Developmental PsychologyI 9 9 6 . V O 1 . 3 2 . N O . 3. 505-514

Copyright 1996 by Ihe American Psychological Association, Inc.0OI2-I649/96/S3.00

Letter Names Help Children to Connect Print and Speech

Rebecca Treiman, Ruth Tincoff, and E. Daylene Richmond-WeltyWayne State University

A critical step in the acquisition ofliteracy involves learning that the printed forms of words sym-bolize the words' linguistic forms. We propose that children first connect print and speech by notic-ing links between letters in printed words (e.g., the b of beech) and letter names in the correspondingspoken words (e.g., the /bi/ in the spoken word beech). Support for this proposal comes from 2experiments in which preschoolers were asked to say the first letters of words. Children were relativelygood at telling that beech and beaver began with b and that deaf ended with/. They were less likelyto know that bone and bonus began with b and that toa/ended with/. Moreover, some children statedthat wife began with y and that seem began with c. These errors reflect the letter names at thebeginnings of the spoken words.

Not until first grade can most North American children writecomplete words on their own, using reasonable spellings thatreflect the words' sounds. However, writing does not emerge fullblown in first grade. Rather, it has a long developmental history.Preschoolers may "write" by making marks with a crayon orpencil, even before they know the conventional letters. Theirwriting, albeit unconventional, differs noticeably from theirdrawing. For example, preschoolers may produce linearly ar-ranged strings of units, resembling print, or wavy lines, resem-bling cursive (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Tolchinsky-Lands-mann & Levin, 1985). They distinguish writing and drawingbased on characteristics such as linearity and size (Lavine,1977).

Although children as young as 3 or 4 know that writing looksdifferent than drawing, they do not yet understand why. Theydo not appreciate that alphabetic writing is a representation ofspoken language. Instead, young children seem to think that thewritten forms of words reflect their meanings. They believe thatvariations in the written forms of objects' names correspond todifferences in the properties of the objects themselves, just asvariations among pictures mirror variations among objects(Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Levin & Korat, 1993; Levin &Tolchinsky Landsmann, 1989). In a study by Lundberg andTorneus (1978), for example, Swedish nonreaders saw two

Rebecca Treiman, Ruth Tincoff, and E. Daylene Richmond-Welty,Psychology Department, Wayne State University.

Ruth Tincoff is now at the Department of Psychology, State Univer-sity of New York at Buffalo.

This research was supported by National Science Foundation GrantsSBR-9020956 and SBR-9408456. We thank Charles Perfetti for com-ments on the manuscript of this article. We are grateful to the staff andchildren of Wayne State University Child Development Lab, Jack andJill Nursery School and Kindergarten, Ferndale Montessori Center,Happy Time Child Care Center, Bright Beginnings Children's Center,Beverly Hills Child Care Center, Advent Children's Center, and theGrosse Pointe Pre-kindergarten—South for their cooperation.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Re-becca Treiman, Psychology Department, Wayne State University, 71West Warren Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48202. Electronic mail may besent via Internet to treiman@math.wayne.edu.

printed words. An English example is arm and ambulance. Thechildren were asked which printed word was arm. Children per-formed better if the word denoting the smaller object was writ-ten with fewer letters, as in the case of arm and ambulance, thanif the word for the larger object was written with fewer letters, asin the case of whale and mosquito.

As children learn more about print, they notice that the phys-ical features of words and of the letters they contain do not nec-essarily match the physical features of the corresponding ob-jects. For example, a child named Bobby might learn the con-ventional spellings of Dad and Bobby and observe that theprinted word Dad has fewer letters than Bobby, even thoughDad is bigger and older than Bobby. Ferreiro and Teberosky(1982) suggested that such mismatches help lead children tothe idea that written language represents spoken language.

According to Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982), children whohave grasped the idea that writing is a representation of spokenlanguage first believe that the correspondence between print andspeech is at the level of syllables. Only later do they learn that,for English and other alphabetic languages, the links betweenprint and speech are primarily at the level of phonemes. Evi-dence for the syllabic hypothesis comes from the case studies ofArgentinian children carried out by Ferreiro and Teberosky andfrom the findings of Levin and Korat (1993), Levin and Tol-chinsky Landsmann (1989), and Tolchinsky Landsmann andLevin (1987) with Israeli children. In these latter studies, 5- and6-year-olds tended to use more characters to write phonologi-cally longer words than phonologically shorter words. However,the results do not unambiguously support the syllabic hypothe-sis because the phonologically longer words contained morephonemes as well as more syllables than the phonologicallyshorter words. Jones (1990) also questioned Ferreiro and Teb-erosky's syllabic hypothesis, as well as some of their other pro-posals, based on her work with Scottish children.

Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982) claimed that some childrenwho are working with the syllabic hypothesis invent their ownletter forms to represent syllables. Other children symbolize syl-lables with real letters, but in an inconsistent manner. They rep-resent a given syllable with one letter on one occasion and withanother letter on a second occasion. Still other children developstable spellings for certain syllables. These spellings are often

505

506 TREIMAN, TINCOFF, AND R1CHMOND-WELTY

based on letter names. For example, an English-speaking childmay consistently spell the syllable /bi/ with the letter b becausethe name of the letter Z> is /bi/.1 Ferreiro and Teberosky's pro-posal, then, is that young children who are familiar with thenames of letters may use this knowledge to relate print andspeech.

Middle-class North American children typically know thenames of many letters before they go to school. They acquirethis knowledge from parents, preschool teachers, alphabetbooks, and children's television programs. In one study(Mason, 1980), almost two-thirds of 4-year-olds were said bytheir parents to very often recite the alphabet without error.Over half of the children could link letter names to their printedforms, being able to name more than 20 letters of the alphabet.In another study, which assessed acquisition of alphabet skillsdirectly rather than by relying on parental report, children fromthe United States could recite or sing 5 or more Letters of thealphabet by age 4 and were almost perfect by age 5 (Worden &Boettcher, 1990). Shown uppercase letters and asked to namethem, 4-year-olds were correct on about 14 of the 26 letters.Five-year-olds were correct on about 22 letters. Children knewmuch less about the sounds of the letters, with 4-year-olds pro-viding the sounds for about 6 Letters of the 26 and 5-year-oldsfor 8.

Given that North American 4- and 5-year-olds are familiarwith the names of many letters, they might use this knowledgeto relate print and speech. If so, spellings that can be justifiedon the basis of letter names should make more sense to youngchildren than spellings that cannot be so justified. For example,children may appreciate that the spelling of beach begins with bbecause the spoken form of this word starts with /bi /. Childrenmay not understand that the spelling of bone begins with b be-cause no /bi/ appears in the spoken form of this word. Thus,children may come to grasp the important concept that theprinted forms of words are related to the words' linguistic formsby discovering links between the letters in printed words (e.g.,the b of beach) and letter names in spoken words (e.g., the/bi/ in the spoken form of beach). Indeed, a 4-year-old of ouracquaintance was thrilled one day to discover that the first nameof his G.I. Joe doll was spelled with g followed by i. This childwas able to relate speech and print by dividing the spoken nameinto the syllable / d j / followed by the syllable /ai/ and spellingeach syllable with the corresponding letter name. This was oneof the first spellings that made sense to the child, its rationalebased on its use of letter names.

Durrell (1980) commented that, when revising a test of pre-reading abilities, he and Murphy noted that low-ability kinder-garteners were better at identifying the first letters of spokenwords such as beaver and deep than of words such as ball anddog. In the former words, the first syllable or part of a syllable isthe name of the letter. In the latter words, the initial consonantis followed by a vowel that is not in the letter name. The presentexperiments, which involved preschoolers, were designed toverify and extend Durrell and Murphy's observations.

In the beginning condition of Experiment 1, children wereasked to say the first letters of words such as beach, jail, bone,and June. Words such as beach and jail are called correct letter-name words. For these words, knowledge of letter names canprovide the correct first letter. Words such as bone and June arecontrol words, or words that do not begin with a letter name.

Based on Durrell and Murphy's observations (Durrell, 1980),we expected that children would do better at providing the firstletters of words such as beach and jail than the first letters ofwords such as bone and June. Experiment 1 also included anend condition in which children were asked to state the finalletters of words such as deaf and loaf. Extending Durrell andMurphy's observations, we expected children to do better oncorrect letter-name words such as deaf, which end with a lettername, than on control words such as loaf. We expected perfor-mance to be poorer for the last letters of words than for the firstletters, given previous findings that final phonemes are generallyharder to spell and harder to segment than initial phonemes(Stage & Wagner, 1992; Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer,1984; Treiman, 1993; Treiman, Berch, & Weatherston, 1993;Treiman, Weatherston, & Berch, 1994).

Children who rely on letter names in our task should cor-rectly say that beach begins with b and that deaf ends with/.However, letter names may lead to errors in other cases. Forexample, children may say that wife begins with y or that seembegins with c. We included wrong letter-name words such asthese in the beginning condition of Experiment 1. If childrensearch for letter names in spoken words, they should be morelikely to say that wife begins with y than that wait begins with y.

