Pollo, Tatiana Cury, Rebecca Treiman, Brett Kessler & Emily Rosenzweig. 2010, July. Children’s initial spelling strategies: ‘Bear’ is not bigger than ‘mosquito’. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Berlin, Germany. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/PolloSSSR2010
It has been asserted that beginning writers use a referential strategy rather than a phonological one (e.g., Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982). For example, children may use more letters when writing ‘bear’ than ‘mosquito’ because they believe the number of letters should reflect the size of the referent rather than the length of the pronunciation. However, to date, most evidence for this strategy is anecdotal and not rigorously tested. In this study we investigated the strategies that children use in their earliest writing.
We studied 91 English-speaking children (mean 4 years 7 months). Monte Carlo techniques identified subgroups who made significant use of phonologically appropriate letters (14 children) or did not (56). Children spelled 24 words of different lengths that represented small objects (e.g., bug, mosquito) or large ones (bear, dinosaur). We asked whether the prephonological writers would use more letters to spell bigger objects, ignoring word length, and whether phonological spellers would evince the opposite pattern.
Children who used some phonology in their spellings wrote more letters for longer words (p < .001), whereas the prephonological group did not (p = .808). However, neither group consistently used more letters for bigger objects (p = .237 for the prephonological writers).
We found no evidence of referential strategies even among children who had not yet learned to use letters to represent sounds. The referential strategy adduced by previous studies might not describe how the majority of prephonological children spell in controlled experiments.
Pollo, T. C., Treiman, R., Kessler, B., & Rosenzweig, E. (2010, July). Children’s initial spelling strategies: ‘Bear’ is not bigger than ‘mosquito’. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Berlin, Germany. Abstract retrieved from http://spell.psychology.wustl.edu/PolloSSSR2010
Last change 2010-11-21T11:56:01-0600