ABSTRACT
A number of recent investigations that have studied the acquisition of spelling in children indicate that, during early stages, spelling reflects an attempt to represent the sounds of the words, rather than an effort to visually memorize the sequence of letters in words (Gentry, 1982; Read, 1973; Treiman, 1993). However, reliance on phonology alone does not lead ultimately to accurate spelling, because the constituent letters of many English words do not have a one-to-one relationship with pronunciation. This inconsistent relationship between spelling and pronunciation is due to the fact that the spelling of many words in the English language is influenced not only by phonology but also by etymological, morphemic, and syntactic conventions. The definition of spelling pattern (also referred to as orthography) as the “visual pattern of the written language as it relates to the graphemic, phonological, and semantic features of the language” (Henderson, 1984, p. 1) succinctly paraphrases this view. Consequently, far from being a literal phonetic transcription of speech, spelling is governed by complex phonemic, syntactic, and semantic conventions. Therefore, acquiring proficiency in spelling requires a knowledge of the semantic and syntactic features of the language, in addition to phonology. For this reason, mastery of spelling is said to be dependent on a mastery of morphophonemic knowledge.
