Caravolas, Markéta, Margaret J. Snowling, Charles Hulme & Brett Kessler. 2004, June. How orthographic consistency affects the development of spelling skills in English: Implications for theories of orthographic learning. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The effects of vowel grapheme consistency on the development of spelling skills in a cohort of 150 British children were examined. Children’s spelling of 100 monosyllabic words was monitored at three time points over the first two years of schooling. All vowel spellings were scored for conventional accuracy. The unconditional and conditional consistencies (i.e. consistencies weighted by the adjacent graphemes) of all graphemes in the word set were computed. Within-subjects regression analyses showed that word frequency and unconditional grapheme consistency had a significant additive effect on vowel spelling by the end of the first year of schooling. The variance accounted for by these two variables increased in the second year of schooling. In addition, by the conditional consistency (i.e. the consistency of the vowel given the ensuing coda grapheme) accounted for unique variance in in vowel spelling by the middle of year 2. These findings suggest that children's orthographic representations are influenced from very early on by the statistical properties of the English orthography.
Caravolas, M., Snowling, M. J., Hulme, C. & Kessler, B. (2004, June). How orthographic consistency affects the development of spelling skills in English: Implications for theories of orthographic learning. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Last change 2009-08-09T20:03:29-0500