Finally, we asked whether children sometimes make up theirown letter names based on the patterns that they have notedamong the letter names of English. The names of many conso-nant Letters consist of a consonant followed by / i / , as in /bi/,/si/, /pi/, and so on. Another set of letter names begins with/e / , as in /ef/, /em/, and /eks/. A 3 !/2-year-old of our acquain-tance made observations such as the following over a 4-day pe-riod: "Big starts with b (/bi/) and little starts with /li/,""yellow starts with /ji/," "hat has a / h i / " "Fred starts with/fri/." This child seemed to have observed that many letternames begin with a consonantal onset followed by / i / but wasnot sure which of the syllables that followed this pattern werereal English letter names and which ones were not. To find outwhether other children do the same, we included false letter-name stimuli in the beginning and end conditions of Experi-ment 1. An example of a false letter-name word in the beginningcondition is feed. If children make up letter names ending with /i/, they may say that/m/begins with the "letter" /ft/. Theyshould be less likely to say that folk begins with /fo/ because noletters in English are composed of a consonant followed by /o /. In the end condition, a sample false letter-name stimulus isbed. We asked whether children were more likely to say that bedends with the "letter" /ed/ than that job ends with the "letter" /ab/, in line with the fact that some English letters have ft/ +consonant names whereas none have /a / + consonant names.

Experiment 1

Method

Participants

The participants were 16 preschoolers (7 boys, 9 girls) with an aver-age age of 5 years 5 months (range = 4 years 5 months - 6 years 0

1 Key to notation: / i / as in bead, /ai/ as in buy, /e / as in bed, /o/ asin boat, /a/ as in father, /e/ as in bait, /u/ as in boot, /a/ as in sofa,/as / as in bad, /<£ / as in gym, / j / as in _yet> and /// as in ship.

CONNECTING PRINT AND SPEECH 507

months). All of the children were native speakers of English. They at-tended one of several daycare centers in the Detroit area that servedprimarily middle-class populations- None of the children had begunkindergarten and none had received any formal reading instruction.

Procedure

The children were tested individually at their daycare centers. Eachchild participated in a beginning condition, in which the child was askedto provide the initial letters of spoken words, and an end condition, inwhich the child was asked to provide the final letters of spoken words.The two conditions were administered in different sessions, with theorder of the conditions balanced across children. The two sessions wereusually held on the same day, one in the morning and one in the af-ternoon, or 1 day apart. For one child, there was a week's break betweenthe sessions.

For the beginning condition, the experimenter began by asking,"\bur name is , right?" The child was then asked to spell his or herfirst name aloud. All but two of the children did this on their own; theexperimenter assisted the other two children. The child was then askedto tell the experimenter the first letter of his or her name. All of thechildren were able to do this. The child was then told that he or shewould hear a series of words. The experimenter pronounced each word,said it in a sentence, and said the word again. The child was instructedto repeat the word aloud and then tell the experimenter the first letter ofthe word. The younger children were given the opportunity to hold apuppet and have it "tell" the experimenter the word's first letter. Thechildren were given general encouragement and praise but were not toldwhether their responses were correct. The order of the words was ran-domized for each child.

The procedure for the end condition was similar to that for the begin-ning condition except that the children were asked to provide the lastletters of words. To introduce the task, the child was asked to spell his orher first name and then to say its last letter. Most of the children coulddo this. The experimenter assisted the two children who could not orallyspell their complete first names and the one child who could not provideits last letter.

At the end of the second session, each child was tested on ability torelate printed letters to the letters1 names and ability to relate printedletters to the letters' sounds. For the test of letter-name knowledge, thechild was shown a series of cards with letters printed on them and wasasked to say the name of each letter. For the letter-sound test, the childwas shown the cards and was asked to say the sound made by each letter.The order of the cards was randomized for each test for each child. Theorder of the letter-name and letter-sound tests was balanced acrosschildren.

StimuliBeginning condition. The beginning condition included 36 mono-

syllabic words. The words were divided into six categories, examples ofwhich are shown in Table 1. The Appendix provides a complete list ofstimuli, as well as information about the frequencies of the words inchildren's reading materials (Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971) andin kindergarteners' speech (Kolson, 1961).

