Spelling

205 Pages·1997·6.87 MB·English

by  Dr Rebecca Treiman (auth.), Rebecca Treiman (eds.)

SPELLING
Spelling
Edited by
REBECCA TREIMAN
Department ofP sychology,
Wayne University, Detroit
Reprinted from
Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Volume 9, Nos. 5-6, December 1997
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-4998-8 ISBN 978-94-017-3054-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-3054-9
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
Printed in the Netherlands.
Contents
R. Treiman I Introduction to special issue on spelling 1
K. Nation I Children's sensitivity to rime unit frequency when
spelling words and nonwords 7
R.P. Deavers and G.D.A. Brown I Rules versus analogies in chil-
dren's spelling: Evidence for task dependence 25
W.H.J. van Bon and I.J.C.A.F. Uit De Haag I Difficulties with con-
sonants in the spelling and segmentation of CCVCC pseudo-
words: Differences among Dutch first graders 49
L. Wade-Woolley and L.S. Siegel I The spelling performance of
ESL and native speakers of English as a function of reading
skill 73
V. Muter and M. Snowling I Grammar and phonology predict
spelling in middle childhood 93
T. Nunes, P. Bryant and M. Bindman I Learning to spell regular
and irregular verbs 113
C.K. Varnhagen, M. McCallum and M. Burstow I Is children's
spelling naturally stage-like? 137
M. Dixon and Z. Kaminska I Is it misspelled or is it mispelled?
The influence of fresh orthographic information on spelling 169
Ch. Barry and P. de Bastiani I Lexical priming of non word spelling
in the regular orthography of Italian 185
Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9: 315-319, 1997. 315
R. Treiman (ed.), Spelling, pp. [1-5]
© 1997 KluwerAcademic Publishers.
Introduction to special issue on spelling
REBECCA TREIMAN
Department ofP sychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA
This special issue of Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal
focuses on one important aspect of writing, spelling. Just as one cannot be a
fluent reader if one has to laboriously sound out each word, so one cannot be
a fluent writer if one must puzzle over each spelling. Learning to spell accu
rately and automatically is an important part of learning to read and write,
and brings with it valuable experience in analyzing the sounds and meanings
of language. Despite the importance of writing and spelling, there has been
less research on these topics than there has on reading. For example, research
articles in psychological journals have many more references to 'reading' (a
total of 18,359 from 197 4 to early 1997, according to a PsycLit search) than
to either 'writing' (5,140) or 'spelling' (1,993). The purpose of this special
issue is to refocus our attention on spelling as an important linguistic skill.
The articles in the special issue vary along several dimensions, exempli
fying the range of variation in current research on spelling. One dimension
is age group. Seven of the articles focus on children learning to spell, while
two others examine the cognitive processes employed by adult spellers. The
researchers also differ in the language that they have chosen to study. Most
of the studies reported here involve English, but Italian and Dutch are also
represented.
With regard to research topic, some of the articles in the special issue
examine the linguistic factors that make certain kinds of words easier or
harder to spell than others. The study by Nation, which was carried out with
8-9 year old English-speaking children, exemplifies this type of research.
Nation studied spelling performance as a function of the size of an item's
neighborhood, in particular the number of words that share its rime (vowel
final consonant unit). For example, pick has a large rime neighborhood,
with 22 other monosyllables including click, kick, and quick sharing the -ick
spelling. In the case of disk, there are only two other monosyllables (risk and
whisk) that share the /Isk/- isk correspondence. Nation's results show that
words (and nonwords) with more common rimes are easier for children to
316 REBECCA TREIMAN
spell than those with less common rimes. These results suggest that spelling
does not only involve the translation of individual phonemes (e.g., III, /kl)
to individual graphemes (e.g., i, ck). Children also appear to use larger units
of spelling-sound correspondence, as when they translate the phonological
rime /Ikl to the orthographic rime ick. Nation's study shows how careful
examination of the linguistic factors that are implicated in spelling difficulty
can shed light on the cognitive processes involved.
Just as the linguistic structure of a word (or nonword) affects a child's
ability to spell it, so the demands of the task also affect spelling performance.
Deavers and Brown studied how children's use of rime-level units varies with
task demands. In their studies, English-speaking children were asked to spell
nonwords such as /tAv/. This nonword could potentially be spelled as tove,
by analogy with love and dove, or as tuv. Children produced many more tove
spellings when love was presented to them as a clue that could help them to
spell the nonword than when no such clue was given. Deavers and Brown
interpret their results to suggest that the nature of the task affects the size
of the unit employed for sound-to-spelling translation. That is, the particular
strategy that a child uses in spelling is not fixed, but may depend on the
situation.
The study by van Bon and de Haag, which was carried out with Dutch
first graders, further examined the linguistic factors that contribute to spelling
difficulty. An additional goal of the study was to determine whether poorer
spellers show different patterns of performance than better spellers. Van Bon
and de Haag focused on consonant clusters. They found that poor spellers, in
particular, sometimes omit the first consonants of syllable-final clusters when
attempting to spell made-up words. For example, such children may write
the nonword/stalp/ without an l. In an oral segmentation task, these same
children may omit the /11 altogether, saying that /stalp/ contains the units lsi,
It/, Ia/, and /p/, or may group the /11 with the preceding vowel, saying that
/stalp/ contains Is/, It/, loll and /p/. These results suggest that first graders
who lag behind their peers in spelling are poor at analyzing the rimes of
spoken words. Difficulties in phonological analysis appear to be one cause of
spelling problems.
The study by Wade-Woolley and Siegel provides a further assessment of
the idea that spelling (and reading) problems reflect deficits in phonological
processing. These researchers compared the spelling performance of second
graders who were good readers (as assessed by ability to pronounce words in
isolation) and poor readers. The poor readers tended to be poor at spelling,
