Prephonological Spelling and Its Connections With Later Word Reading and Spelling Performance

Before children are able to invent phonologically plausible spellings of words, they may produce strings of letters that do not seem to be motivated by the sounds in words. To examine the nature of these prephonological spellings and their relationship to later literacy performance, we administered a test in which children spelled a series of words using preformed letters, together with other literacy-related tests, to 106 U.S. 3- to 5-year-olds who had not received formal literacy instruction. We then followed the children into the first years of school, administering standardized spelling and word reading tests yearly for the three subsequent years. We used quantitative procedures to identify children who were prephonological spellers at Time 1. Although these children did not use phonologically plausible letters at a rate above that expected by chance, their spellings demonstrated some knowledge about common letters and digrams: graphotactic knowledge. The prephonological spellers also showed some knowledge of the alphabet and some phonological awareness, indicating that these skills do not suffice for phonological spelling. Children who were prephonological spellers at Time 1 were poorer readers and spellers at the later testing points, on average, than children who were not. This result reveals the continuity between children’s early spelling attempts and their later literacy skills and the importance of phonology in spelling. We did not find, as Kessler et al. (Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2013, Vol. 46, pp. 252–259) did in a study in which children wrote words by hand, that better graphotactic knowledge among prephonological spellers is associated with better spelling in later years

Uma revisão crítica de três perspectivas sobre o desenvolvimento da escrita

Aprender a ler e a escrever está entre os maiores desafios de uma criança. Um componente importante da alfabetização é a escrita. Apesar do aumento de interesse pela escrita nos últimos anos, seu estudo ainda não atrai tanta atenção quanto o da leitura. Este artigo revisa três perspectivas no estudo do desenvolvimento da escrita: fonológica, cons-trutivista e da aprendizagem estatística. Atenção especial é dada aos estudos que examinam o desenvolvimento da escrita de forma translinguística, já que são cruciais para diferenciar as propriedades do desenvolvimento da escrita que são universais, daquelas que são específicas ao sistema de escrita da criança. As tradicionais perspectivas fonológicas e construtivistas são revisadas e criticamente avaliadas sob a perspectiva da aprendizagem estatística, mediante a revisão de seus conceitos fundamentais, com base estudos recentes que corroboram algumas de suas premissas.</jats:p

Prephonological Spelling and Its Connections With Later Word Reading and Spelling Performance

Before children are able to invent phonologically plausible spellings of words, they may produce strings of letters that do not seem to be motivated by the sounds in words. To examine the nature of these prephonological spellings and their relationship to later literacy performance, we administered a test in which children spelled a series of words using preformed letters, together with other literacy-related tests, to 106 U.S. 3- to 5-year-olds who had not received formal literacy instruction. We then followed the children into the first years of school, administering standardized spelling and word reading tests yearly for the three subsequent years. We used quantitative procedures to identify children who were prephonological spellers at Time 1. Although these children did not use phonologically plausible letters at a rate above that expected by chance, their spellings demonstrated some knowledge about common letters and digrams: graphotactic knowledge. The prephonological spellers also showed some knowledge of the alphabet and some phonological awareness, indicating that these skills do not suffice for phonological spelling. Children who were prephonological spellers at Time 1 were poorer readers and spellers at the later testing points, on average, than children who were not. This result reveals the continuity between children’s early spelling attempts and their later literacy skills and the importance of phonology in spelling. We did not find, as Kessler et al. (Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2013, Vol. 46, pp. 252–259) did in a study in which children wrote words by hand, that better graphotactic knowledge among prephonological spellers is associated with better spelling in later years

Uma revisão crítica de três perspectivas sobre o desenvolvimento da escrita

Aprender a ler e a escrever está entre os maiores desafios de uma criança. Um componente importante da alfabetização é a escrita. Apesar do aumento de interesse pela escrita nos últimos anos, seu estudo ainda não atrai tanta atenção quanto o da leitura. Este artigo revisa três perspectivas no estudo do desenvolvimento da escrita: fonológica, cons-trutivista e da aprendizagem estatística. Atenção especial é dada aos estudos que examinam o desenvolvimento da escrita de forma translinguística, já que são cruciais para diferenciar as propriedades do desenvolvimento da escrita que são universais, daquelas que são específicas ao sistema de escrita da criança. As tradicionais perspectivas fonológicas e construtivistas são revisadas e criticamente avaliadas sob a perspectiva da aprendizagem estatística, mediante a revisão de seus conceitos fundamentais, com base estudos recentes que corroboram algumas de suas premissas

Statistical learning and spelling: Evidence from Brazilian prephonological spellers

These are data files and analysis scripts for a project in which we analyzed the spelling attempts of Brazilian children (age 3 years, 3 months to 6 years, 0 months) who were prephonological spellers, in that they wrote using letters that did not reflect the phonemes in the words they were asked to spell. We tested the hypothesis that children use their statistical-learning skills to learn about the appearance of writing and that older prephonological spellers, who have had on average more exposure to writing, produce more wordlike spellings than younger prephonological spellers. We found that older prephonological spellers produced longer spellings and were more likely to use letters and digrams in proportion to their frequency of occurrence in Portuguese. There were also some age-related differences in children’s tendency to use letters from their own names when writing other words