How Do Preschoolers Use Letter Names to Select Spellings?

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How Do Preschoolers Use Letter Names to Select
Spellings? Tatiana Cury Pollo, Rebecca Treiman,
Brett Kessler
tpollo_at_wustl.edu

• Research Questions

• Introduction

• Results

Children learn the names of letters at an early
age. Knowledge of letter names plays an
important role in childrens explorations of the
nature of print across languages. Early spellers
often use a letter to spell the full sequence of
sounds in the letter's name (e.g., Treiman,
1993). English kr for car, where r spells
/?r/ Portuguese zbra for zebra /'zebra/ zebra,
where z spells /ze/ But only 1 in 7 words in
English and Portuguese have a full consonant
letter name in them (Pollo, Kessler, Treiman,
2005), leaving little opportunity for children to
use exact letter name spellings. Do children
use partial and imperfect letter name
matches? Hebrew (Levin, Patel, Margalit,
Barad, 2002) ? YES Children spell the initial
consonant of words better when the word matches
the correct letter name in more than one sound
/gamal/ 'camel' beginning with ? /gimel/
/talmid/ 'student' beginning with ?
/taf/ Portuguese mixed evidence Cardoso-Martins
Batista (in press) ? NO L is named /'?li/ ? No
difference between limão /li'mãw/ lime
laranja /la'rã?a/ orange Pollo, Treiman,
Kessler (SSSR, 2005) ? YES Preschoolers used h,
a silent letter named /a'ga/, to spell words
like /'gadu/ 'cattle' (partial match with
/a'ga/) /'kabu/ 'cable' (partial and imperfect
match voicing contrast /g/-/k/ ignored)

• Proportions of Hs and Qs in the Initial Position
  in Spellings of Various Types of Items (Standard
  Deviations in Parentheses)
•  
• Preschoolers used h /a'ga/ to spell words with
  /ga/ (partial letter-name match) and /ka/
  (mismatched voicing).
• They used h for /ga/ twice as often as for /ka/.

1) Is h /a'ga/ used more often for /ga/ (partial
match of name) than for /ka/ (imperfect
match)? 2) Is h used for imperfect matches /ba/
and /da/ (same voicing, different place of
articulation)? 3) Is q /ke/ used to spell /ge/
(imperfect match)? 4) If (3), is q used for
/ge/ less often than for /ke/?
Item Type h q
/ga/ .20 (.31) .04 (.15)
/ka/ .09 (.19) .05 (.15)
/ba/ and /da/ .01 (.04) .01 (.03)
/ke/ .02 (.08) .35 (.36)
/ge/ .05 (.11) .22 (.31)
others /e/ .03 (.09) .03 (.34)
/g/ others .01 (.04) .04 (.11)
/k/ others .02 (.10) .05 (.18)
Fillers .01 (.02) .01 (.02)

• Methods

• Participants
• 46 upper middle-class Portuguese speaking
  children from Brazil
• Average age 5 years, 5 months (4,6 to 5,11)
• Stimuli
• 48 two-syllable pseudowords stressed on the first
  syllable, each syllable being consonant plus
  vowel. Stimuli are paired to match on all sounds
  except for the critical sound in the first
  syllable.
• 12 filler pseudowords

• Conclusions

• Children do use partial and imperfect consonant
  letter-name matches when spelling Portuguese.
• Our preschoolers use consonants only when the
  consonant plus following vowel of the letter name
  match those of the word they are spelling.
• They prefer that the consonants match exactly
  tend to allow consonants with mismatched voicing
  but allow mismatches in no other phonetic
  feature.
• Our results also agree with those of Levin et al.
  (2002) in showing that partial but exact
  consonantvowel (CV) sequences can lead to
  letter-name matching. We extend those findings by
  showing that preschoolers match entire CV
  sequences to select consonants, even though
  Portuguese orthography always writes vowels
  separately, unlike Hebrew.
• Apparent conflict with Cardoso-Martins Batista
  (in press) may be due to the salience of stress.
  They found no influence from the unstressed
  syllable of consonant names, while we found an
  influence from the stressed syllable.
• This study uncovered possible reasoning behind
  certain apparently random spellings. It is
  important for parents and educators to be aware
  of principles behind childrens spelling so they
  can better understand the processes that children
  use when spelling words and respond appropriately
  to help children move to more advanced spellings.

Item Type Example
/ga/ stressed syllable of h /a'ga/ /'gafa/
/ka/ differs from /ga/ in voicing /'kafa/
/ba/ and /da/ differs from /ga/ in place of articulation /'bafa/
/ke/ name of q / ke/ /'keba/
/ge/ differs from /ke/ in voicing /'geba/
others /e/ differs from /ke/ in initial consonant /'meba/
/g/ others /'gofa/
/k/ others /'kofa/
Fillers /tu'riba/

• Goals of the Present Study

• What properties of sounds facilitate inexact
  letter-name matching?
• Can we replicate the results of Pollo et al.
  (SSSR, 2005)?
• Are other letters besides h used in imperfect
  matches?
• Are other phonetic features besides voicing
  ignored?
• How consistently is voicing ignored?

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