The salience of silent letters in children’s memory for word spellings

Abstract

To compare children's memory for silent and pronounced letters in familiar spellings of words, 7-to lO-year-olds were given two tasks. First, they imagined word spellings and decided whether target letters were present. Then they recalled the words associated with the target letters. Five experiments yielded similar findings. Pronounced letters were recognized somewhat more accurately than silent letters. However, silent letters were detected more rapidly in words than pronounced letters were, and silent letters prompted superior recall of words. The influence of several factors, such as the particular words chosen, the position of letters, and the expectancies of subjects, was ruled out in one or another experiment. Two explanations for findings are proposed. The favorite is that effects reflect the way silent letters are stored in long-term memory when spellings are learned. The other is that events occurring in the experiment enhanced episodic memory for silent letters.One of the properties of English word spellings that is especially bothersome to beginning readers concerns letters that do not symbolize any sound in a word's pronunciation. Although in a linguistic analysis some silent letters (e.g., final E) may be considered to participate in functional spelling units that as a whole map sounds systematically (Venezky, 1970), it is doubtful that beginning reader/spellers are aware of or use such complex spelling-sound relationships. More likely, if beginners cannot find a separate sound for a single letter and if they do not see it as part of a digraph (e.g., sh, ch, th), then the letter is regarded as silent. Categorization of letters as "silent" is probably a common explanation given to beginning readers and spellers when they stumble over letters lacking a correlate in sound. Rather than attempt a complicated and possibly futile explanation regarding how one letter changes the pronunciation of another, teachers in the early grades and also parents are likely to assert simply that the letter is silent. That this distinction may be acquired early is suggested in Chomsky's (1979) observation of her own preschooler, who saw the word "Joan," sounded it out as "Jane," and upon learning of his mistake explained, "Oh, I see. The A is silent. I thought the 0 was silent." To the extent that unpronounced letters are learned as silent rather than as instances of complex spelling rules, their occurrence must appear This research was supported by Grant NIE-G-77-Q009, awarded by the National Institute of Education, and Grant HD-12903-Ql, awarded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. We express our gratitude to the Davis Unified School District and to S1. James Elementary School in Davis for their cooperation. Authors' address: Department of Education, University of California, Davis, California 95616.capncious, a property unique to those printed words containing them. Because silent letters are characteristic of many English words encountered by children as they learn to read, it is important...

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