of the research, Margaret Powers for sharing her first graders' com- positions, and .... Children's Spellings of Word-Initial Consonant-Consonant. (CC) Clusters in ...
Journal of Educational Psychology 1991, Vol. 83, No. 3, 346-360
Copyright 1991 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-0663/91/$3.00
Children's Spelling Errors on Syllable-Initial Consonant Clusters Rebecca Treiman Wayne State University Read (1975) discovered that children sometimes fail to spell consonants when the consonants occur in clusters at the ends of words. For example, children may spell sink as "sek," leaving out the /n/. The present research shows that children also omit consonants in clusters at the beginnings of words. For example, children may spell play as "pay." Some 1st graders make these errors in their classroom writings; some kindergarteners and 1st graders make them in experimental tasks. Second-consonant omissions occur whether the cluster is at the beginning of a word, as in play, or at the beginning of a syllable within a word, as in diploma. Although children sometimes add an / to their spelling of play when shown that they have written play and pay alike, they do not always do so. The linguistic basis of the omission errors and their educational implications are discussed.
Read (1975) discovered an interesting phenomenon among preschool children who began to spell on their own. Specifically, these children sometimes failed to spell the nasals /m/, /n/, and /n/ when the nasals occurred before another consonant.1 For example, the children misspelled sink as "sek," and as "ad," and went as "wet." The children rarely omitted nasals in other contexts, such as at the beginnings of words. Why do beginning spellers make errors such as "wet" for wentl One hypothesis, the one favored by Read (1975), is that these errors reflect the specific properties of nasals in final clusters. In final clusters, the nasal segment is very short. Moreover, the vowel itself is nasalized. The phonetic characteristics of a word such as went may cause some children to spell it as "wet." An alternative hypothesis, first advanced by Marcel (1980), is that errors such as "wet" for went and "ad" for and are one sign of a general problem in analyzing spoken syllables into phonemes. Phonemic awareness is known to play an important role in the acquisition of alphabetic writing systems (see Stanovich, in press). Children who lack awareness of the separate phonemes in spoken words have difficulty learning and using relations between phonemes and letters. With final clusters such as /nd/, even children who pronounce the clusters correctly, as most kindergarteners and first graders do, may be unable to apprehend the internal structure of the cluster. Children who cannot analyze the spoken syllable /send/ (and) into the three separate phonemes /ae/, /n/, and /d/ may fail to spell the word with three appropriate letters. If children sometimes misspell words that end with consonant clusters because of a difficulty in analyzing these words into phonemes, similar difficulties may occur for words that
have consonant clusters in other positions. In particular, children may have trouble analyzing and spelling words that begin with consonant clusters. Indeed, there is evidence that initial consonant clusters are difficult for children to divide into phonemes (Bruck & Treiman, 1990; Treiman, 1985a; Treiman, in press). Initial clusters are also difficult for children to spell. For example, Marcel (1980) found that some 8- and 9-year-old children who were one or more years below the level expected for their age in spelling and in reading made errors such as "tay" for tray. That is, they sometimes omitted the liquids of initial stop + liquid clusters. Bruck and Treiman (1990) discovered similar errors among dyslexic children ages 7 to 13 years and, to a lesser extent, among normal first and second graders. In addition, Miller and Limber (1985) reported that kindergarteners sometimes failed to symbolize the second consonants of consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant (CCVC) nonwords when they were asked to spell them. Preliminary evidence points to a connection between children's difficulty in analyzing initial clusters into phonemes and their spelling of these clusters (Bruck & Treiman, 1990). Children's problems in analyzing and spelling initial clusters may reflect the linguistic structure of these clusters. A spoken word such as /pie/ contains two linguistic units: the onset /pi/ and the rime /e/ (see Treiman, 1988, and Treiman, in press, for discussion of onset and rime units). Young children tend to treat the onsets of spoken words as units. Some children may not be aware that the onset /pi/ contains the phoneme /p/ followed by the phoneme /I/. The second phoneme of the onset, /I/, is particularly difficult to access. Thus, when trying to spell a syllable such as /pie/, children may symbolize the onset with p only rather than with p plus /. The research reviewed above supports the idea that misspellings such as "ad" for and and "wet" for went are one manifestation of a larger phenomenon. Another sign of this phenomenon is errors such as "tay" for tray. All of these
This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants HD20276 and HD00769. I thank Catalina Danis, Peggy Ericson, Jennifer Gross, Patrick Lavery, and Andrea Zukowski for their contributions in various stages of the research, Margaret Powers for sharing her first graders' compositions, and Maggie Brack for a careful reading of the manuscript. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rebecca Treiman, Psychology Department, Wayne State University, 71 West Warren Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48202.
