CHILDRENS SENSITIVITY TO RIME UNIT FREQUENCY WHEN SPELLING WORDS AND NONWORDS

This paper presents two experiments investigating 8-9 year old childre n's sensitivity to rime level sound-spelling correspondence units when spelling words and nonwords. In Experiment 1, children spelled more w ords correctly if they contained a common rime unit rather than a uniq ue or irregular unit. In Experiment 2, children spelled more words and nonwords correctly if they had many rime unit neighbours; words and n onwords with average or few rime unit neighbours were spelled less wel l. These findings show that children's spelling can not be described s imply according to one-to-one phoneme-grapheme mapping. Instead, child ren are sensitive to lexical factors such as rime unit sound-spelling correspondence. The findings are interpreted within the framework of a connectionist model of spelling development.