How Do Preschoolers Use Letter Names to Select Spellings?Tatiana Cury Pollo, Rebecca Treiman, & Brett Kessler

Children learn the names of letters at an early age.

Knowledge of letter names plays an important role in children’s explorations of the nature of print across languages.

Early spellers often use a letter to spell the full sequence of sounds in the letter's name (e.g., Treiman, 1993).

English: kr for car, where r spells /ɑr/Portuguese: zbra for zebra /ˈzebra/ ‘zebra’, where z spells /ze/

But only 1 in 7 words in English and Portuguese have a full consonant letter name in them (Pollo, Kessler, & Treiman, 2005), leaving little opportunity for children to use exact letter name spellings.

Do children use partial and imperfect letter name matches?

Hebrew (Levin, Patel, Margalit, & Barad, 2002) YESChildren spell the initial consonant of words better when the word matches the

correct letter name in more than one sound: /gamal/ 'camel' beginning with ג /gimel/ /talmid/ 'student' beginning with ת /taf/

Portuguese: mixed evidenceCardoso-Martins & Batista (in press) NO

L is named /ˈɛli/ No difference between:limão /liˈmãw/ ‘lime’ — laranja /laˈrãʒa/ ‘orange’

Pollo, Treiman, & Kessler (SSSR, 2005) YESPreschoolers used h, a silent letter named /a'ga/, to spell words like:/'gadu/ 'cattle' (partial match with /a'ga/)/'kabu/ 'cable' (partial and imperfect match: voicing contrast /g/-/k/ ignored)

Proportions of Hs and Qs in the Initial Position in Spellings of Various Types of Items (Standard Deviations in Parentheses)

 

Preschoolers used h /a'ga/ to spell words with /ga/ (partial letter-name match) and /ka/ (mismatched voicing).

They used h for /ga/ twice as often as for /ka/.

Children also used q /ke/ to spell /ke/ and /ge/ but no other syllable.

They used q 60% more often for /ke/ (exact letter-name match) than for /ge/ (mismatched voicing).

Participants

46 upper middle-class Portuguese speaking children from BrazilAverage age: 5 years, 5 months (4,6 to 5,11)

Stimuli

48 two-syllable pseudowords stressed on the first syllable, each syllable being consonant plus vowel. Stimuli are paired to match on all sounds except for the critical sound in the first syllable.

12 filler pseudowords

Research QuestionsIntroduction

Item Type h q

/ɡa/ .20 (.31) .04 (.15)/ka/ .09 (.19) .05 (.15)/ba/ and /da/ .01 (.04) .01 (.03)/ke/ .02 (.08) .35 (.36)

/ɡe/ .05 (.11) .22 (.31)others + /e/ .03 (.09) .03 (.34)/ɡ/ + others .01 (.04) .04 (.11)/k/ + others .02 (.10) .05 (.18)Fillers .01 (.02) .01 (.02)

Results

Children do use partial and imperfect consonant letter-name matches when spelling Portuguese.

Our preschoolers use consonants only when the consonant plus following vowel of the letter name match those of the word they are spelling.

They prefer that the consonants match exactly; tend to allow consonants with mismatched voicing; but allow mismatches in no other phonetic feature.

Our results also agree with those of Levin et al. (2002) in showing that partial but exact consonant–vowel (CV) sequences can lead to letter-name matching. We extend those findings by showing that preschoolers match entire CV sequences to select consonants, even though Portuguese orthography always writes vowels separately, unlike Hebrew.

Apparent conflict with Cardoso-Martins & Batista (in press) may be due to the salience of stress. They found no influence from the unstressed syllable of consonant names, while we found an influence from the stressed syllable.

This study uncovered possible reasoning behind certain apparently random spellings. It is important for parents and educators to be aware of principles behind children’s spelling so they can better understand the processes that children use when spelling words and respond appropriately to help children move to more advanced spellings.

Conclusions

Methods

1) Is h /a'ga/ used more often for /ga/ (partial match of name) than for /ka/ (imperfect match)?

2) Is h used for imperfect matches /ba/ and /da/ (same voicing, different place of articulation)?

3) Is q /ke/ used to spell /ge/ (imperfect match)?

4) If (3), is q used for /ge/ less often than for /ke/?

Item Type Example

/ɡa/ stressed syllable of h /aˈga/ /ˈɡafa/

/ka/ differs from /ga/ in voicing /ˈkafa/

/ba/ and /da/ differs from /ɡa/ in place of articulation /ˈbafa/

/ke/ name of q / ke/ /ˈkeba/

/ge/ differs from /ke/ in voicing /ˈɡeba/

others + /e/ differs from /ke/ in initial consonant /ˈmeba/

/g/ + others /ˈɡofa/

/k/ + others /ˈkofa/

Fillers /tuˈriba/

tpollo@wustl.edu

What properties of sounds facilitate inexact letter-name matching?

Can we replicate the results of Pollo et al. (SSSR, 2005)?

Are other letters besides h used in imperfect matches?

Are other phonetic features besides voicing ignored?

How consistently is voicing ignored?

Goals of the Present Study

References

Cardoso-Martins, C. & Batista, A. C. E. (in press). O conhecimento do nome das letras e o

desenvolvimento da escrita: evidência de crianças falantes do português [Letter name

knowledge and the development of spelling skills: Evidence from Brazilian Portuguese-

speaking children]. Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica.

Levin, I., Patel, S., Margalit, T., & Barad, N. (2002). Letter names: Effect on letter saying,

spelling, and word recognition in Hebrew. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23, 269–300.

Pollo, T. C., Kessler, B., & Treiman, R. (2005). Vowels, syllables, and letter names:

Differences between young children’s spelling in English and Portuguese. Journal of

Experimental Child Psychology, 92, 161–181.

Pollo, T. C., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2005, June). Beginning spellers exploit inexact letter-

name matches. Poster to be presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific

Study of Reading, Toronto, Canada.

Treiman, R. (1993). Beginning to spell: A study of first-grade children. New York: Oxford

University Press.