Statistical Learning and Spelling: Older Prephonological Spellers Produce More Wordlike Spellings Than Younger Prephonological Spellers

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 le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2018-07, Vol.89 (4), p.e431-e443
Main Authors: Treiman, Rebecca, Kessler, Brett, Boland, Kelly, Clocksin, Hayley, Chen, Zhengdao
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Children
Learning
Older children
Phonemes
Spelling
Statistics
Variability
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/cdev.12893