Statistical learning and spelling: Evidence from Brazilian prephonological spellers

Abstract

We analyzed the spelling attempts of Brazilian children (age 3 years, 3 months to 6 years, 0 months) who were prephonological spellers, in that they wrote using letters that did not reflect the phonemes in the words they were asked to spell. We tested the hypothesis that children use their statistical-learning skills to learn about the appearance of writing and that older prephonological spellers, who have had on average more exposure to writing, produce more wordlike spellings than younger prephonological spellers. We found that older prephonological spellers produced longer spellings and were more likely to use letters and digrams in proportion to their frequency of occurrence in Portuguese. There were also some age-related differences in children's tendency to use letters from their own names when writing other words. The results extend previous findings with learners of English to children who are learning a more transparent orthography.

Early Context-Conditioned Orthographic Knowledge in European Portuguese: The Spelling of the Schwa

“…Since the schwa lacks phonological value, and the children's alphabetic knowledge was still incipient, this result is fairly surprising. In line with recent work (Kessler et al, 2013;Kessler et al, 2018, Kessler et al, 2019bTreiman and Kessler, 2013), a statistical learning perspective on early sensitivity to letter patterns would seem to provide a plausible account of this finding. According to these authors children develop very early, from the initial exposures to written materials, an intuitive sense of fitting letter sequences, even when their phonological analytic abilities are minimum.…”

“…First of all, the words with potentially orthographically illegal patterns and those with potentially legal ones were equally frequent and thus lexical knowledge would theoretically be similar for the two kind of words; and secondly, since children spelt, on average, only half of the letters each word comprised, they were as yet unaware of how they were spelt. Rather, it seems more likely that those beginning spellers were already able to perceive certain prominent graphotactic regularities of their language's orthography, in line with the recent findings of Treiman and colleagues that show that knowledge of letter patterns may be the first source of children learning about orthographic regularities (Pollo et al, 2009;Kessler et al, 2013;Treiman et al, 2019b). This means that children have become aware that some letters "go together" and others do not, i.e., as early as 3 months into formal training in spelling, children were already becoming sensitive to which consonants are accepted as a cluster or a coda and which ones need a "silent" <e> in order to conform to graphotactic input.…”

“…Like it was briefly stated when presenting this study framework at the beginning of the Introduction, graphotactic regularities provide children with a very early means of shaping the information they need for spelling, as can be confirmed in the example of the respective proportions of consonant-and vowelalternation in the letter patterns produced by pre-phonological spellers (Treiman et al, 2019b). Another aspect of graphotactic knowledge, sensitivity to legal combination of letters, is also apparent from very early attempts to write.…”

“…Crucially, only /l/, /r/, and /S/ are allowed as codas. Thus, by the time they were tested, children may have already noticed the dominance of CV structures (Treiman et al, 2019b) and the role of <e> as a resource to use when last consonants do not conform to their expectations.…”

“…Yet early spelling is not based purely on phonology (Caravolas et al, 2005;Treiman, 2017a;Treiman et al, 2018). Recent work (Treiman et al, 2019b) has shown that 3-6-year old Portuguesespeaking Brazilian pre-phonological spellers do not choose letters at random when writing letter sequences that do not represent any sound of the words they were asked to spell. Older children tend to use letters and digrams more frequently than younger children, in proportion to their frequency of occurrence in the texts to which they are exposed.…”