ABSTRACT
For young language learners, writing commences as an adjunct to other language skills. As part of the phonological aspect of reading, children will have come to recognise symbol-to-sound relationships as they decode the characters. Now they must come to perform the reverse, as they hear sounds, repeat them themselves, identify specific graphical representations of them and encode the sounds in symbols. The process is not confined to early writers. When confronted with a new word to write, adults tend to vocalise it (albeit internally) in order to apply generalisations about graphic representations that they have made from previously acquired data. Punctuation, too, may depend on sound as much as on sense or syntax – witness the use of the comma.
