Development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge as revealed by their spellings.

Abstract

We investigated the development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge by obtaining nonword spellings from a total of 187 children―45 each from kindergarten, first, and second grade, and 52 from third grade. Our results indicated that young children's nonword spellings reflect the joint influences of linguistic knowledge (orthographic and phonological) and psychological processes (working memory limitations) and that these influences vary developmentally. Limited working memory constrains the spelling performance of younger children but not that older children. For youngeer children, individual differences in phonological awareness and in working memory account for nearly all of the shared variance between spelling and word decoding ; for older children, additional factors are also implicated