Spelling strategies in good and poor readers

Abstract

This study investigates the use of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules assumed to underlie phonetic spelling errors. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds and adult literacy students did two spelling tasks employing real words and nonwords respectively. Good and poor readers were compared in their ability to produce graphemic representations for four specific phonemes. Two of these were relatively “ambiguous” and the real-word task investigated the effect of ambiguity as a function of reading skill. While good readers were significantly better than poor readers at representing the critical phonemes, ambiguity had a similar effect on good and poor readers. Nonword results indicate that poor readers can employ phoneme-grapheme correspondences more than is expected from their real-word spelling error patterns.

Spelling Acquisition; Effects of Pronouncing Words on Memory for Their Spellings

“…The strategy of giving nonphonetic letters a distinctive pronunciation was observed to improve subjects' recall of these letters. Poor spellers are known to have difficulty generating phonetically accurate spellings (Fox & Routh, 1983;Frith, 1980;Perin, 1982), yet our poor spellers were able to recall phonetically regular letters almost perfectly (i.e., 94% of the common letters correct). This suggests that phonetic letter memory processes were contributing to their ability to spell the words.…”

“…Studies of disabled readers and spellers indicate that those who are poor at both reading and spelling have weak phoneme-grapheme knowledge as well as poor memory for correct word spellings. As a result, their spellings are both inaccurate and nonphonetic (Fox & Routh, 1983;Frith, 1980;Perin, 1982). In contrast, students whose disability is limited to spelling possess adequate phoneme-grapheme knowledge so their misspellings are phonetically accurate (Frith, 1980;Nelson & Warrington, 1974;Sweeney & Rourke, 1978).…”

Phonemic segmentation and spelling

“…Studies of spelling have concentrated on two types of spelling error, phonetic and non-phonetic, defined in terms of how well the sound structure of the target is represented in a spelling error. Non-phonetic spelling errors have often been reported to be characteristic of poor readers (Boder, 1973;Nelson & Warrington, 1974;Camp & Dolcourt, 1977;Sweeney & Rourke, 1978;Frith, 1979;Perin, 1982), although this finding is not entirely consistent (Holmes & Peper, 1977). Frith (1980) has suggested that at least some non-phonetic errors must be related to a problem in phonemic segmentation.…”