Young Children Use Letter Names in Learning to Read Words

Most theories of reading development claim that young children are logographic, or prealphabetic, readers, unable to take advantage of the systematic links between spellings and sounds that exist in an alphabetic writing system. To test this view, we taught preschool and kindergarten children to pronounce three types of made-up spellings. In the name condition, the name of the word's first letter was heard in the spoken word (e.g., BT for “beet”). In the sound condition, letter-sound cues were present but letter-name cues were not (e.g., BT for “bait”). Neither type of cue was available in the visual condition (e.g., bT for “ham”). Even children who were unable to read any simple words performed better in the name condition than the other two conditions. Thus, children are able to benefit from links between spellings and sounds when these links involve the names of letters.