The beginning condition included six correct letter-name wordswhose spoken form began with the name of an English letter and whosewritten form began with this letter. For example, the correct letter-nameword beach begins with /bi/, which is the name of the letter b. As ex-pected based on the letter name in the word's spoken form, b is the firstletter of this word's spelling. As another example, the spoken form ofjail begins with the letter name /dje / and./ is also the first letter of thisword's spelling. There were two correct letter-name words beginningwith / b / , two with /dj /, and two with / t / . Corresponding to the sixcorrect letter-name words were six control words, two with initial /b / ,two with /d3 /, and two with / t / . For example, the control word bone

Table 1Sample Stimuli for Experiment I and Number of Stimuliof Each Type

Condition and type

BeginningCorrect letter-nameCorrect letter-name controlWrong letter-nameWrong letter-name controlFalse letter-nameFalse letter-name control

EndCorrect letter-nameCorrect letter-name controlFalse letter-nameFalse letter-name control

Examples

beach, jailbone, Junewife, seemwail, soupfeed, greenfolk, group

deaf, gemloaf hambed, deskjob, mask

n

666666

121266

begins with /bo/, which is not the name of a letter in English, and thecontrol word June begins with / dju /, which is not the name of a letter.Although the control words had the same first letters as the correct letter-name words, their different vowels meant that the control words did notstart with a letter name. The vowels of the control words, like the vowelsof the letter-name words, were long vowels.

The beginning condition also included six wrong letter-name stimuli.These stimuli are so labeled because use of letter names would leadchildren to produce the wrong first letter. The spoken forms of thesewrong letter-name words began with the name of an English letter. How-ever, the written forms of these words did not begin with this letter butinstead with some other letter. Three of the wrong letter-name stimulibegan with / wai/, which is the name of y. An example is wife. Althoughthe spoken word starts with /wai/, it is not spelled with initial y butwith initial w. The other three wrong letter-name stimuli began with/si/, the name of the letter c, but were not spelled with initial c. Anexample is seem. There were six control words, half beginning with / w/followed by a long vowel other than /ai/ and half beginning with / s /followed by a long vowel other than/i/. Examples of control words arewait and soup.

Finally, there were six false letter-name stimuli that began with a con-sonant or consonant cluster followed by /{/. For example, feed beginswith / ii/ and green begins with /gri /. If children have noticed that manyletter names in English end with / i / , they may sometimes respond thatfeed begins with the "letter" /fi/ or that green begins with the "letter"/ gri /. That is, children may produce a sequence of phonemes that is nota real letter name. The matched control words began with the sameconsonants and consonant clusters as the false letter-name words. How-ever, the vowels that followed the consonant or consonant cluster, /o /and / u /, are vowels that do not typically appear in the names of Englishconsonant letters. If children have picked up the phonological structureofletter names, they should be unlikely to say that folk begins with the"letter"/fo/.

End condition. The end condition included 36 words of the fourtypes shown in Table 1. The Appendix provides a full list of the words,as well as information about the words' frequencies.

The spoken forms of the correct letter-name words ended with thename of an English letter. For example, deaf ends with /ef/ and gemends with /em/. Use ofletter names yields the correct final consonantin these cases. Thus, the printed form of deaf ends with/and the printedform of gem ends with m. Of the 12 correct letter-name words, 2 endedwith each of the phonemes/letters /f/ ( / ) , /m/ (m), /I/ (/),/n/ («), /r/ (r), and / s / (s). There were 12 corresponding controlwords, 2 each with final / f / ( / ) , /m/ (m) . /I/ ( /) , /n/<n),/r /(r) , and/s / (5). The spoken forms of these control words did not end with a

508 TREIMAN, TINCOFF, AND RICHMOND-WELTY

Table 2Proportion of Correct Responses in Experiment 1

Condition

BeginningEnd

Correct letter-name

(e.g., beach, deaf)

M SD

0.68 0.280.43 0.39

Word type

Correct letter-name control

(e.g., bone, loaf)

M SD

0.50 0.430.35 0.41

letter name. For example, the control word loaf ends with / of/, whichis not the name of a letter in English.

The end condition also contained six false letter-name stimuli whosespoken forms ended with / e / followed by a consonant or consonantcluster. Examples include bed and desk. If children have observed thatthe names of some English consonant letters begin with / e / , they maysay that Wends with the "letter" /ed/ or that desk ends with the "let-ter" /esk/. There were also six control words that had the same finalconsonants or clusters as the false letter-name words but vowels that donot typically occur in English letter names. For example, the vowels ofthe control words job and mask are not found in the name of any En-glish letter.

