Two studies examined children's use of letter-name spelling strategies when target phoneme sequences match letter names with different degrees of precision. We examined Portuguese-speaking preschoolers' use of "h" (which is named /a'ga/ but which never represents those sounds) when spelling words beginning with /ga/ or variants of /ga/. We also…

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.…