Preschoolers' Conjectures about Segments of a Written Sentence

This study, inspired by Ferreiro's (1978; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979/1982) research, examined English-speaking children's notions about segments of written sentences. In individual interviews, 38 three-, four-, and five-year-olds watched a sentence being written and listened to it being read. After writing the sentence, the interviewer asked questions about each word—whether or not it was written and, if it was, where it was written. Four distinct levels were found by analyzing the children's responses. At level 1 the child thinks that only nouns are written. At level 2 the child thinks that every spoken word is written, but does not make correspondences between spoken words and written segments. The child at level 3 makes correspondences between spoken words and written segments by focusing on the order in which the words are spoken. At the fourth level the child does everything the level 3 child does but, in addition, uses some knowledge of letter-sound correspondences to identify written segments.