A developmental study of children's ability to acquire knowledge of spelling patterns.

The ability to abstraet two types of" spelling patterns, , -., morphologieal and orthographic, ~as studie&by mean;; of a multipleehoiee test of nonsense words, a multiple-ch~ee test of real words ~nd a dietation test of nonsense words.~ These tests were'administered to 160 ehildren, 20 good and 20 poor spellers at eaeh grade level from , two to five.Botq _groups of spellers showed clear developmental ' ) trènds in their -abili ty to abstract morphological and orthographie, ' .A' patterns on al; three tests\ The ~od spellers we~: __ consHtentlY better than the poor spellers, ~ho l~ged behind t~~ good spel1er~ in the acquisition of spelling patter~s bY'about two years.Good spell~rs performed better on orthographie patterns than on morpholog~ca~ patterns; 'while the reverse was true for the poor spellers on the two tests using nonsense words.The'findings demonstrate that pattern .'-"