1 Key to notation: /i/ as in beet, /u/ as in boot, /a/ as in hot, /e/ as in bed, /ae/ as in bad, /i/ as in bit, /e/ as in bay, /oi/ as in boy, /o/ as in hoe, /au/ as in plow, /ai/ as in buy, /s/ as in sofa, / e / as in th'm, /s/ as in shin, and /n/ as in thing
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SPELLING ERRORS errors reflect a lack of phonemic awareness, specifically, a difficulty in analyzing syllables containing consonant clusters into their component phonemes. Although misspellings such as "tay" for tray have been documented in previous work, they have not been studied in much detail. Such an investigation is important for testing the claim that these errors reflect a difficulty in analyzing the onsets of spoken syllables into phonemes. One question is whether errors such as "tay" for tray occur in children's spontaneous writings. The studies by Bruck and Treiman (1990), Marcel (1980), and Miller and Limber (1985) found the errors in spelling dictation tests, certain characteristics of which could have caused increased difficulty on clusters. For example, many of the tests involved nonwords. Items with initial clusters such as /bli/ sometimes occurred in the same lists as similar items without initial clusters such as /bil/. In Study 1, I examined whether errors on initial consonant clusters occur in the natural classroom writings offirstgraders.
Study 1 Method In this study, I analyzed the classroom writings of 43 first-grade children. The writings were produced between late August and mid April by first graders from Indianapolis, Indiana. The children were all taught by the same teacher and were members of her class during 2 successive school years. All of the children in this study were White, middle-class, native speakers of English. None was considered to have an articulation problem. The exact ages of the children were not available. The teacher favored a language-experience approach to the teaching of reading and writing. Each morning, the children spent about half an hour writing. They wrote on large sheets of unlined paper, accompanying their stories with pictures. When the children finished a story, they read it to the teacher or teacher's aide. The teacher or teacher's aide wrote the children's stories on the paper using the correct spellings of the words but did not specifically mention the misspelled words. The children were exposed to standard spelling in this way and through their other classroom activities. However, the teacher did not stress spelling during the free writing period. Indeed, she told the children that she would not give them the spellings of words if they asked, so the children rarely asked. Also, the teacher told the children that she wanted their own writings, so the children did not typically copy from one another.
