ABSTRACT

Research on the cognitive processes involved in children’s spelling shows that two main strategies are used: a rule-based strategy and a lexical strategy (Ehri, 1986; Kreiner, 1992; Kreiner & Gough, 1990). The rule-governed nature of English spelling is emphasized by a number of linguists (e.g., Chomsky, 1970; Chomsky & Halle, 1991; Hanna, Hanna, Hodges, & Rudorf, 1966; Read, 1986) and psychologists (e.g., Frith, 1985). The rule strategy refers to the mapping of phonemes onto graphemes to represent them. These rules are probabilistic in nature. For example, for the word cab the phoneme /k/ can be represented by the grapheme <c> as in <i>cat, or <k> as in king, or <ch> as in chord, or even <kh> as in khaki. The most probable phoneme to grapheme correspondence for initial /k/ is that of <c> according to the computer analysis of over 17,000 words by Hanna et al. (1966). Graphemes are defined as minimal lexical contrastive units in writing and are analogous to, but not entirely parallel with, phonemes in spoken language (Hanna et al., 1966; Henderson, 1985; Venezky, 1970). A grapheme may have one or more than one letter such that the letter or letter cluster is usually pronounced as one phoneme. Thus, cheap should be parsed as three graphemes <ch> + <ea> + <A>, or deaf as <d> + <ea> + / dәf/.