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…

Two studies examined young children's knowledge of letters' sounds and names and preschoolers' ability to learn various sound-letter mappings. Findings indicated that an important determinant of letter-sound knowledge is whether the sound occurs in the name of the letter, and its location. Children used knowledge of letters' names when learning…

The results of four experiments refute the idea that children rely heavily on their knowledge of letter names when they begin trying to spell words. Although kindergartners and first graders sometimes spelled the nonword /var/ as "vr," they were less likely to spell the nonword /ves/ as "vs" or the nonword /tib/ as…

Two eye movement experiments examined whether skilled readers include vowels in the early phonological representations used in word recognition during silent reading. Target words were presented in sentences preceded by parafoveal previews in which the vowel phoneme was concordant or discordant with the vowel phoneme in the target word. In…

Reports on three experiments focusing on phonological recoding in fluent reading of meaningful sentences and asks whether spelling-sound rules play a role in this process. Results show that effects attributed to spelling-sound rule use--effects previously found in lexical decision tasks with single words--also emerge in sentence reading. (EKN)

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…

Stop consonants after initial /s/ are standardly spelled as the unvoiced stops /p/, /t/, and /k/. Phonetically, however, they are similar to the voiced stops /b/, /d/, and /g/. Research suggests that many young children make consistent, reasonable, but unconventional, judgments about sounds and English spelling. This paper considers the case of…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

First graders listened to the pronunciation of single syllable nonsense words and were asked to spell the words. Results showed that, for nonsense words of the form consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant, in which the consonant following the vowel was a nasal or a liquid, children often omitted the second consonant in their spelling. (BC)

Two experiments explored the effects of one aspect of English phonology, syllabic consonants, on young children's spelling. For first graders, vowel omissions and misorderings occurred primarily for syllabic /r/ and /l/, whereas by second grade only orthographically influenced errors on syllabic /l/ remained. Results show that the sound form of…

Two experiments used phoneme counting tasks to investigate the foundations of phonemic awareness. Found that first graders and college students had some ability to distinguish between monophthongs (as in "he") and diphthongs (as in "how"), and they tended to count fewer "sounds" for syllables ending with the more…

Children with dyslexia are believed to have very poor phonological skills for which they compensate, to some extent, through relatively well-developed knowledge of letter patterns. We tested this view in Study 1 by comparing 25 dyslexic children and 25 younger normal children, chosen so that both groups performed, on average, at a second-grade…