Results and Discussion The collection of 5,617 spellings included 390 attempts to spell words with initial consonant-consonant (CC) clusters. I scored each spelling according to which consonants of the cluster were represented. For each spelling, I also noted whether the consonants were spelled in a legal manner; that is, with letters that are used to symbolize the consonants in the conventional English system. Appendix A lists the criteria for legal spellings that were used in this and the following studies. For example, the child who spelled clean as "klen" symbolized both /k/ and /I/ with letters that can be used for
these consonants in English; Id, although wrong, is legal or phonetically plausible. In "plo" for blow, p appears to be an attempt to symbolize /b/. However, this spelling is illegal because p is never used for / b / in English. "Sid" for slide contains a legal spelling of/s/ but does not include any letter for /I/. Other errors in which the second consonants of wordinitial clusters are omitted are "pay" for play, "sube" for stubby, "pinsos" for princess, and "cistmis" for Christmas. As Table 1 shows, a common error on words with initial clusters was to represent the first phoneme of the cluster and omit the second. These errors occurred on almost one quarter of the children's attempts to spell initial CC clusters. The proportion of second-consonant omissions did decrease from the first semester of the school year (through the end of December) to the second semester, .32 to .21, ;(21) = 2.97, p < .005, one-tailed (this test is based on the data for those 22 children who attempted words with initial clusters during both semesters). Nevertheless, the errors continued to occur during the second semester of the school year. Thus, omissions of consonants in initial clusters are not restricted to dictation tasks. They are also found in first graders' classroom writings. I have proposed that misspellings such as "pay" for play reflect children's difficulty in analyzing cluster onsets into phonemes. If this hypothesis is correct, omissions should be more common for consonants in cluster onsets than for single consonants. Children should more often omit the /I/ of/pie/ {play), which is part of an onset cluster, than the /I/ of/alon/ (alone), which is not part of an onset cluster. In confirmation of this prediction, the children deleted the consonant only twice in 105 attempts to spell initial vowel-consonant-vowel sequences. This low percentage of omissions supports the idea that errors such as "pay" for play reflect the position of the /I/ in the syllable onset. To further test the onset hypothesis, it is desirable to examine children's spellings of cluster onsets in the middles of words as well as their spellings of onsets at the beginnings of words. For example, the /t/ and /r/ of patrol/ (patrol) form the onset of the word's second syllable. If syllabic structure is critical, errors such as "patol" for patrol (omission of the second consonant of an onset) should outnumber errors such as "parol" (omission of the first consonant of an onset).
Table 1 Children's Spellings of Word-Initial Consonant-Consonant (CC) Clusters in Study 1 Type of spelling
Example
C11.C21.
"klen" for clean "plo" for blow "fmust" tor fruit "sid" for slide "tree" for three "wrwf' for dwarf "rd" for scared
C IL C 2I
c1L c,, cOther 2L
No. of occurrences
277
10 3 88 3
1 8
Proportion
.71 .03 .01 .23 .01 .00 .02
Note. Subscript L indicates a legal spelling of the phoneme; Subscript I indicates an illegal spelling. Subscript numerals indicate the order of the consonants. Proportions do not total 1.00 precisely because of rounding.
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REBECCA TREIMAN Table 2
Numbers of Children With Omission Rates for Second Consonants of Consonant-Consonant (CC) Onsets in Various Ranges Study Proportion Study 2, Study 2, of omissions Study l a kindergarten15 1st grade" Study 4C Study 5d .00 t o . 10 10 12 21 10 10 .11 to .20 7 3 4 1 4 .21 to .30 6 2 4 3 4 .31 to .40 10 0 1 1 1 .41 to .50 2 1 0 2 0 .51 to .60 1 0 0 0 0 .61 to .70 2 0 0 1 0 .71 to .80 0 1 2 0 0 .81 to .90 0 1 0 0 0 'Proportion of spellings of word-initial CC clusters in which the second consonant (C2) was omitted in first graders; 5 children did not attempt any words with CC initial clusters. b Proportion of spellings of word-initial CC clusters in which the first consonant ( d ) was legally represented and C2 was omitted. c Proportion of spellings of consonant-consonant-vowel syllables in word and nonword spelling tasks and of consonant-consonant-vowel-(consonant) syllables in the first phase of comparison task in which C2 was omitted and other phonemes were legally spelled infirstgraders. d Proportion of spellings of word-medial CC onsets in which Ci was legally represented and C2 was omitted in first graders.
