Young spellers must learn to symbolize the sounds in words with phonologically appropriate letters. Do children use their knowledge about their own names to do this, performing better on sound--letter correspondences in their name than expected on the basis of other factors? According to some theories, children learn the spelling of their name as…

One influential theory of literacy development, the constructivist perspective, claims that young children believe that writing represents meaning directly and that the appearance of a written word should reflect characteristics of its referent. There has not been strong evidence supporting this idea, however. Circumventing several methodological…