The spelling of an English word may reflect its part of speech, not just the sounds within it. In 2 preregistered experiments, we asked whether university students are sensitive to 1 effect of part of speech that has been observed by linguists: that content words (e.g., the noun "inn") must be spelled with at least 3 letters, whereas…

We investigated how university students select between alternative spellings of phonemes in written production by asking them to spell nonwords whose final consonants have extended spellings (e.g., ‹ff› for /f/) and simpler spellings (e.g., ‹f› for /f/). Participants' choices of spellings for the final consonant were influenced by whether they…

Many English phonemes have more than one possible spelling. People's choices among the options may be influenced by sublexical patterns, such as the identity of neighboring sounds within the word. However, little research has explored the possible role of lexical conditioning. Three experiments examined the potential effects of one such factor:…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This article reviews literature on normal and impaired spelling development, and discusses the influence of consonant clusters, phonetic influences, and the role of letter names. Research that underscores the importance of fine-grained linguistic analyses of spelling performance is described. It is concluded that such an approach holds promise.…

While previous studies have investigated children's awareness of two units within words--syllables and phonemes, there is experimental evidence that children are also aware of intrasyllabic units (units intermediate in size between the syllable and the phoneme), and that these units may be useful for teaching phonological awareness and reading.…