 4 years, 9 months) in Brazil and the US and selecting a group of prephonological spellers. The spellings of this prephonological group showed a number of patterns that reflected such things as the frequencies of letters and bigrams in the child's language. The prephonological spellers in the two countries produced spellings that differed in some respects, consistent with their exposure to different written languages. We found no evidence for reportedly universal patterns in early spelling, such as the idea that children write one letter for each syllable. Overall, our results reveal that early spellings that are not phonological are by no means random or universal and preserve certain patterns in the writing to which the child has been exposed. Keywordsprephonological; spelling; print exposure; statistical learning; cross-linguistic; Portuguese Young children often attempt to write words and sentences after they have learned how to write letters of the alphabet but before they learn how letters represent sounds. Ehri (1991) reported a child writing hs for quick, and Bissex (1980) related how a 4-year-old boy wrote a banner with the letters sshidca to tell his mother welcome home. Even for literacy researchers who are experienced in deciphering children's spelling errors, productions such as these appear hopelessly opaque. They appear to have no particular visual connection to the way adults write these words, nor is there evidence that the children have applied any knowledge of how different letters represent specific sounds of language. The goal of this study is to understand the nature of those early, prephonological, spellings. Are they the random concatenations of letters, as they appear to be, or do they reflect some understanding of the structure of written text on the part of the child?Most theories of early literacy acquisition concentrate on how children learn to map sounds to phonetically appropriate letters (Ehri, 2005;Gough & Hillinger, 1980). Researchers examine how children analyze words in spoken language as strings of phonemes and how they grasp the idea that letters in words in written language represent phonemes in spoken language (e.g., Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974). This phonological perspective focuses on phonological development, and it gives short shrift to very early spellings. Before children learn how letters correspond to sounds, their writing is often characterized as random (Gentry, 1982).Other researchers do study earlier attempts at spelling. They believe that prephonological spellings have patterns that reflect hypotheses that the child constructs, guided by principles NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript that hold across languages. This perspective is especially well represented in many countries where languages other tha...

To examine the factors that affect the learning of letter names, an important foundation for literacy, we asked 318 US and 369 Brazilian preschoolers to identify each uppercase letter. Similarity of letter shape was the major determinant of confusion errors in both countries, and children were especially likely to interchange letters that were similar in shape as well as name. Errors were also affected by letter frequency, both general frequency and occurrence of letters in children's own names. Differences in letter names and letter frequencies between English and Portuguese led to certain differences in the patterns of performance for children in the two countries. Other differences appeared to reflect US children's greater familiarity with the conventional order of the alphabet. Boys were overrepresented at the low end of the continuum of letter name knowledge, suggesting that some boys begin formal reading instruction lacking important foundational skills.

Children with dyslexia are believed to have very poor phonological skills for which they compensate, to some extent, through relatively well-developed knowledge of letter patterns. We tested this view in Study 1 by comparing 25 dyslexic children and 25 younger normal children, chosen so that both groups performed, on average, at a second-grade spelling level. Phonological skill was assessed using phoneme counting and nonword spelling tasks. Knowledge of legal and illegal letter patterns was tested using a spelling choice task. The dyslexic children and the younger nondyslexic children performed similarly on all the tasks, and they had difficulty, for the most part, with the same linguistic structures. Supporting the idea that older dyslexics' spellings are quite similar to those of typical beginners, we found in Study 2 that experienced teachers could not differentiate between the two groups based on their spellings.

The present study explored how children’s prephonological writing foretells differential learning outcomes in primary school. We asked Portuguese-speaking preschool children in Brazil (mean age 4 1/4 years) to spell 12 words. Monte Carlo tests were used to identify the 31 children whose writing was not based on spellings or sounds of the target words. 2 1/2 years later, the children took a standardized spelling test. The more closely the digram (2-letter sequence) frequencies in the preschool task correlated with those in children’s books, the better scores the children had in primary school; and the more preschoolers used letters from their own name, the lower their subsequent scores. Thus, preschoolers whose prephonological writing revealed attentiveness to the statistical properties of text subsequently performed better in conventional spelling. These analytic techniques may help in the early identification of children at risk for spelling difficulties.

No abstract

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.

The theory that learners of alphabetic writing systems go through a period during which they treat writing as representing syllables is highly influential, especially as applied to learners of Romance languages. The results of Study 1, a 2-year longitudinal study of 76 Portuguese speakers in Brazil from 4 to 6 years of age, did not support this theory. Although most children produced some spellings of words in which the number of letters matched the number of syllables, few children produced significantly more such spellings than expected on the basis of chance. When such spellings did occur, they appeared to reflect partially successful attempts to represent phonemes rather than attempts to represent syllables. Study 2, with 68 Brazilian 4- and 5-year-olds, found similar results even when children spelled words that contained three or four syllables in which all vowels are letter names—conditions that have been thought to favor syllabic spelling. The influential theory that learners of Romance languages go through a period during which they use writing to represent the level of syllables appears to lack a solid empirical foundation.

A number of investigators have suggested that young children, even those 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 present 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 should thus 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.