Spelling as a source of information about children's linguistic knowledge

Abstract

Two studies of English speakers' understanding of the English spelling system are discussed. The first study is Groat's (1979) investigation of seven‐year‐old children's ability to assign stress appropriately to two‐syllable nonsense words embedded in otherwise normal sentences. This work is compared with an earlier study of university students' performance on a similar task (Smith & Baker, 1976) and suggests that seven‐year‐olds are as sophisticated as adults in extracting many of the linguistic factors (vowel quality, syllable structure, syntactic category) which influence stress assignment, but they lack the ‘heterogeneous’ structure of the lexicon that is characteristic of the adult (i.e. a lexicon where different classes of word are subject to different rules). Furthermore it is shown that experience with Pitman's initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.) leads to subtle differences in children's performance in this task, suggesting that children taught to read with i.t.a. are using different print‐to‐sound conversion rules even after they have transferred to traditional orthography.