Statistical Learning and Spelling: Older Prephonological Spellers Produce More Wordlike Spellings Than Younger Prephonological Spellers

Abstract

The authors analyzed the spellings of 179 U.S. children (age = 3 years, 2 months-5 years, 6 months) who were prephonological spellers, in that they wrote using letters that did not reflect the phonemes in the target items. Supporting the idea that children use their statistical learning skills to learn about the outer form of writing before they begin to spell phonologically, older prephonological spellers showed more knowledge about English letter patterns than did younger prephonological spellers. The written productions of older prephonological spellers were rated by adults as more similar to English words than were the productions of younger prephonological spellers. The older children s spellings were also more wordlike on several objective measures, including length, variability of letters within words, and digram frequency.

Statistical learning and spelling: Evidence from Brazilian prephonological spellers

“…Although there were a few differences, the many similarities between the present results with Brazilian prephonological spellers and the previous findings with US prephonological spellers (Treiman et al, 2018) are striking because of the differences in orthographic depth between Portuguese and English. Many studies have shown that the orthographic depth of a writing system strongly influences spelling and reading development (e.g., Serrano et al, 2011; Seymour et al, 2003).…”

“…To assess the degree to which children used letters in proportion to their frequency in the language and whether this varied as a function of age, we computed for each child a version of the monogram correlation measure used in previous studies (Kessler et al, 2013; Treiman et al, 2018). To compute this measure, we summed the frequency with which a child used each letter of the alphabet across all of the spellings in each test and calculated the Kendall rank correlation coefficient (xb) between these values and the frequency counts of the letters in texts for preschool children, based on the word counts of Pinheiro (1996).…”

“…Based on a statistical-learning view, we might expect to see age differences in the productions of prephonological spellers that reflect these differences in experience. Treiman et al (2018) found some such differences in a cross-sectional study of US prephonological spellers who ranged in age from 3;2 (years; months) to 5;6. The spellings produced by older prephonological spellers were on average longer than those produced by younger ones, and older prephonological spellers were more likely than younger ones to use digrams in proportion to their frequency of occurrence in books.…”

“…The productions of prephonological spellers are also influenced by the characteristics of their given name, a word that is particularly important to them. These children use letters from their names rather often when asked to write other words—more often than expected based on the frequency of these letters in words in general (Treiman, Kessler, Boland, Clocksin, & Chen, 2018, for US prephonological spellers; see also Bloodgood 1999, for US kindergartners and Both-de Vries & Bus, 2008, for Dutch children).…”

“…This is an important question because the orthography studied by Treiman et al (2018), English, is often described as deep. That is, English has complex and sometimes inconsistent links between spellings and sounds.…”