There were no wrong letter-name stimuli in the end condition com-parable to those in the beginning condition because English does notoffer potential stimuli of this kind.

Tests of letter-name and letter-sound knowledge. For these tests, theletters y, c, w, s,j, b, t,f I, m, n, r, g, d, and k were printed in upper-caseletters on individual 3 '/2-in. X 5 V2-in. cards. Uppercase letters were usedbecause children are more familiar with them than with lowercase let-ters {Smythe, Stennett, Hardy, & Wilson, 1970-1971; Worden &Boettcher, 1990).

Results

Consider, first, the results for the correct letter-name wordsand the corresponding control words. In the beginning condi-tion, examples are beach (correct letter-name word) and bone(control word); in the end condition, sample stimuli are deaf(correct letter-name word) and loaf{ control word). As Table 2shows, children were more accurate on the correct letter-namewords than on the control words in both conditions. That is,children did better when the word's spoken form contained thename of its first or last letter, as in beach and deaf, than whenthe word's spoken form did not contain the name of its first orlast letter, as in bone and loaf Children also performed better inthe beginning condition than in the end condition.

To confirm these impressions, analyses of variance(ANOV\s) were carried out both by participants {Fl) and bystimuli {F2) using the variables of word type (correct letter-name vs. control) and position (beginning vs. end). There weremain effects of word type, Fl{\, 15) = 7.74, p = .014; F2(1,32)= 10.01, p = . 003, and position, Fl(\, 15)= 11.15,p =.004; F2{ 1, 32) = 41.86, p < .001. The two variables did notinteract (p > .09). Overall, children did 13% better on letter-name words than control words. They were 20% better at givingthe first letters of words than the last letters of words.

The tendency for better performance on letter-name words ascompared with control words was quite consistent across chil-

dren. Of the 16 children, 12 performed better on letter-namewords than on control words and only 2 showed the oppositepattern. The remaining 2 children did not show a differencebetween the two types of words, performing at or close to ceilingon both types. Thus, one could get very different ideas of achild's knowledge about spelling depending on the type of wordone used. For example, 1 child was only 6% correct at giving thefirst letters of words such as bone or the last letters of words suchas loaf In contrast, this child produced correct responses 50%of the time when asked to give the first letters of words such asbeach or the last letters of words such as deaf.

For the wrong letter-name stimuli in the beginning condition,such as wife and seem, one can ask whether use of letter-nameknowledge sometimes caused children to produce the incorrectresponses y and c. Table 3 shows the proportion of such re-sponses for the wrong letter-name words and the correspondingcontrol words. The children produced 23% incorrect y re-sponses to words that began with /wai/ (wrong letter-namestimuli) as compared with only 2% y responses to words thatbegan with /w/ followed by another vowel (wrong letter-namecontrol stimuli). Also, children produced 33% incorrect c re-sponses to words that begin with /si/ (wrong letter-namestimuli) as compared with 13% such responses to words thatbegan with / s / followed by another vowel (wrong letter-namecontrol stimuli). ANO\As with the variables of word type(wrong letter-name vs. control) and initial phoneme (/w/ vs./s/) confirmed that there was a main effect of word type, Fl(1, 15 ) - 19.74, p<. 001; F2( 1,8) = 7.84,/? = .023, and noother effects. Children produced more of the errors suggestedby the letter name when the spoken word began with the lettername than when it did not.

We now turn to the results on the false letter-name stimuli. Inthe beginning condition, these are words such as feed and greenfor which children might produce such false letter names suchas /fi/ and /gri/. For the control words, such as folk and group,one would expect fewer responses that consisted of the word'sinitial consonant (or cluster) and vowel because the vowel is nottypical of English letter names. Table 4 shows the proportion ofresponses in the beginning condition that consisted of the onsetand vowel of the stimulus. There was a tendency for more suchresponses for false letter-name words, which contained / i /, thanfor control words, which contained some other vowel. However,this tendency was not significant in ANOVAs using the variablesof word type (false letter-name vs. control) and onset type(single consonant vs. cluster), Fl(\, 15) = .92, p = .35; F2

Table 3Proportion of Y Responses to Words Beginning With /w/and CResponses to Words Beginning With /s/in Experiment 1

Word type

Wrong letter-name

(e.g., wife, seem)

Wrong letter-name control

(e.g., wait, soup)

Initial phoneme

M/s/

M

0.230.33

SD

0.240.34

M

0.020.13

SD

0.080.27

CONNECTING PRINT AND SPEECH 509

Table 4Proportion of Responses Consisting of the Onset and Vowel ofthe Stimulus to False Letter-Name Stimuli and Control Stimuliin Beginning Condition of Experiment 1

Onset type

Single consonantCluster

Word type

Falseletter-name

(e.g.,feed, green)

M SD

0.08 0.230.10 0.26

False letter-namecontrol

(e.g., folk, group)

M SD

0.04 0.110.04 0.17

(1,8) = 2.50, p = .15. In the end condition, children did notproduce any responses to false letter-name or control words thatconsisted of the word's vowel and final consonant (or cluster).That is, they never said that the last "letter" of bed was /ed/ orthat the last "letter" of desk was /esk/.

