Children under 3 1/2 years of age or so are often thought to produce the same types of scribbles for writing and drawing. We tested this idea by asking Chinese 2- to 6-year-olds to write and draw four targets. In Study 1, Chinese adults judged the status of the productions as writings or drawings. The adults performed significantly above the level…

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 age = 4 years 9 months) in Brazil and the United States and selecting a group of prephonological spellers. The spellings of this prephonological group…

Learning about letters is an important foundation for literacy development. Should children be taught to label letters by conventional names, such as /bi/ for "b", or by sounds, such as /b[inverted e]/? We queried parents and teachers, finding that those in the United States stress letter names with young children, whereas those in England begin…

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal…

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between "ch" and "tch" is determined by the preceding vowel ("coach," "roach" vs. "catch," "hatch"). We investigated children's sensitivity to vowel context when spelling…

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset. We presented the nonwords used by Treiman and colleagues in their 2003 study to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school…

Young Portuguese-speaking children have been reported to produce more vowel- and syllable-oriented spellings than have English speakers. To investigate the extent and source of such differences, we analyzed children's vocabulary and found that Portuguese words have more vowel letter names and a higher vowel-consonant ratio than do English words.…

Two experiments examined the influence of children's knowledge of spelling and phonology on their syllabification of spoken words. Found that spelling knowledge influenced oral syllabification by older children and adults, but not by 6- and 7- year-olds. Young children, like older children and adults, showed syllabification differences between…

Four experiments examined whether letter names at the ends of words are equally useful as letter names in the initial position. Findings indicated that 4- and 5-year-olds derived little benefit from such information in reading or spelling, although adults did. For young children, word-final information appeared to have less influence on reading…

Explored how 5.5- to 9-year-olds generalize to novel items a new phoneme spelling. Found they were more likely to use novel grapheme when the vowel appeared in the middle of a target; they were not more likely to use novel grapheme when it shared vowel and final consonant of the target than when it shared initial consonant and vowel. (Author/KB)

Two studies compared children's knowledge about the letters in their name with knowledge of other letters. Findings indicated that Australian first graders and U.S. kindergartners and preschoolers had superior knowledge of letter-name, but not letter-sound, for first letter of their first name. Also, U.S. preschoolers were better at printing the…

Three studies examined linguistic factors influencing preschooler's phonemic awareness task performance. Results indicated no performance differences between fricatives and stops. Subjects were more likely to mistakenly judge that syllables began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme differed from the target only in voicing than when it…

Studied whether kindergartners and first graders spell a sequence of phonemes with the corresponding consonant letter rather than spelling the sequence alphabetically with a consonant letter followed by a vowel. Found that children made letter-name spelling errors, especially when the consonant and vowel formed a complete syllable, showing that…

Examines young children's ability to use simple morphological relations among words as a source of information about the words' spelling. Found that children used morphological relations among words only to a small extent. Suggests that although phonology plays an important role in early spelling, young children can also use other sources of…

Noting that in previous research, the linguistic status of the unit has often been confounded by its size, five experiments were conducted to provide a better test of the linguistic status hypothesis. Results supported the linguistic status hypothesis by indicating that effects of linguistic level on phonological sensitivity cannot always be…