and also performed worse than the good readers on the phonological tasks
of phoneme deletion and pseudoword repetition. These findings mirror those
of other studies, and support the phonological deficit hypothesis. More novel
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INTRODUCTION 317
are the findings that Wade-Woolley and Siegel obtained when they studied
children for whom English was a second language. Although the second
language speakers performed more poorly than the native speakers on tests
of syntactic knowledge, phoneme deletion, and pseudoword repetition, the
second language speakers were not worse than the native speakers in spelling.
These results suggest that, even if children have not fully mastered the sound
system of their second language, they need not be disadvantaged in spelling
it. The findings appear to pose a challenge to views of reading and spelling
that place primary emphasis on phonology.
The Muter and Snowling study, together with the Nunes, Bryant and
Bindman study, broadens the focus by examining aspects of spelling beyond
phonology. Muter and Snow ling, in their longitudinal study of British school
children, examined the degree to which various linguistic skills measured
between the ages of 4 and 6 predicted spelling ability at age 9. The results
support the idea that phonological skill plays an important role in spelling
development, and further suggest that awareness of phonemes is more
strongly related to spelling ability than awareness of rimes. In addition,
grammatical awareness appears to predict spelling skill. Children who are
able to reflect on meaning relationships among words may be in a position
to understand how this information is represented in English spelling. For
example, such children may understand that word-final /ks/ is spelled as x in
words like box and fox, which contain a single morpheme or unit of meaning,
but as cks in words like socks and blocks, which contain two morphemes.
Nunes, Bryant, and Bindman examined the role of morphology in spelling
by focusing on past tense forms. Children heard passages such as "Harry is
crelling his book. Maybe he will crell mine tomorrow. He /kn:ld/ another
one this morning." This passage is designed to give children the impression
that /kn:11 is some kind of action. How do children spell the past tense of
this new verb? One possibility is to spell it purely on the basis of phoneme
grapheme correspondences, yielding kreld. Another possibility is to use final
ed, the typical ending for the English past tense but one which does not
correspond directly to pronunciation (i.e., the e does not represent a separate
vowel in the spelling krelled). Older children were more likely to adopt the
-ed solution than younger children, displaying a better understanding of the
fact that the English writing system reflects meaning as well as sound. Nunes
et al. also reported that children's performance in a grammatical awareness
task predicted their use of -ed 21 months later. The results are interpreted to
suggest that grammatical knowledge plays an important role in learning to
spell in English.
The study by Varnhagen, McCallum, and Burstow examined the nature
of developmental change in spelling. Is learning to spell best described as
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a stage-based process, with children passing through various stages during
which they possess distinctively different kinds of knowledge and strategies?
Alternatively, is learning to spell a more continuous process, with children
of all ages possessing a range of strategies and knowledge? Analyzing the
spelling of several types of words by children from first to sixth grade,
Vamhagen et al. found little evidence to support the kinds of qualitative
changed predicted by existing stage theories. Vamhagen and her colleagues
argue that research on children's spelling should concentrate on investigating
the multiple strategies that children have available and the way in which
children select among and modify strategies as they attempt to master the
writing system.
The two final articles in the special issue address the cognitive processes
used by adult spellers. One might have thought that, once the spelling of a
word is well established in memory, its representation remains stable. The
results of Dixon and Kaminska show that this is not necessarily the case. If
college students are asked to read a misspelled word such as truely, they are
more likely to misspell this same word a week later than if they did not see the
misspelling. This holds true for both good spellers and less good spellers.
Dixon and Kaminska's results suggest that memory representations for
spellings are labile and capable of taking in new information even in adult
hood. The findings further support the idea that exposure to print (correctly
spelling print, it is hoped) is an important factor in the development of spelling
ability.
Finally, Barry and De Bastiani examine the cognitive processes used by
adult spellers of Italian. Italian has a highly regular spelling system, and
almost all words can be spelled correctly using phoneme-to-grapheme conver
sion rules. One might therefore expect Italians to use a nonlexical process
when spelling nonwords, assembling a spelling from phoneme-grapheme
rules and not using information about the spellings of specific known real
words. Contrary to this expectation, Barry and De Bastiani found a lexical
influence on nonword spelling. For example, Italians were more likely to spell
the nonword 'cuodo' as quodo if they had previously heard the word quota
(which uses the qu spelling) than if they heard the word cuoco (which uses the
cu spelling). As Barry and De Bastiani note, this same effect has previously
been found in English. The results thus point to a degree of similarity in
the spelling processes employed for different languages, even when those
languages appear to be rather different.
Together, the nine articles in the special issue provide an excellent sample
of the kind of research that is currently being carried out on spelling. This
research includes linguistically-oriented studies, task- and process-oriented
studies, and developmentally-oriented studies. It is encouraging to observe
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INTRODUCfiON 319
the interactions that are developing among these research strands, as well as
the interactions among researchers who are studying different languages. I
hope that the research presented in the special issue will show the progress
that has been made in our understanding of spelling, and that it will encourage
others to learn from and perhaps contribute to this research.
Address for correspondence: Dr Rebecca Treiman, Department of Psychology, Wayne State
University, 71 West Warren Avenue, Detroit, MI 48202, USA
Phone: [phone]; Fax: [phone]; Email: [email protected]
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