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This study was designed to determine whether children's conceptualization of the component sounds in words is influenced by their knowledge of the words' spellings. For example, the spelling of pitch may lead learners to discover the phonetic element [t] in its pronunciation and to conceptualize this as a separate phoneme, whereas the spelling of rich should not. Positive results were obtained in a phonemic segmentation task with real and made-up words taught to fourth graders. Findings are interpreted to show that phonemic segmentation skill may be a consequence of as much as a prerequisite to learning to read words. Results are consistent with a theory of printed word learning in which visual spellings are retained in memory through a sound symbolization process. • 1980 Cambridge University Press

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The mnemonic value of spellings in a paired-associate sound learning task was examined in four experiments. First and second graders were taught four consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense sounds as oral responses. The stimuli were geometric figures or numbers or alphabet letters corresponding to initial consonant sounds. Various types of adjunct aids or activities occurred during study and feedback periods as the learning trials progressed. Visual spellings or misspellings of the CVC sounds were shown; or subjects imagined visual spellings; or they listened to oral spellings or to sounds broken into phonetic segments; or they rehearsed the sounds. Spellings were not present during test trials when sounds were recalled. In all experiments, sound learning was fastest when correct spellings were seen or imagined. The preferred interpretation is that spellings are effective because they provide readers with orthographic images useful for symbolizing and storing sounds in memory. Spelling-aided sound learning scores were highly correlated with subjects' knowledge of printed words, indicating that this representational process may be used by beginning readers to store printed words in lexical memory.