ABSTRACT

Young spellers must learn to symbolize the sounds in words with phonologically appropriate letters. Do children use their knowledge about their own names to do this, performing better on sound–letter correspondences in their name than expected on the basis of other factors? According to some theories, children learn the spelling of their name as a rote form and do not derive conceptual knowledge from the name that transfers to other items. Analyzing data from studies in which 565 U.S. 3- to 6-year-old children spelled words or nonwords, however, we found that children who had begun to represent some sounds in their spelling used the initial sound–letter correspondence of their first name in an appropriate manner more often than otherwise expected. The results shed new light on the role of personal names in spelling development and have implications for early literacy instruction and assessment.

摘要

年轻的拼写者必须学会用语音上适当的字母来象征单词中的声音。孩子们是否利用他们自己的名字知识来做到这一点，使他们在名字上的音字母对应表现优于其他因素所期望的？根据一些理论，孩子们学会了将其名字拼写为死记硬背的形式，并且不会从转移到其他项目的名字中获得概念知识。通过对565名美国3至6岁儿童拼写单词或非单词的研究数据进行分析，我们发现，在拼写中开始表现出某些声音的孩子使用了他们名字中名字的初始字母和字母对应关系。适当的方式比其他方式预期的要多。