Conclusions and Implications

Traditionally, spelling errors have been classified orthographically, by reference to the correct spelling of the word (see Spache, 1940). For example, the child who spells read as RED is said to have omitted the letter a. Orthographic classification schemes are based on the idea that children spell by recalling the letters in printed words that they have seen and memorized. Children may err by omitting a letter, reproducing the letters in the wrong order, substituting one letter for another, and so on. Orthographic classification schemes contrast with phonological classification schemes, in which errors are viewed by reference to the word’s sound. My results show that orthographic classification schemes are not sufficient to explain first graders’ spellings. Consider BAD for bed and SHA for she. From an orthographic viewpoint, the two errors should be about equally common. Both involve the substitution of a for e. However, the first graders were more likely to substitute a for e when e represented /ε/, as in bed, than when e represented /i/, as in she. This difference cannot be understood if one considers only the letters in the printed words. One must also consider the phonemes that the letters represent. The phoneme /æ/ is more similar to /ε/ than it is to /i/. This is one reason why children more often use a to spell /ε/ than to spell /i/. To make the same point in another way, consider the errors HR for her and HN for hen. From an orthographic perspective, both errors involve the omission of an e in the middle of a three-letter word. The two errors should be about equally common. In fact, the first graders were much more likely to omit the e of her than the e of hen. This difference does not make sense on purely orthographic grounds. It can be understood only if one considers the phonological forms of the two words. From the child’s point of view, the spoken form of her contains /h/ followed by a syllabic liquid. The spoken form of hen contains /h/ plus /ε/ plus /n/.

Inflected and Derived Words

In this chapter, I discuss the first graders’ spellings of inflected and derived words. The children in this study often misspelled inflected words (Chapter 2). One type of error that has already been documented is the omission of inflectional endings like the /s/ of books (Chapter 8). This chapter considers the children’s spellings of inflected and derived words in more detail. Before beginning the discussion, some definitions and examples are in order. In English, inflections are added to the ends of words to mark such things as tense and number. For example, helped contains the verb stem help plus the past tense inflectional suffix. I refer to the past tense suffix as -D. Helped contains two morphemes or units of meaning, help and -D. The inflected word books also contains two morphemes, the stem book and the plural suffix -Z. As these examples show, the addition of an inflectional suffix does not change a word’s part of speech. Derivations differ in several ways from inflections. For one thing, English derivational morphemes may be either prefixes or suffixes. One derivational prefix is re-, which may be added to the verb read to form reread. Derivational suffixes include -ion and -ly. Unlike inflections, derivations may change a word’s part of speech. For example, the noun vacation is derived from the verb vacate by the addition of-ion; the adjective facial is derived from the noun face by the addition of -ial. The relation in meaning between a stem and a derived form is often less transparent than the relation in meaning between a stem and an inflected form. For instance, one cannot predict the full meaning of vacation from the meaning of its parts. As discussed in Chapter 1, the spellings of inflected and derived words in English often represent the words’ morphemic forms rather than their phonemic forms. For example, the past tense suffix is /t/ in words like helped, whose stem ends with a voiceless consonant, but /d/ in words like cleaned, whose stem ends with a voiced consonant. The phonemic forms of stems, too, sometimes change when inflectional or derivational morphemes are added.

