Abstract
Two experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spellings by French third graders is influenced by two graphotactic patterns: consonants cannot double in word-initial position (Experiment 1) and consonants cannot double after single consonants (Experiment 2). Children silently read meaningful texts that contained three types of novel spellings: no doublet (e.g., mupile, guprane), doublet in a legal position (e.g., muppile, gupprane), and doublet in an illegal position (e.g., mmupile, guprrane). Orthographic learning was assessed with a task of spelling to dictation. In both experiments, children recalled items without doublets better than items with doublets. In Experiment 1, children recalled spellings with a doublet in illegal word-initial position better than spellings with a doublet in legal word-medial position, and almost all misspellings involved the omission of the doublet. The fact that the graphotactic violation in an item like mmupile was in the salient initial position may explain why children often remembered both the presence and the position of the doublet. In Experiment 2, children recalled non-words with a doublet before a single consonant (legal, e.g., gupprane) better than those with a doublet after a single consonant (illegal, e.g., guprrane). Omission of the doublet was the most frequent error for both types of items. Children also made some transposition errors on items with a doublet after a single consonant, recalling for example gupprane instead of guprrane. These results suggest that, when a doublet is in the hard-to-remember medial position, children sometimes remember that an item contains a doublet but not which letter is doubled. Their knowledge that double consonants can occur before but not after single consonants leads to transposition errors on items like guprrane. These results shed new light on the conditions under which children use general knowledge about the graphotactic patterns of their writing system to reconstruct spellings.
Highlights
All alphabetic writing systems are based on the principle that graphemes represent phonemes, but they vary in orthographic depth, from consistent mappings between phonemes and graphemes in shallow writing systems to inconsistent mappings in deep writing systems (Sprenger-Charolles, 2003; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005)
We asked whether and how children’s learning of spellings is influenced by two graphotactic patterns that are not typically taught explicitly in French schools: consonants cannot double in word-initial position (Experiment 1) and after single consonants (Experiment 2)
French third graders were better at recalling spellings that did not include doublets than spellings that did
Summary
All alphabetic writing systems are based on the principle that graphemes represent phonemes, but they vary in orthographic depth, from consistent mappings between phonemes and graphemes in shallow writing systems to inconsistent mappings in deep writing systems (Sprenger-Charolles, 2003; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). The fact that there is often more than one possible spelling for a given phoneme in deep writing systems like English and French is a major source of difficulty in learning to spell (Seymour et al, 2003). Spellers must choose between representing a sound with a single letter or a doublet, that is, a sequence of two identical letters. This case is especially frequent in French, where there is usually no phonological distinction between single and double consonants. French children and adults sometimes omit a required doublet (e.g., bulle misspelled as bule) or double a letter when not required (e.g., formule misspelled as formulle; Lucci and Millet, 1994; Manesse et al, 2007)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
