Pollo, Tatiana Cury, Brett Kessler & Rebecca Treiman. 2009, June. Do children’s prephonological writing patterns predict later spelling performance? Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Boston, MA. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/PolloSSSR2009
In an earlier study, we (Pollo, Treiman, & Kessler, 2008) analyzed the productions of prephonological spellers in English and Portuguese. These productions are typically considered random strings of letters. However, we found that they reflected patterns in the texts in children’s experiences, including children’s books, their own names, and enumerations of the alphabet. The frequency of the letters a child produced correlated with their frequency in books from the child’s country, over and above an effect whereby children favored letters from their own name. Also, children’s use of letter bigrams correlated with their frequency in text and with whether the bigram appears in the alphabet listing. The goal of the present study is to study the value of these early prephonological spellings in predicting later, phonological, spellings.
The present study is a longitudinal investigation of 67 Portuguese-speaking preschoolers: 29 were prephonological at Time 1 (mean age 4 years; 8 months) and were tested again one year later.
Certain aspects of very early spellings help predict accuracy of spellings over the next year. Prephonological children who used letter bigrams that correlated with the bigrams’ frequency in text were more likely to have accurate spellings a year later. Although these children did not represent phonology in their Time 1 writings, some had apparently learned more about the common letter sequences of their written language from informal exposure.
The findings suggest that aspects of children’s prephonological writing can help to predict later literacy success.
Pollo, T. C., Kessler, B., & Treiman, R. (2009, June). Do children’s prephonological writing patterns predict later spelling performance? Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Boston, MA. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/PolloSSSR2009
Last change 2010-11-21T12:03:06-0600