Initial Sound/Letter Correspondences in Children's Early Written Productions

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Pollo

Cardoso-Martins

et al. 2013

The theory that learners of alphabetic writing systems go through a period during which they treat writing as representing syllables is highly influential, especially as applied to learners of Romance languages. The results of Study 1, a 2-year longitudinal study of 76 Portuguese speakers in Brazil from 4 to 6 years of age, did not support this theory. Although most children produced some spellings of words in which the number of letters matched the number of syllables, few children produced significantly more such spellings than expected on the basis of chance. When such spellings did occur, they appeared to reflect partially successful attempts to represent phonemes rather than attempts to represent syllables. Study 2, with 68 Brazilian 4- and 5-year-olds, found similar results even when children spelled words that contained three or four syllables in which all vowels are letter names—conditions that have been thought to favor syllabic spelling. The influential theory that learners of Romance languages go through a period during which they use writing to represent the level of syllables appears to lack a solid empirical foundation.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Do young children spell words syllabically? Evidence from learners of Brazilian Portuguese

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Pollo

Cardoso-Martins

et al. 2013

“…One exception is the constructivist perspective of Ferreiro and colleagues (Ferreiro, 1983, 1984, 1985; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982), which has been particularly prominent in research and pedagogy in Romance-language speaking countries (e.g., Silva & Alves-Martins, 2002) and which has also been applied to written language acquisition in English (e.g., Kamii, Long, Manning, & Manning, 1990; Vernon, 1993). Researchers in the constructivist tradition assert that young children hold certain hypotheses about the characteristics of writing even before they understand that writing represents the sounds of language.…”

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confidence: 99%

WritingDinosaurLarge andMosquitoSmall: Prephonological Spellers’ Use of Semantic Information

Zhang

Scientific Studies of Reading

2015

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 concerns with previous studies, we examined written spellings of young children who did not yet use letters to represent the sounds of words, that is, prephonological spellers. We identified 38 prephonological spellers (mean age 4 years 2 months) and measured the area of their writing productions. Prephonological spellers made significantly larger productions for words representing large objects than those representing small objects. This effect held true after controlling for the influences of other variables, including size of writing on previous trials and order of trial in a session. Our results suggest that young children sometimes use drawing-like features to communicate the meaning of words when writing.

How do prephonological writers link written words to their objects?

Kessler

Decker

et al. 2016

Cognitive Development

Two experiments studied prephonological writers, namely children who do not yet use letters to represent phonemes. The experiments tested the hypothesis that these children link elements of writing not to the phonological forms of spoken words but to physical characteristics of the words' referents. In Experiment 1, prephonological spellers (n = 36, mean age 4 years, 3 months) used more elements on average to write plural nouns such as cows than singular nouns such as cow. Prephonological spellers in Experiment 2 (n = 42, mean age 4 years, 4 months) did not use more elements to write longer verbs such as buying than shorter ones such as buy. Thus, the results of Experiment 1 suggest that prephonological spellers are sensitive to the quantity of the referent rather than the number of phonemes, syllables, or morphemes in the word. That is, prephonological spellers have some tendency to treat writing as iconic.