Unfortunately, the children in Study 1 included few singlemorpheme words such as patrol in their writing.2 Another way to test the onset hypothesis is to examine the results for different types of clusters. If errors such as "pay" for play reflect the unitary nature of the syllable onset, then second-consonant omission errors should occur for all initial clusters, regardless of the phonemes they contain. This is because, according to most linguists, all initial clusters form onsets. Unfortunately, the data of Study 1 are not well suited for examining possible differences among clusters. The children attempted certain clusters infrequently or not at all. The data presented up to this point represent the performance of all of the children as a group. To determine whether some children were more likely to omit the second consonants of initial clusters than other children, I calculated the proportion of second-consonant omissions for each child. The data, shown in Table 2, reveal large individual differences. Some children rarely omitted the second consonants of onset clusters. Other children omitted them more than half of the time. These individual differences will be discussed in more detail below. To conclude, at least some first graders make omission errors on cluster onsets in their own compositions. The errors are not restricted to artificial spelling tests. However, the conclusions that can be drawn from the naturalistic data of Study 1 are limited by the particular words that the children chose to spell. In an attempt to overcome these limitations, I designed four studies to gather additional evidence on children's spellings of onset clusters. In these experiments, I sampled a wide variety of onset clusters. I examined onset clusters in the middles of words as well as onset clusters at the beginnings of words. The children in the following four experiments, like the children in Study 1, were middle-class native speakers of English who were predominantly White and who were not considered to have articulation problems. One difference is that the children in the following four experiments were not
taught with a language-experience approach. Thus, the results of the experiments show whether errors on cluster onsets are restricted to children who are taught by a language-experience approach or whether they occur more generally. Study 2 In this study, children were given a simplified spelling task in which the laborious process of handwriting was avoided. The use of a simplified task allowed me to study kindergarteners as well as first graders. The experimenter pronounced a syllable such as /sloi/, making sure that the child could repeat it correctly. The experimenter then placed the letters o and y on the right side of a magnetic board. He asked the child to complete the spelling by choosing from a relatively small set of consonant letters that included s and /. The question was whether children would pick both s and / or whether they would use ^ only. The stimuli for Study 2 included almost all of the English onsets that are normally spelled with two consonant letters.
Method Subjects Participating in this study were 20 kindergarteners with a mean age of 5 years and 5 months (range = 5 years to 6 years and 1 month) and 21 first graders with a mean age of 6 years and 5 months (range = 5 years and 11 months to 7 years and 5 months). The children attended a parochial school in a Detroit, Michigan, suburb and were
2
Two-morpheme words such as playground, which some children attempted, do not provide a good test of the onset hypothesis. For example, if children consider playground to be two words rather than one, /gr/ is an onset at the beginning of the word rather than an onset in the middle of the word.
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SPELLING ERRORS tested in October and November. At this time, the kindergarteners were learning the letters of the alphabet and their sounds. Testing focused on those kindergarteners whom the teacher judged to be making progress in learning these skills. Scores on the reading subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test-Revised (WRAT-R; Jastak & Wilkinson, 1984) were available for all of the kindergarteners and for 14 of the first graders. The average score for kindergarteners corresponded to a beginningfirst-gradereading level; the average score for the first graders was that of a mid-first-grade reading level. Both groups contained several children who were older than expected for their grade level. However, when these children's data were omitted from the analyses, the results were similar to those reported.
Stimuli and Materials The children were first asked to give the sounds made by the letter group oy and by the 13 consonant letters to be used in the spelling task. Magnetic letters were used; the letters o and y were glued together. Next, the children were asked to spell the onsets of 34 syllables: 21 consonant-consonant-vowel (CCV) syllables and 13 consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. All of the syllables contained the vowel /oi/; most were not real words. The CCV syllables involved most of the English onsets listed by Vergnaud and Halle (1979). The clusters /er/, /sr/, and /ew/ were excluded because they are typically spelled with three letters; /kw/ was omitted because it is normally spelled as qu rather than with two consonant letters; /gw/ was omitted because it is the voiced counterpart of/kw/. The syllables used in the study are presented in Appendix B.
Procedure The children in this experiment and the subsequent experiments were tested individually. In the first part of Study 2, the child was shown the 13 letters and 1 letter group, which were presented in a random order, and was asked to give the sound made by each. Any mistakes were corrected. Next, the CV and CCV syllables were presented in a randomly chosen order for each child. The child repeated each syllable after the experimenter; any repetition errors were corrected. The experimenter then placed the letter group oy on the right side of a magnetic board. The 13 consonant letters were placed beside the board, and the child attempted to complete the spelling. The experimenter did not tell the child whether his or her spellings were correct.
