ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that children's beginning spelling is essentially phonetic. To a greater extent than adults or older children, young children spell by representing speech sounds individually rather than by learning the spellings of whole words or morphemes. The phonetic spellings reported in Read came from a total of thirty-two children in preschools and kindergartens, who created 2517 spellings for 1201 words. A knowledge of letter-sound correspondences, reading readiness, and being able to recognize some words on sight all correlated with creative spelling. English spelling represents the language on more than one level. The chapter determines whether kindergarten and first-grade children who are not creating the phonetic spellings really hear the phonetic relations that those spellings appear to represent. The kindergarten children made consistent judgments, choosing the phonetically-related pairs to a significant degree. The actual difference between wet and went is primarily in the nasalization of the vowel, rather than in the nasal consonant.