Consonant Omissions

In this chapter, I turn from vowel omission errors to consonant omission errors. Consider the child who spelled blow as BOW. This child did not include any letter for /l/. Similarly, the child who spelled tumble as TUBOL failed to represent /m/. In this chapter, I ask when children omit consonant phonemes from their spelling and why they do so. As in Chapter 7, omission errors are defined phonologically rather than orthographically. Thus, the child who spelled thin as TIN symbolized each phoneme in the word’s spoken form, although he did not spell /θ/ in the conventional manner. From a phonological point of view, this child did not make an omission error. The study of consonant omissions is particularly important in light of the claim that beginning spellers often omit the final consonants of monosyllabic words (Morris & Perney, 1984). For example, children may misspell back as B or BA. Why do they do this? Is it because /k/ is the last consonant in the word, because /k/ is the last consonant in the syllable, or for both reasons? To address these questions, it is necessary to look beyond the simple consonant-vowel-consonant monosyllables that have been analyzed in much of the previous research. An examination of more complex words can also shed light on children’s omissions of consonants in clusters, as in BOW for blow. In the present study, consonant omission errors were not as common as consonant substitution errors. Of the children’s spellings of consonants, 7.4% or 800 out of 10,831 were omission errors. In contrast, 13.3% of all consonant spellings were substitution errors. Although the percentage of consonant omission errors was relatively low overall, omissions were quite common for certain consonants. For example, omissions were relatively common for the /l/ of blow and the /m/ of tumble; they were rare for the /l/ of love and the /m/ of milk. When interpreting the omission rates reported in this chapter, remember that the percentages are out of all the children’s spellings—correctly spelled words as well as incorrectly spelled words.

Introduction

To be literate, people must be able to read and to write. There has been a large amount of research on the first aspect of literacy, reading. We now know a good deal about how adults read and about how children learn to read. We know much less about the second aspect of literacy, writing. One aspect of learning how to write is learning how to spell. How do children manage this, especially in a language like English that has so many irregular spellings? That is the topic of this book. In this book, I present a detailed study of the spellings produced by a group of American first-grade children. I ask what the children’s spellings reveal about their knowledge of language and about the development of spelling ability. In these days of computerized spelling checkers, is learning to spell correctly still necessary for being a good writer? I believe that it is. In her review of research on beginning reading, Marilyn Adams (1990, p. 3) states that “the ability to read words, quickly, accurately, and effortlessly, is critical to skillful reading comprehension— in the obvious ways and in a number of more subtle ones.” Similarly, the ability to spell words easily and accurately is an important pan of being a good writer. A person who must stop and puzzle over the spelling of each word, even if that person is aided by a computerized spelling checker, has little attention left to devote to other aspects of writing. Just as learning to read words is an important part of reading comprehension, so learning to spell words is an important part of writing. In the study reported in this book, I focus on a group of American first-grade children who were learning to read and write in English. These children, like an increasing number of children in America today, were encouraged to write on their own from the very beginning of the first-grade year. Their teacher did not stress correct spelling. Indeed, she did not tell the children how to spell a word even if they asked.

Reversals

So far, in studying how children spell phonemes, I have discussed three kinds of spellings that children may produce. First, children may spell the phoneme correctly. Second, children may use an incorrect spelling in place of the correct spelling. Third, children may fail to spell the phoneme altogether. In this chapter, I consider yet another type of error. This error, a reversal error, involves a pair of phonemes. In a reversal error, a child symbolizes both phonemes in a pair, either correctly or incorrectly. The error arises because the child transcribes the phonemes in the wrong order. For example, the child who spelled and as NAD presumably intended n to symbolize /n/ (a correct spelling), a to symbolize /æ/ (a correct spelling), and d to symbolize /d/ (also a correct spelling). Although the child represented each phoneme in the word, she placed the letter for /n/ before the letter for /æ/. That is, she reversed /æ/ and /n/. In this chapter, I ask when and why such errors occur. The study of reversals takes on particular significance given the importance that has sometimes been attached to such errors. Reversals of letter sequence as in NAD for and, like reversals of individual letters as in DAT for bat, have often been seen as symptoms of spelling and reading disability. For example, Orton (1937) viewed these errors as signs of brain dysfunction. He claimed that the errors reflect a failure to establish normal hemispheric dominance for language. Contrary to Orton’s claims, it appears that reversals in reading are better explained in terms of orthographic knowledge than in terms of minimal brain dysfunction (I.Y. Liberman, Shankweiler, Orlando, Harris, & Berti, 1971). Misreadings like was for saw are not limited to disabled readers. They also occur among normal beginners. In this chapter, I ask whether the same holds true for spelling. Do normal beginning spellers sometimes make reversal errors? If so, when do these errors occur? Traditionally, reversal errors have been defined orthographically, with regard to the letters in the word’s conventional printed form.