Table 3 Proportions of Spellings of Various Types in Study 2 Type of stimulus
CV
C1L
CCV
c,, C C L 1L
2
C,L
C2L
Other
Proportion of spellings Kindergarteners
1st graders
.89 .11 .70 .17 .01 .12
.99 .01 .74 .19 .00 .06
Note. CV = consonant-vowel; C = consonant; CCV = consonantconsonant-vowel; CC = consonant-consonant. Subscript L indicates a legal spelling of the phoneme; Subscript I indicates an illegal spelling. Subscript numerals indicate the order of the consonants. Proportions do not total 1.00 precisely because of rounding.
grade) confirmed that the children produced fewer legal spellings of cluster onsets than of singleton onsets, F{\, 39) = 35.76, MSe = .027, p < .001. There was no effect of grade, F(l, 39) = 1.54, p = .22, and no interaction between onset type and grade, F(l, 39) < 1, ns. The most common type of error on clusters was to represent the first consonant of the cluster in a legal manner and to omit the second. The proportion of such spellings was .17 for the kindergarteners and .19 for the first graders. As Table 2 shows, there were large individual differences in the tendency to omit the second consonants of word-initial clusters. Some children at each grade level omitted the second consonants over half of the time; other children never made these errors. Although the children sometimes spelled the first consonant of the cluster and dropped the second, they rarely spelled the second consonant and dropped the first. The probability of a child's spelling a cluster in a legal manner, given that the child legally spelled both consonants in the cluster when they occurred singly, ranged from .10 to 1.0 across children. The average value for all kindergarten and first-grade children was .74. Thus, children who know that p represents /p/ and that r represents /r/ cannot always spell initial /pr/ with p followed by r, even though they can pronounce /pr/. The ability to spell /poi/ with p and /roi/ with r does not guarantee the ability to spell /proi/ with pr.
Results and Discussion The children performed well when asked to give the sounds of letters in the first part of the experiment. The proportion of correct responses was .86 for the kindergarteners (.93 when only the 13 consonants were considered) and 1.0 for the first graders. Table 3 shows how the children spelled the onsets of the CV and CCV syllables in the second part of the study. The proportions of legal spellings for the onsets of CV stimuli— .89 for the kindergarteners and .99 for the first graders—were commensurate with the children's levels of letter-sound knowledge. For CCVs the proportion of spellings in which both consonants were represented in a legal manner was .70 for the kindergarteners and .74 for the first graders. A twoway analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the variables of onset type (singleton vs. cluster) and grade (kindergarten vs. first
Type of spellings
Study 3 Children sometimes omit the second consonants of initial clusters when producing their own spellings. These errors occur in children's own compositions and even in the very simple spelling task of Study 2. In Study 3, I examined whether children make the same kinds of errors when, rather than producing their own spellings, they judge whether a letter occurs in the spelling of a word.
Method Subjects There were 18 first graders with an average age of 7 years and 1 month. The large age range (5 years and 8 months to 8 years and 4
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months) reflects the fact that one child was much older than the others. However, this child's data did not appear to be unusual. The children were from Bloomington, Indiana, and were tested in April and May.
Stimuli and Materials There were 80 picturable English words and compound words: 20 for the target /, 20 for r, 12 each for t and c, and 8 each for m and n. A colored drawing was made for each word on a 3 in. x 5 in. card. For each target letter, the spellings of half of the words—the positive items—contained the target. The spellings of the other half of the words—the negative items—did not contain the target. For half of the positive items for each target, the phoneme corresponding to the target letter was the second consonant of a syllable-initial consonant cluster. These stimuli are called C2-target stimuli. An example is sunflower, in which /I/ is the second consonant of the syllable-initial /fl/ cluster. For the other positive items, the phoneme corresponding to the target letter was not the second consonant of a cluster onset. An example of such a control stimulus is baloney. Some assumptions about the syllabification of English words had to be made to design the stimuli. I assumed that syllable boundaries correspond to morphological boundaries. I further assumed that consonants are assigned to syllables in such a way that sequences of consonants that are illegal at the ends of words do not occur at the ends of syllables and sequences of consonants that are illegal at the beginnings of words do not occur at the beginnings of syllables. Vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel sequences in which the CC cluster is a legal English onset and the first vowel is "long" and stressed were assumed to be syllabified after the first vowel. Thus, the /pr/ of apron is a syllable-initial cluster. I also assumed that the onsets of stressed syllables are maximized. These assumptions fit with the tendencies of children and adults in syllabification experiments (Fallows, 1981; Treiman & Danis, 1988; Treiman & Zukowski, 1990), with dictionary syllabifications, and with some (but not all) linguistic theories of syllabification. The C2-target and control stimuli were closely matched for number of syllables, number of phonemes, position of the target phoneme in the word, whether the target phoneme belonged to a stressed or unstressed syllable, and frequency in children's reading materials (Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971). The negative stimuli were similar in number of syllables to the positive stimuli. The stimuli are listed in Appendix B.
