ABSTRACT
Most of the morphologically-related sets of words spelled consistently in English are like telegraphy rather than width: learned, polysyllabic and technical words derived from Latin or Greek. Observing children's beginning spelling in other languages can help one's to answer questions because other languages typically have systems of speech sounds that are different from that of English. The effect of segmentation difficulty on beginning reading and spelling can be tested by studying children's progress in languages with syllabic or logographic writing, where phonemic segmentation is presumably not necessary for learning to read and write. More research has been directed to the related question of whether readers of non-alphabetic scripts employ phonemic recoding. The resolution suggested by O. Tzeng and D. Hung is that phonological representation operates in both perception and memory in the reading of English, but only in memory in the reading of Chinese. The potential significance of studying children's spelling in languages other than English has not gone unnoticed.
