Children's use of phoneme-grapheme correspondences in spelling: Roles of position and stress.

Whether children's ability to use phoneme-grapheme correspondences in spelling is affected by the position of the phoneme in the word or syllable and by the stress of the syllable was examined. Experiment 1, conducted with monosyllabic nonwords, was performed with kindergartners and 1st graders. Experiments 2 and 3, conducted with bisyllabic nonwords, were carried out with 1st graders. Children spelled the first and last phonemes of nonwords more accurately than the middle phonemes. Also, children performed better on syllable-initial single consonants than on syllablefinal single consonants. Errors tended to be more common for phonemes in unstressed syllables than for phonemes in stressed syllables. Together, the results suggest that the context in which a phoneme occurs influences children's ability to spell it. Learning to read and write involves learning the mappings between units in spoken words and units in printed words. For alphabetic writing systems, these units include phonemes and graphemes. Children must learn and use the link between the phoneme /m/ and the grapheme m and the link between /as/ and a. (For a key to the notation, see the Appendix.) In many homes and kindergarten and first-grade classes, children are taught links between individual letters and individual sounds. Children learn that m makes the sound /m/, that a makes the sound /ae/, and so forth. It is often assumed that once children have mastered isolated correspondences such as these, they can use the correspondences to spell and read words. For example, a child who knows that An/ corresponds to m can use this knowledge to spell words that contain Iml. The goal of the present research is to test this assumption. Is children's ability to use phoneme-grapheme correspondences indeed governed only by the intrinsic difficulty of the correspondences? Alternatively, does the context in which a correspondence occurs within a word affect children's ability to use it?