Rebecca Treiman

Learning to produce the written forms of individual words is an important part of writing. In this article, I review research on how children acquire this skill. I begin by discussing young children’s knowledge about the visual appearance of writing and then consider how learners of alphabetic writing systems begin to use letters to symbolize the sounds they hear in words. The English writing system, the focus of this review, is complex. In the final section of the article, I discuss how older children learn about its subtler patterns. Implications of the research for how children learn and for how spelling should be taught are considered.

According to the differentiation hypothesis, young children's attempts to write show characteristics common to all writing systems, such as linearity. Characteristics that are specific to the writing system of the child's culture emerge only later. We tested this hypothesis by presenting adults who knew both Chinese and English with written productions of Chinese and United States 2- to 5-year-olds and asking them to judge the nationality of the writer. Adults performed significantly above the level expected by chance even with the productions of 2- and 3-year-olds, suggesting that knowledge of language-specific characteristics emerges earlier than previously thought. Children appeared to show more language-specific characteristics in their names than in other writings, for adults performed better with children's names than with other items. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Children's early attempts to write may show general properties...

Conversations about literacy-related matters with parents can help prepare children for formal literacy instruction. We studied these conversations using data gathered from fifty-six US families as they engaged in daily activities at home. Analyzing conversations when children were aged 1;10, 2;6, 3;6, and 4;2, we found that explicit talk about the elements and processes of reading and writing occurred even when children were less than two years old and became more common as children grew older. The majority of literacy-related conversations included talk about alphabet letters. Literacy-related conversations occurred in a variety of contexts, not only book-reading. There were few differences as a function of family socioeconomic status in the proportion of utterances during the sessions that occurred in literacy-related conversations. At older ages, however, children in families of lower socioeconomic status bore more of the conversational burden than children in families of higher...

The authors analyzed the spellings of 179 U.S. children (age = 3 years, 2 months-5 years, 6 months) who were prephonological spellers, in that they wrote using letters that did not reflect the phonemes in the target items. Supporting the idea that children use their statistical learning skills to learn about the outer form of writing before they begin to spell phonologically, older prephonological spellers showed more knowledge about English letter patterns than did younger prephonological spellers. The written productions of older prephonological spellers were rated by adults as more similar to English words than were the productions of younger prephonological spellers. The older children s spellings were also more wordlike on several objective measures, including length, variability of letters within words, and digram frequency.

An understanding of the nature of writing systems and of the typical course of spelling development is an essential foundation for understanding the problems of children who have serious difficulties in learning to spell. The present article seeks to provide that foundation. It argues that the dual-route models of spelling that underlie much existing research and practice are based on overly simple assumptions about how writing systems work and about how spelling skills develop. Many writing systems include not only context-free links from phonemes to letters but also context-sensitive phonological patterns, morphological influences, and graphotactic patterns. According to an alternative framework, IMP (integration of multiple patterns), spellers acquire multiple sources of information through use of their statistical-learning skills and through direct instruction. Children learn the spelling of a word most easily when different patterns converge on the spelling, and they have difficulty when patterns conflict. Implications of these ideas for assessment and instruction are considered.

To investigate preschoolers' knowledge about symbol systems, we compared the written and drawn productions of 2-5-year-old U.S. children. In Study 1, children (N = 88) wrote and drew four targets, including their own name and a picture of themselves. Children differentiated writings from drawings in the implements they used, the size of their productions, and use of recognizable letters. Some distinctions were present in the youngest children and others became more prominent with age. In Study 2, adults (N = 16) who judged whether the productions were writings or drawings performed above the level of chance for all age groups. Adults did better for children's names and self-portraits than for other targets, suggesting that the name plays a leading role in U.S. children's learning about writing. Overall, the results show that children begin to learn about formal differences between writing and drawing at an early age.

This chapter differs from most of its companions in addressing literacy from the stand-point of the writer rather than the reader. Literacy research has concentrated on reading, but without the ability to write a person could scarcely be called literate. A full under-standing of ...

Learning the orthographic forms of words is important for both spelling and reading. To determine whether some methods of scoring children's early spellings predict later spelling performance better than do other methods, we analyzed data from 374 U.S. and Australian children who took a 10-word spelling test at the end of kindergarten (mean age 6 years, 2 months) and a standardized spelling test approximately two years later. Surprisingly, scoring methods that took account of phonological plausibility did not outperform methods that were based only on orthographic correctness. The scoring method that is most widely used in research with young children, which allots a certain number of points to each word and which considers both orthographic and phonological plausibility, did not rise to the top as a predictor. Prediction of Grade 2 spelling performance was improved to a small extent by considering children's tendency to reverse letters in kindergarten.

Previous studies suggest that adults and children divide spoken syllables into subsyllabic onset-rime units more readily than into any other kind of subsyllabic unit. We asked whether this same onset-rime segmentation might also be beneficial in teaching children to read. That is, can children learn more words segmented at the onset-rime boundary (e.g., CL-AP, D-ISH) than words segmented after the vowel (CLA-P, DI-SH)? In three experiments, first-grade students studied single words presented by a computer connected to a high-quality speech synthesizer. Experiment 1 used words of four letters but only three phonemes apiece (e.g., WHIP, DISH). In some of these words the onset-rime segmentation corresponded to the initial bigram (e.g., WH-IP); in some it did not (e.g., D-ISH). Experiments 2 and 3 used words of four letters and four phonemes (e.g., CLAP, CORN). In all three experiments, onset-rime segmentation proved more helpful than postvowel segmentation in short-term learning of the words.