Procedure For each target letter, the child wasfirstasked to name the pictures. If the child offered a name different from the one intended, for example "margarine" instead of "butter," the experimenter told the child the intended label. The child was then shown the target letter and asked to name it. All of the children correctly named all of the target letters. The experimenter then asked whether the name of each picture contained the target letter. The order of the pictures for each target was randomized for each child. The experiment was run in two sessions, no more than 1 week apart. The target letters were presented in a pseudorandom order, which was varied across subjects, such that the number of items in each session was about the same.
Results and Discussion The proportion of correct target detections was .80 for the C2-target stimuli as compared with .90 for the control stimuli. Although the children performed well on both types of stim-
uli, they did significantly better on the control stimuli than on the C-2-target stimuli, ?(17) = 3.49, p < .005, one-tailed. Thus, even though the children usually said that sunflower and baloney contain an /, it was easier for them to detect the / in baloney, in which the corresponding sound is the first phoneme of a syllable, than in sunflower, in which the sound is the second phoneme of a syllable-initial consonant cluster. For negative items, the proportion of correct rejections was very high, .97. Thus, children sometimes overlook the second consonants of onset clusters even when they do not have to generate spellings themselves. Just as first graders sometimes misspell butterfly as "budrfi," when asked whether the word contains an /, they sometimes say "No." Study 4 In Study 4 I used somewhat more complex tasks in hopes of learning more about children's omissions of consonants in initial clusters. One question addressed in Study 4 concerns the persistence of spellings such as "say" for stay. When children are shown that they have written stay and say alike, do they realize that they have made a mistake? Or, do the children continue to spell both words as "say?" A second question concerns children's ability to spell words and nonwords in a legal manner. I predicted that children would produce more legal spellings for consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables than for CCV syllables, even when the phonemes in the syllables are the same. That is, the arrangement of the phonemes within a syllable, not just the identity of the phonemes, affects children's ability to represent the syllable in spelling. In addition, in Study 4 I attempted a further test of the hypothesis that children who spell /ste/ as "say" do so because they consider /s/ and /t/ to form a unit. To test this onset hypothesis, I adopted a task developed by Read (1975) for the study of final consonant clusters containing nasals. Read asked children where the difference in sound occurs in a pair of syllables such as /bent/, /bet/. Some first graders, he found, could not make consistent judgments. This result is not surprising given the relatively high level of conscious phonemic awareness that the task demands. Of the children who could perform the task, those who spelled the words alike, as "bet," usually said that the difference in sound fell on the vowel. In contrast, children who spelled /bent/ with an n typically placed the marker by the n. Read interpreted the results to mean that beginning spellers who omit preconsonantal nasals group the nasal with the vowel. In the case of onset clusters, I predicted that children would group the second consonant of the cluster with the first; thus, children would say that the difference between /ste/ and /se/ lies in the /s/. To address the three questions described above,firstgraders were asked to spell words and nonwords with CVC and CCV structures such as feel and flee and /bil/ and /bli/. The children were also asked to compare their spellings of syllables such as /ste/ and /se/, judging where the difference in sound between the two syllables was located.
