ABSTRACT
Over the years, I have conducted several studies investigating how children learn to read words. I designed these studies to include information about students’ memory for spellings of the words they learned to read in the belief that I was studying more general word learning processes in which treatments would influence spelling as well as reading. Results of these studies confirmed my belief. The purpose of this chapter is to consider the relationship between reading and spelling. A conceptual framework distinguishing the important behaviors, processes, and types of knowledge is presented. Similarities and differences between reading and spelling concepts and phenomena are examined to achieve a clearer understanding of how reading and spelling are linked during development. Various studies are examined for evidence bearing on these relationships. I build a partly theoretical, partly empirical case for the claim that learning to read and learning to spell are one and the same, almost.1
