THE AUTOMATIC ACTIVATION OF SOUND-LETTER KNOWLEDGE - AN ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION OF ANALOGY AND PRIMING EFFECTS IN EARLY SPELLING DEVELOPMENT

This paper presents two experiments investigating 6-year-old children' s use of analogy in spelling. In Experiment I, children make analogies between a visible flue word and a similar sounding target word. Analo gies are made to the same extent regardless of whether the clue and ta rget share a rime unit, a consonant vowel (CV) or a vowel but are not made when only common letters are shared. A second experiment investig ates children's spelling by analogy when the clue word is not visible. Again, an equal number of analogies are made between words sharing a rime unit, a CV or a vowel. From the earliest stages of learning to sp ell, children benefit from drawing analogies (at the level of individu al phonemes) with words that they know. These findings are related to recent connectionist models of the development of reading and spelling skills. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.