SPELLING ERRORS
Method Subjects Participating in this study were 18 children attending first grade in Bloomington, Indiana. Their average age was 6 years and 9 months (range = 6 years 3 months to 7 years and 4 months). The children were tested during the second half of the school year, as in the study by Read (1975).
Stimuli Nonword spelling task. There were 10 pairs of nonwords. One syllable in each pair was a CVC; the other was a CCV. In 9 of the pairs, the two syllables contained the same phonemes. They differed only in whether the second consonant preceded or followed the vowel. For example, the CVC nonword /bil/ and the CCV nonword /bli/ are alike except for the position of/I/. In one pair, the nonwords also had different initial consonants. Word spelling task. The stimuli were 10 pairs of words. Within each pair, one word was a CVC and the other was a CCV. Because of the constraints of English, the words in a pair did not always share three phonemes. However, the words always shared at least one phoneme and usually shared more than one. Also, the spellings of the words had at least two letters in common. Sample pairs are (a) the CVC word /moz/ (mows) together with the CCV word /sno/ (snow) and (b) the CVC word /pil/ (peel) with the CCV word /gli/ (glee). The CVC and CCV words had similar frequencies (Carroll et al., 1971). Nonword comparison task. The stimuli included 13 nonwords that began with CC clusters and ended with vowels or vowel-consonant (VC) groups. These stimuli are called consonant-consonantvowel-(consonant), or CCV(C), stimuli. There were also 9 consonant-vowel-(consonant), or CV(C), stimuli, which began with single consonants and ended with vowels or VCs. The stimuli formed pairs such that for each CCV(C) nonword there was a CV(C) nonword that lacked the second consonant but was otherwise alike. For example, the CCV(C) nonword /twe/ was paired with the CV(C) nonword / te/. In four cases, a single CV(C) nonword was matched with 2 different CCV(C) nonwords. For example, /sat/ was paired with both /snar/ and /smar/. In nine cases, a CV(C) nonword formed a pair with a single CCV(C) nonword, as in the pair /te/ and /twe/. The onsets of the stimuli included 11 different consonants. There were 5 different vowels and VC groups. Word comparison task. There were 13 CCV(C) words that began with CC clusters and ended with vowels or VC groups, and there were 9 corresponding CV(C) words. The stimuli formed pairs such as /ste/, /se/ (stay, say) and /spel/, /sel/ (spell, sell). The CCV(C) and CV(C) words were similar in frequency (Carroll et al., 1971). Eleven different consonants appeared in the onsets of the words. There were 5 different vowels and VC groups. Appendix B lists the stimuli for Study 4.
Materials The nonword and the word spelling tasks were paper-and-pencil tasks in which the children wrote spellings on lined paper. For the nonword and word comparison tasks, the children used a magnetic board and magnetic letters. For the nonword comparison task, the 11 consonant letters that were needed to spell the initial consonants and CC groups of the stimuli were put beside the board. The 5 letter
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groups that were needed to spell the final vowels and VC groups of the stimuli were also laid out. The letters in each group were glued together, forming groups such as ay and ar. The word comparison task also involved 11 consonant letters and 5 letter groups (e.g., ay, ell). In addition, the letter x served as a marker during the comparison phase of the nonword and word comparison tasks, as described below.
