This study investigated children's sensitivity to spelling consistency, and lexical and sublexical (rime) frequency, and their use of explicitly learned canonical vowel graphemes in the early stages of learning to spell. Vowel spellings produced by 78 British children at the end of reception year (mean age 5 years, 7 months) and 6 months later in…

Within alphabetic languages, spelling-to-sound consistency can differ dramatically. For example, English and German are very similar in their phonological and orthographic structure but not in their consistency. In English the letter "a" is pronounced differently in the words "bank," "ball," and "park,"…

Distinguished experimentally between the learner's use of independent grapheme-phoneme correspondences and determined whether in the initial year of reading instruction sublexical relations can be formed. Results could not be given alternative explanations by the developmental bypass hypothesis nor by accounts which predict exclusive use of onset…