This chapter presents a number of studies of older children from which the authors must make inferences about invented spellings by young children. An implicit assumption of many dialect studies is that dialects are deviations from a norm, especially from so-called Standard English (SE). In fact there is no SE dialect; there are only standards of pronunciation and usage set by the prescriptive grammar which plays so large a part in our educational experience, or by the speech style of the broadcast media. Dialects can be divided into social and regional varieties. Most of the research on spelling and social dialect has been done on Black English (BE). In the early 1970s, D. Kligman and B. Cronnell carried out a series of studies of the comparative effects of BE and SE on spelling. B. F. Stever's dissertation is concerned with separating the influences of social class and dialect on spelling.