Beginning to Spell

This groundbreaking study on the psycholinguistics of spelling presents the author's original empirical research with 43 American first graders. The study supplies the theoretical framework necessary to understand how children's ability to write is related to their ability to speak a language. The author explores areas in a field traditionally dominated by work on reading skills and highlights the importance of learning to spell for both psychologists and educators. Since as they begin to spell, children attempt to represent the phonological, or sound form, of words, the study of children's spelling can shed light on the nature of children's sound systems and can illuminate the way sounds are organized into larger units, such as syllables and words. Research on children's spelling leads directly to an understanding of the way phonological knowledge is acquired and how phonological systems change with the development of reading and writing ability. In addition to this insight concerning cognitive processes, the findings presented here have implications for how spelling should be taught and why some writing systems are easier to master than others. Cognitive and developmental psychologists, psycholinguists, educational psychologists, and linguists and educators will find the work both an interesting and thoughtful discussion of this important field.

Rebecca Treiman is Professor of Psychology at Wayne State University. She received an undergraduate degree in linguistics from Yale University and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on spoken language, written language, and the relationship between them.

- Introduction
- 1: Spelling of Words
- 2: Spelling of Phonemes: Correct Spellings, Legal Substitutions, and Illegal Substitutions
- 3: Vowels
- 4: Consonants
- 5: The Influence of Orthography on Children's Spelling of Vowels and Consonants
- 6: Vowel Omissions
- 7: Consonant Omissions
- 8: Reversals
- 9: Inflected and Derived Words
- 10: Conclusions and Implications