Vowel Omissions

In this chapter and the following one, I turn to omission errors. These are errors in which children fail to represent a phoneme in their spelling. I ask which phonemes children tend to omit and why. This chapter focuses on omissions of vowels, while Chapter 8 considers omission errors on consonants. Also included in Chapter 8 is a comparison of vowel omission errors and consonant omission errors. The study of vowel omissions takes on particular importance in light of the claim that beginning spellers are particularly likely to omit vowels (Ehri, 1986; Morris & Perney, 1984). For example, Morris and Perney (1984) state that semiphonetic spellers often produce spellings like M or ML for mail, omitting the middle vowels of one-syllable words. Not until the phonetic stage, they say, do vowels begin to appear in children’s spellings of such words. Do children omit the vowel of mail because the phoneme is in the middle of the word or do they omit it specifically because it is a vowel? To find out, it is necessary to examine words whose phonemic structure is more complex than consonant-vowel-consonant. Only then will we be able to determine whether all phonemes in the middles of words are susceptible to omission, or just vowels. Consider the child who spelled rainy as RNIE. The spoken form of this word contains four phonemes—/r/, /e/, /n/, and /i/. The child who produced RNIE symbolized /r/ with r, /n/ with n, and /i/ with ie. The child failed to represent /e/ altogether, a vowel omission error. Other spellings that contain vowel omissions are HLP for help, in which /ɛ/ is deleted, and BLUN for balloon, in which the unstressed /ə/ of the first syllable is deleted. In this study, omission errors are defined by reference to the spoken form of the word, not by reference to its conventional spelling. Thus, the child who spelled said as SID is not considered to have made an omission error. This child did symbolize the vowel, albeit with i instead of with the correct ai.

The Influence of Orthography on Children’s Spelling of Vowels and Consonants

So far, the first graders’ spellings have been studied from a phonological perspective. Spellings have been classified according to the phonemes they symbolize in order to examine children’s knowledge of the various phoneme-grapheme correspondences of English. The results of these analyses have shown that children’s spellings are built on their conceptions of phonemic structure. But orthographic influences have been visible too. As we have seen, the words that children see and read affect their own attempts to spell. In this chapter, these orthographic influences take center stage. The children’s spellings are classified according to the conventional spellings of the words that they represent in order to examine children’s knowledge of such orthographic features as digraphs and final is. The question is whether and how the conventional spelling of a word affects children’s attempts to spell the word. The special characteristics of these children’s first-grade experience make it particularly interesting to examine their learning of orthographic conventions. These children received little direct instruction in spelling. Even if they asked how to spell a word, their teacher did not tell them. The children were not explicitly taught about such orthographic conventions as the fact that ck occurs in the middles and at the ends of words but not at the beginnings of words. Did the children nevertheless pick up such conventions from the words they saw and read? For example, did they induce that ck occurs only in the middles and at the ends of words from seeing words like package and sick but not words like ckatl To anticipate the results presented in this chapter, the children did pick up this and other orthographic patterns on their own. Thus, the findings suggest that children can learn about certain orthographic conventions from their experiences with printed words, in the absence of direct instruction. The results presented in this book show that children often misspell graphemes such as ai and sh. Clearly, children have difficulty with graphemes in which two or more letters symbolize a single phoneme. Less clear, at this point, are the sources of this difficulty and the conditions under which it occurs.

Spelling of Phonemes: Correct Spellings, Legal Substitutions, and Illegal Substitutions

