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Abstract

Recent research has suggested the importance of oral language ability in learning to read. It has been shown that the young child's awareness of phonological structure can greatly influence early reading success. To expand our understanding of this linguistic awareness, children's written spellings of nasality were examined in four distinct contexts: (1) consonant, vowel, nasal, voiceless stop consonant; (2) consonant, vowel, nasal, voiced stop consonant; (3) consonant, vowel, non-homorganic nasal-consonant pair; and, (4) nasals in other positions. The results indicated that the young child's nasal representations reflect a highly developed awareness of phonetic detail, an awareness that becomes quite evident when the child constructs his own written cipher for the sounds that he hears.

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Representation of Nasality in Children's Non-Standard Spellings

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