ABSTRACT An understanding of the nature of writing is an important foundation for studies of how people read and how they learn to read. This chapter discusses the characteristics of modern writing systems with a view toward providing that foundation. We consider both the appearance of writing systems and how they function. All writing represents the words of a language according to a set of rules. However, important properties of a language often go unrepresented in writing. Change and variation in the spoken language result in complex links to speech. Redundancies in language and writing mean that readers can often get by without taking in all of the visual information. These redundancies also mean that readers must often supplement the visual information that they do take in with knowledge about the language and about the world.

When briefly presented with a string of colored letters, subjects sometimes report seeing letters and colors in incorrect combinations. We asked whether these illusory conjunctions of letter shape and identity can illuminate the units of analysis that are used by the visual system in word ...

Spelling words in English can be a frus-trating and discouraging experience for schoolchildren. For some words, spellers can easily achieve success by dividing the word into small units of sound, phonemes, and representing the phonemes by the letters that most commonly spell them. For example, the word tip is composed of the phonemes/t/,/I/, and/p/, 1 which can be straightforwardly spelled by the letters t, i, and p. Words such as pat, fit, and shop are easily spelled using such a sound-based or phonemic strategy. However, for ...

1. The chapters in" Reading Acquisition" address various processes and problems in learning to read. These include the manner in which acquisition gets underway, the contribution of story listening experiences, the process of learning to read words, and the ...

... Journal of Memory and Language 27.87-104. Treiman, Rebecca, Jennifer Gross, and Annemarie Cwikiel-Glavin. 1992. ... Proceedings of the 23rd annual Boston Conference on Language Development, ed. by Annabell Greenhill, Heather Littlefield, and Cheryl Tano, 753-763. ...

... however, after a syllable that ends in /l/, the ending /shu˘ n/ is spelled sion, as in compulsionor expulsion. ... into two groups.15 Both groups were taught to spell one-syllable words that ended in /k/. one group was taught to spell the words by using letter units such as ank, ack, and ...

Much research on literacy development has focused on learners of alphabetic writing systems. Researchers have hypothesized that children learn about the formal characteristics of writing before they learn about the relations between units of writing and units of speech. We tested this hypothesis by examining young Chinese children's understanding of writing. Mandarin-speaking 2-to 5-year-olds completed a graphic task, which tapped their knowledge about the formal characteristics of writing, and a phonological task, which tapped their knowledge about the correspondence between Chinese characters and syllables. The 3-to 5-year-olds performed better on the graphic task than the phonological task, indicating that learning how writing appears visually begins earlier than learning that writing corresponds to linguistic units, even in a writing system in which written units correspond to syllables. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Learning about writing's visual form, how it looks, is an important part of emergent literacy. Knowledge of how writing symbolizes linguistic units may emerge later. What does this study add? We test the hypothesis that Chinese children learn about writing's visual form earlier than its symbolic nature. Chinese 3-to 5-year-olds know more about visual features than character–syllable links. Results show learning of the visual appearance of a notation system is developmentally precocious. Learning to understand and use symbol systems is an important part of cognitive development. Symbols have an inherently dual nature: They are objects in their own right and they represent something other than themselves. Children need to think about and mentally represent both aspects (DeLoache, 2011). Understanding the relation between a symbol and its referent can be challenging, as in the learning of such symbol systems as maps and scale models (DeLoache, 1991, 2000). In the present study, we focused on another symbol system, writing. Writing, like other symbol systems, has two aspects. The first is its outer form: what it looks like on the surface. For example, writing is made up of marks arranged in a linear fashion. The second aspect of writing is its inner structure: how

There has been less research on how children learn to spell than on how they learn to read, but a good deal is now known about spelling development. This article reviews studies of normative development, beginning with children's early scribbles and proceeding to prephonological spelling involving letters, phonologically influenced invented spelling, and more advanced spelling. Most of the studies deal with spelling development in alphabetic writing systems. Theories about how children learn to spell, including constructivist theories, stage and phase theories, dual-route theories, and Integration of Multiple Patterns, are presented and reviewed in light of the research evidence. The final section of the article discusses directions for future research and implications for children with spelling difficulties.

Choosing between alternative spellings for sounds can be difficult for even experienced spellers. We examined the factors that influence adults' choices in one such case: single-versus double-letter spellings of medial consonants in English. The major systematic influence on the choice between medial singletons and doublets has been thought to be phonological context: whether the preceding vowel is phonologically long or short. With phonological context equated, we found influences of graphotactic context—both the number of letters in the spelling of the vowel and the spelling sequence following the medial consonant—in adults' spelling of nonwords and in the English vocabulary itself. Existing models of the spelling process do not include a mechanism by which the letters that are selected for one phoneme can influence the choice of spellings for another phoneme and thus require modification in order to explain the present results.