Before formal instruction, preschoolers represent words in print in various degrees of conventionality. Unlicensed letters are letters that have no connection to the word that the child is aiming to write; they are neither licensed by phoneme-grapheme rules nor by orthographical representations in the mental lexicon. In the current paper, we…

The study's aims were to (a) evaluate preschoolers' use of private speech (overt talk to themselves) during spelling; and (b) study how it is affected by the nature of orthography. Participants were 197 Hebrew speaking Israeli preschoolers (109 girls and 88 boys) (M = 5.6 years). Children spelled 12 words (N =44 letters) that represented one of…

Sixty-nine children (20 with cerebral palsy (CP)) and their mothers participated in a joint writing activity. Children (M age = 64.56 months; SD = 7.07 months) wrote a four-item grocery list on a keyboard at home with their mothers. Mothers who had children with CP generally provided a lower level of graphophonemic (i.e., segmenting words into…

The authors developed a digital spelling game to promote children's early literacy skills. Based on the dual-coding theory, the authors studied the benefits of auditory support alone versus auditory+visual support. Children played the game in three conditions: no support, hearing the whole word; auditory-only support, hearing a word segmented; and…

Twenty kindergartners (eight boys) with cerebral palsy (CP) and their mothers engaged in a writing activity that required dyads to compose a grocery list containing four items together. Maternal writing supports were observed, including graphophonemic mediation (i.e., support for letter--sound correspondence) and printing mediation (i.e., guidance…