Abstract
We examined the spelling acquisition in children up to late primary school of a consistent orthography (Italian) and an inconsistent orthography (English). The effects of frequency, lexicality, length, and regularity in modulating spelling performance of the two groups were examined. English and Italian children were matched for both chronological age and number of years of schooling. Two-hundred and seven Italian children and 79 English children took part in the study. We found greater accuracy in spelling in Italian than English children: Italian children were very accurate after only 2 years of schooling, while in English children the spelling performance was still poor after 5 years of schooling. Cross-linguistic differences in spelling accuracy proved to be more persistent than the corresponding ones in reading accuracy. Orthographic consistency produced not only quantitative, but also qualitative differences, with larger frequency and regularity effects in English than in Italian children.
Highlights
The dual route models (e.g., Ellis, 1984; Barry and Seymour, 1988; Kreiner, 1992) assume the existence of two spelling procedures: the lexical procedure, in which word-specific orthographic representations are accessed, and the sub-lexical procedure, which relies on the serial conversion of phonemes into graphemes according to specific rules
We focus on spelling acquisition as a function of orthography consistency, but we refer to similarities/differences with the acquisition of reading in the two languages
- English children generally performed worse than Italian children across all conditions; performance of Italian children was near ceiling for high frequency words by the age of 9–10 years and for low frequency words by the age of 10–11 years;
Summary
The dual route models (e.g., Ellis, 1984; Barry and Seymour, 1988; Kreiner, 1992) assume the existence of two spelling procedures: the lexical procedure, in which word-specific orthographic representations are accessed, and the sub-lexical procedure, which relies on the serial conversion of phonemes into graphemes according to specific rules. It is generally held that beginners firstly rely on the non-lexical phoneme-to-grapheme conversion procedure and only subsequently shift to the lexical one (e.g., Frith, 1985). If children know the words to be spelled, lexical spelling is used among young children (e.g., Cossu et al, 1995; Frith et al, 1998; Angelelli et al, 2010; Notarnicola et al, 2011) Despite this early evidence of lexical spelling, it is generally held that reliance on this procedure increases as children become more competent and acquire a relatively great amount of orthographic representations (e.g., Sprenger-Charolles et al, 2003). Inconsistent orthography-phonology mappings in opaque orthographies are associated to a longer time to acquire reading (e.g., Seymour et al, 2003) and greater reliance on
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