Young children's knowledge about the links between writing and language

The present study tested the hypothesis (Byrne, 1996) that young children who do not yet understand that the elements of alphabetic writing represent phonemes link writing to language at the level of morphemes. We asked US preschoolers to write words that varied in the number of morphemes and the number of syllables that they contained. We identified a group of 50 children who used letters that represented phonemes in the intended words no more often than expected by chance (mean age = 4 years, 9 months). These prephonological spellers did not produce longer spellings for two-morpheme words such as teacup than for one-morpheme words such as napkin, although the length of their spellings was affected by the number of letters that they used to spell the previously presented word and by the order of the word in the experiment. The results suggest that the length of prephonological spellers' productions is not influenced by the linguistic length of a message in phonemes, syllables, or morphemes, and they do not support the idea that these children show a special sensitivity to morphemes.