Learning correspondences between letters and phonemes without explicit instruction

Abstract

Three studies examined the sources of learning by which children, very early in learning to read, formed correspondences between letters and phonemes when these were not explicitly taught in the whole language instruction they received. There were three classes of predicted knowledge sources: (a) induced sublexical relations (i.e., induction of orthographic–phonological relations from the experience of print words), (b) acrophones from letter names, and (c) transfer from spelling experience. The results of Study 1 indicated that children used both sources (a) and (b). Study 2 results showed that source (a) dominated when the letters were initial components of pseudowords rather than isolated items. The transfer from phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences of the children's spelling was examined in Study 3. The results were not consistent with the use of source (c). The findings of these studies have implications for the question of how early in learning to read children are able to use knowledge from their experience of print words as a source for phonological recoding.