Role of visual word‐recognition checks in children's spelling

Abstract

Two experiments were carried out to test the idea that children use visual word‐recognition knowledge to check for errors in spellings generated by phoneme‐letter correspondence rules. Experiment 1 compared oral spelling performance with written spelling performance for words varying in frequency. Word‐recognition checks were assumed to be possible for written spelling, but not for oral spelling. However, there was found to be no difference in accuracy between the two modes of spelling for words of any frequency. Experiment 2 compared oral and written spelling using a more sensitive repeated‐measures design. Although written spelling was found to be better than oral spelling, this effect was..