Emergent writing forms in Spanish

The purpose of this work was to study the variations in children's early wr iting forms in Spanish and the relationship among different writing forms, phonological awareness and the demands of the writing tasks. A group of kin dergarten children was assessed in: (a) the ability to match initial sounds in words, (b) the ability to segment words into phonemes, (c) the knowledg e of sound-letter correspondences, and (d) the performance on tasks present ing different cognitive demands: word writing and text writing. Results sho w that children produced a wide range of forms in both tasks, being the for ms used for word writing more elaborated than the forms used for text writi ng. These results suggest that in the process of writing acquisition, child ren move back and forth across forms of writing. The analysis of the relati onship between the writing farms and phonological awareness resulted in the identification of the different mechanisms children might be using to writ e, from an unanalytic approach to print to an analytic phonological mechani sm. The pattern of variation observed in the children's performance when wr iting words and texts seems to reflect the interplay among different types and levels of knowledge, knowledge about print, the phonological structure of words, sound-letter correspondences, and the cognitive demands of the ta sks.