ABSTRACT
A six year old English girl began a story that she was writing about a burglary with the sentence “Tom nicta cr” (meaning “Tom nicked a car”). Her spelling, although attractive, was not perfect, but the mistakes that she made tell us a great deal. These are orthographic mistakes, but it would be churlish to call them phonological errors, because the girl actually managed to preserve the phonological relations between the letters and the sound of the words that she was trying to produce very well.
