Abstract
This longitudinal study examined how the phonemic-orthographic context affects the spelling of the schwa (/ɨ/) by Portuguese beginning spellers at two time points in the first school grade. The schwa is phonetically unstable and phonologically ill-defined, has an unpredictable realization, is frequently deleted at the syllable's end, and is often spelt as <e>, a very high frequency grapheme with numerous phonological renditions. In addition to cognitive and other alphabetic tasks, 41 first graders were asked to spell 40 consistent words of medium-low frequency: 5 CV.CV (consonant, vowel. consonant, vowel) with well-articulated vowels; 10 C/ɨ/C.VC, the first vowel being a schwa, thereby creating potential phonological consonantal clusters, half legal (/fɨliʃ/, /fliʃ/), half illegal (/pɨdal/, /pdal/); 10 CV.C/ɨ/, the last vowel being a schwa, potentially creating phonological monosyllables half with a legal coda (/mɔlɨ/, /mɔl/) and half with an illegal coda (/n'avɨ/), (/nav/); in addition, the children spelt 15 CVC ending with /l/, /ɾ/ and /ʃ/, the only legal Portuguese codas. Participants were also asked to spell equivalent pseudowords at a second point in time. Our results show that children were sensitive to allowable letter patterns from the Time 1 assessment point. Although alphabetic spelling was not entirely mastered, children used <e> more in first syllables than at the end of the word, and more in illegal than in legal phonological consonantal clusters, although the pattern of significant differences did change over time. The results were similar for pseudowords. Also, children used <e> more at the CV.C/ɨ/ words whose last C was /l/, than in monosyllabic CVC words ending with /l/. This was not observed with pseudowords, where the grapheme <e> was used with a similar frequency in the two types of items. Overall, these results show that children's acquisition of this kind of context-conditioned orthographic knowledge occurs simultaneously with alphabetic letter-sound learning and depend largely on intuitive statistical learning reflecting the regularities of the written code to which they are exposed.
Highlights
At the beginning of formal schooling children rely heavily on phonology when spelling words, trying to match each sound they can detect in a word to a non-arbitrary letter (Caravolas, 2004; Pollo et al, 2005; Fernandes et al, 2008; Sargiani and Albuquerque, 2016; Chaves-Sousa et al, 2017).Phonology is an essential component of early spelling and may be the most relevant information source when children begin the journey of making sense of how alphabetic systems work
The above-mentioned evidence raises the question of how children deal with these two sources of information in early spelling, before either has been firmly acquired and may compete with each other
At T2 they performed at a typical level in the TLP-1 reading test and they significantly progressed from T1 to T2 in terms of representing sounds by letters, achieving very good, though not perfect, levels of consistent CV.CV word and pseudoword spelling
Summary
At the beginning of formal schooling children rely heavily on phonology when spelling words, trying to match each sound they can detect in a word to a non-arbitrary letter (Caravolas, 2004; Pollo et al, 2005; Fernandes et al, 2008; Sargiani and Albuquerque, 2016; Chaves-Sousa et al, 2017).Phonology is an essential component of early spelling and may be the most relevant information source when children begin the journey of making sense of how alphabetic systems work. A comparative study showed that, corresponding to the orthographic features of Portuguese, 4–5-year old Brazilian children used more vowels and more consonant-vowel (hitherto referred to as CV) alternation than did US children (Pollo et al, 2009). These findings reflect young children’s ability at a very early age to detect and extract letter patterns from inputs, and show that they may learn graphotactic aspects of writing, that is which sequences of letters go and do not go together, even before they learn how letters represent sounds (Treiman, 2017b). The above-mentioned evidence raises the question of how children deal with these two sources of information (phonology and graphotactics) in early spelling, before either has been firmly acquired and may compete with each other
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