Spelling

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.

Klappentext

The chapters in this volume focus on one important aspect of writing: spelling. There has been much less research on spelling and writing than on reading, and these papers represent an attempt to restore the balance. The papers, by some of the leading researchers in the field, provide an excellent sample of current research on spelling. Some of the papers focus on spelling as a linguistic process, examining the phonological and morphological factors that make certain words easier or harder to spell than others. Other papers treat spelling as a cognitive process, looking for example at the effects of task demands on performance. And still other papers view spelling as a developmental process, asking how children learn to spell and why some children experience more difficulty than others. Together, the papers reveal the progress that has been made in our understanding of spelling.

Inhalt
to special issue on spelling.- Children's sensitivity to rime unit frequency when spelling words and nonwords.- Rules versus analogies in children's spelling: Evidence for task dependence.- Difficulties with consonants in the spelling and segmentation of CCVCC pseudowords: Differences among Dutch first graders.- The spelling performance of ESL and native speakers of English as a function of reading skill.- Grammar and phonology predict spelling in middle childhood.- Learning to spell regular and irregular verbs.- Is children's spelling naturally stage-like?.- Is it misspelled or is it mispelled? The influence of fresh orthographic information on spelling.- Lexical priming of nonword spelling in the regular orthography of Italian.