According to traditional stage models of spelling development, children are
thought to isolate the phonemes in the word and attempt to spell each with
an appropriate grapheme without regard for acceptable letter sequences or
other conventions of specific orthographies. In this paper, using nonwords
in both judgement and production tasks, we show that French children (Grade
s 1 to 5) are sensitive to some orthographic patterns having no phonologica
l counterparts (the use of double consonants and the transcription of /o/)
much earlier than traditional stage models posit.