Procedure Nonword spelling task. The experimenter first explained that the stimuli were not real words. She pronounced each stimulus and asked the child to repeat it. Any errors were corrected. The child was then asked to spell the stimulus. The order of the 20 items was randomly chosen for each child. Word spelling task. The procedure was similar to that described for the nonword spelling task except that the experimenter told the child that the stimuli were real words. She used each word in a phrase or sentence before having the child spell it. Nonword comparison task. This task consisted of two phases. The first phase was a simple spelling task. The experimenter pronounced each stimulus and asked the child to repeat it. Any errors were corrected. The child then attempted to spell the stimulus on the magnetic board using the letters and letter groups provided, which were arranged haphazardly beside the board. The experimenter explained that the stimuli were not real words. The order of the 22 stimuli was randomized for each child. The second phase of the task required the child to compare the spellings and pronunciations of selected CCV(C)-CV(C) pairs. Pairs were chosen for this phase according to how the child had spelled them in the first phase. Two types of pairs were included in the second phase. Identical pairs were those for which the CCV(C) and CV(C) syllables were spelled alike in the first phase of the task. For example, if a child spelled /snar/ as "sar" and /sar/ as "sar," this pair was used in Phase 2 for that child. C2-different pairs were also included in Phase 2. These are pairs in which the child had spelled the CCV(C) with a second consonant that the CV(C) lacked but in which the spellings were otherwise alike. For example, if a child spelled /snar/ as "snr" and /sar/ as "sr," then this pair was used in Phase 2. Pairs that did not have either of these two relationships were not included in Phase 2. For example, if a child spelled /snar/ as "snr" and /sar/ as "soyr," then these items were not presented in Phase 2 for that child. The number of pairs in Phase 2 varied across children, ranging from 0 (for one child) to 13, the maximum possible. The identical pairs and the C2-different pairs were randomly intermixed for presentation in Phase 2. For each pair, the experimenter first formed the child's previous spelling of the CCV(C) on the top of the magnetic board. The experimenter then formed the child's previous spelling of the CV(C) on the bottom of the board. For example, the experimenter formed "sar" on the top of the board, saying "This is how you spelled /snar/." Then the experimenter formed "sar" on the bottom of the board, saying "This is how you spelled /sar/," The experimenter pronounced the two syllables, /snar/ and /sar/ in the example. She said, "They sound different, don't they?" If the child said that the two words sounded alike, which was uncommon, the experimenter stated that the words sounded different to her. After showing the child his or her previous spellings, the experimenter asked the child whether these spellings were right. If the child was dissatisfied with the spellings, he or she was encouraged to change them. For example, a child might say that his or her spellings were correct, for example, that both /snar/ and /sar/ are spelled as "sar." Or a child might say that "sar" is not the correct spelling of /snar/, that this word should contain an n. Finally, the child was asked to use the marker x to indicate the location of the difference in sound between the two words. The child
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was told to put the marker on the CCV(C) spelling to indicate where its pronunciation differed from the pronunciation of the CV(C) spelling. The instructions were the following: "Use this x to show where the difference in sound is between [the CCV(Q] and [the CV(C)]. You can put it anywhere you want— between the letters or over the letters—to show where the difference is. Why don't you show me where the difference is on [the CCV (C)]?" This wording was almost identical to that used by Read (1975). In the example, the child was asked to show where the difference in sound was between /snar/ and /sar/. A child who spelled both syllables as "sar" might put the marker by the s, by the a, or by the r. Word comparison task. The procedure was similar to that described above for the nonword comparison task except that, in the first phase of the task, the experimenter used each word in a phrase or sentence before asking the child to spell it. The number of pairs in the second phase ranged from 0 (for one child) to 13, the maximum possible. The order of the spelling and comparison tasks was balanced across children. Within each task, the order of the word and nonword versions was randomly chosen for each child. The word and nonword versions of a task were administered in the same session if the child was interested and attentive and otherwise in separate sessions.
Results Spelling Tasks The first row of Table 4 shows the mean proportions of legal spellings for CVCs and CCVs in the nonword and word spelling tasks. A legal spelling is one in which all phonemes are symbolized in a legal manner on the basis of the criteria of Appendix A and in which the phonemes are represented in the correct order. For example, "blee" and "ble" are legal spellings of/bli/, whereas "be," "bla," and "beel" are illegal spellings. For words legal spellings include but are not limited to correct spellings. The data on legal spellings were subjected to an ANOVA with the variables of lexicality (word vs. nonword) and structure (CCV vs. CVC). There was a main effect of structure, such that children produced more legal spellings of CVC syllables than of CCV syllables, F(1,17) = 11.48, MSC = 2.91, p < .005. Because the two types of stimuli were of the same length and contained many of the same phonemes, children's poorer performance on CCV syllables than on CVC syllables implies that a syllable's phonological structure influences children's ability to spell it in a legal manner. There was also a main effect of lexicality, F(l, 17) = 6.70, MSC = 3.15, p