So far, I have examined children’s spellings at the level of whole words. The results show that children have more difficulty with some kinds of words than others. For example, children often misspell words that contain multiple-letter graphemes, words such as that and sang. Children often misspell irregular words, words such as said and come. One would guess that th is the trouble spot in that and ai is the trouble spot in said. However, because the analyses presented so far are confined to whole words, I cannot say for sure. To determine which parts of words are difficult to spell, I must move from the level of whole words to the level of individual phonemes and individual graphemes. The need to examine children’s spellings at the level of phonemes and graphemes stems from the nature of the English writing system itself. As discussed in Chapter 1, the English writing system is basically alphabetic. Although most phonemes may be spelled in more than one way, there are relations between phonemes and graphemes. For instance, /k/ may be spelled with k, as in key, c, as in care, or ck, as in back, among other possibilities. Adults cannot always choose the correct spelling from among these possibilities, but we know that /k/ could never be written with m or b. Our knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences tells us that Carl or Karl are reasonable renditions of the spoken form /k’arl/ but that Marl is not. Traditionally, it was thought that children learn to spell on a visual basis, by memorizing the sequence of letters in each word. In this view, children treat printed words as wholes. They do not learn relations between the parts of printed words (graphemes) and the parts of spoken words (phonemes). The traditional view further implies that children memorize one word at a time. They do not learn relations between sounds and spellings that apply to many different words. Findings reported in Chapter 2 suggest that this traditional view of learning to spell is incorrect For example, children's difficulty on irregular words like said and come suggests that children learn about the correspondences between phonemes and graphemes.

Spelling of Words

In studying the first graders’ spellings, it is reasonable to begin at the simplest possible level of analysis. The most basic way to look at the children's spellings is at the level of whole words. At this level, the simplest possible question is whether a word is spelled correctly or incorrectly. Once children’s spellings are classified as correct or incorrect, a number of questions arise. Are some words easier for children to spell correctly than others? If so, what kinds of words are easy to spell and what kinds of words are hard to spell? The answers to these questions should shed light on the difficulties that children face in learning the English writing system. For example, if children have more trouble on irregular words than on regular words, one could suggest that the irregularity of the English system is one source of difficulty in learning to spell. If children often misspell inflected and derived words, one could suggest that the morphological basis of the English writing system is a problem for first graders. Such issues are addressed in the first section of this chapter. Although it is easy to classify children’s spellings of whole words as correct or incorrect, this simple classification may obscure potentially important information. For example, although KARE is the wrong spelling of care, this error is a plausible rendition of the word's spoken form. The letter k is a reasonable rendering of the phoneme /k/; /k/ is spelled as k in words like kite and king. In the terms introduced in Chapter 1, KARE is a legal misspelling of care. On the other hand, CA is an illegal spelling of care. It contains no representation of the /r/. In this chapter, I take a first step beyond the correct/incorrect distinction by classifying errors on whole words as legal or illegal. I ask whether some kinds of words give rise to more legal errors than other words and why. Legal errors are not all alike. They differ from one another in a number of ways, one of which is how easy they are to decipher.

Consonants

Learning to spell involves learning about the relations between the phonemes of the spoken language and the graphemes of the printed language. In Chapter 4, I asked how children learn these relations for vowels. The results showed that a number of factors affect children’s learning, including their exposure to printed words, their knowledge of letter names, and their phonological systems. In this chapter, I turn to consonants. I ask whether these same factors affect children’s spelling of consonants. This chapter focuses on substitution errors and, to a lesser extent, correct spellings. Consonant omission errors will be considered in detail in Chapter 8. Sometimes, the first graders’ most common spellings of consonant phonemes were those spellings that are most frequent in the conventional English system. However, the children’s spellings did not always mirror those of conventional English. The children sometimes used a grapheme that never represents the phoneme in the standard system; that is, an illegal spelling. As in Chapter 4, I focus on illegal spellings that occurred at rates of 2.5% or more. I ask why the children selected that particular grapheme to represent the phoneme. In other cases, the students used a legal spelling significantly more often than expected given its frequency in the conventional system. Again, factors other than exposure to the relations between phonemes and graphemes in English words must be responsible for the error. I ask what these factors are. As in Chapter 4, I use binomial tests to compare the frequencies of correspondences in children’s spelling to the frequencies of the correspondences in the conventional spellings of the same words. In this section, the children’s spellings of various consonant phonemes are discussed. The reader may find it helpful to refer to the consonant chart of Figure 1.5 when reading this section. The stop consonants of English are /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, and /g/. In discussing how the children spelled these consonants, I will first consider the children’s spellings without regard to the contexts in which the consonants occurred. Next, I will discuss some errors that occurred for stop consonants in particular contexts.