WHAT HAPPENED TO THE N OF SINK - CHILDRENS SPELLINGS OF FINAL CONSONANT CLUSTERS

Children's spellings provide a window on their representations of spok en words. These representations may not always match those assumed by the conventional orthography. We examined one specific case in which t his may be true, that of CVCC (consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant) sy llables. In three experiments, first graders often produced spellings such as ''sach'' for the nonword /saentf/ and ''pit'' for the nonword /pilt/. We suggest that many children consider these syllables to cont ain three phonemes instead of four phonemes. Rather than treating the postvocalic nasal or liquid as a separate phoneme, children consider i t an attribute of the vowel. This suggestion was supported by the resu lts of a phoneme counting test in which children often used three toke ns for syllables such as /saent/ and /pilt/. The results suggest that, in addition to difficulties in gaining access to phonemes, nonstandar d phonemic representations may be a stumbling block in the acquisition of alphabetic literacy.