Although the trend in Table 4 was not significant, one childproduced false letter-name responses to five of the six false let-ter-name words in the beginning condition. For example, shesaid that feed began with /fi/ and that green began with /gri/.For the six control words, this child did not produce any errorsthat consisted of the onset and vowel of the stimulus. Instead,she made three errors on these six words that consisted of theinitial consonant or cluster of the stimulus plus / i / , saying thathose began with /li/ , moon began with /mi/, andgroup beganwith /gri/. This child also produced some false letter namesending with ,/i/ elsewhere in the initial and final conditions ofthe experiment. For example, she said that wife and week beganwith /wi/, that web ended with /wi/, and that hill ended with/hi/ . These latter two errors reflect a confusion between endingand beginning letters, a confusion that occurred among otherchildren as well. Of this child's 20 responses in the two condi-tions of the experiment that were not the name of a real Englishletter, 12 were consonant + / i / syllables, 5 were consonant +consonant + / i / syllables, 1 was a consonant + /o / syllable, and2 were single vowels. Thus, 1 of the 16 children in this study didappear to invent letter names that ended with / i / . Interestingly,this child performed perfectly on the letter-name task.

Although the child just described did produce some inventedletter names, the majority of errors in the initial and final con-ditions of the experiment (68%) were real letter names. Theremaining errors included responses that were phonologicallyrelated to the stimulus (e.g., rhyming words, initial consonant +vowel sequences; 12%), letter sounds (11%), and miscellaneousother errors (e.g., numbers, failures to respond).

As expected, the children were much better at providing thenames of visually presented letters than the sounds of these let-ters. The proportion of correct responses on the letter-name test,.87, was significantly higher than the proportion of correct re-sponses on the letter-sound test, .52, Fl{\9 15) - 13.36, p -.002;/2(1, 14) = 213.83, p<. 001. The discrepancy betweenletter-name knowledge and letter-sound knowledge was largerfor y (L.00 vs. 0.25) than for any other letter. Five of the 16children mistakenly said that y made the sound /ws/, appar-ently using the initial consonant in the name of y to suggest the

letter's sound. These errors are similar to those seen by Treimanet al. (1994), who reported that many kindergarteners thinkthat y makes the sound / ws/.

Discussion

The results of this study show that spellings that can be justi-fied on the basis of letter names make more sense to young chil-dren than spellings that cannot be so justified. Thus, childrenwere more successful at providing the first letter of beach thanthe first letter of bone. This difference occurs because the spokenform of beach starts with / bi /, the name of the letter b, whereasthe spoken form of bone starts with /bo/ , which is not the nameof a letter in English. To determine that the printed form ofbeach starts with b, children need not know that b stands forthe phoneme /b / or that the spoken word beach contains thisphoneme. Children must simply notice that the spoken form ofbeach sounds similar to the letter name /bi/. The children hadmore trouble telling that bone started with b because this re-quires the knowledge that b corresponds to the phoneme /b /and that the spoken form of bone begins with this phoneme.The findings with preschoolers in the beginning condition ofthis experiment support Durrell and Murphy's observationswith low-achieving kindergarten children (Durrell, 1980).

We found letter-name effects for the final letters of words aswell as for the initial letters. Children were better at providingthe last letter of deaf{ which ends with a letter name, / ef /) thanthe last letter of loaf(which does not end with a letter name).In addition, performance was poorer for the last letters of wordsthan for the first letters. Different letters had to be used in theinitial and final positions of the words, because of the charac-teristics of letter names in English, so the two conditions are notas well-matched as one would ideally like. However, the ob-tained difference between initial and final positions accordswith previous findings that final phonemes are generally harderto segment and spell than initial phonemes (Stage & Wagner,1992; Stanovich et al., 1984; Treiman, 1993; Treiman et al.,1993; Treiman etal., 1994).

Children's use of letter names to generate the first letters ofwords led them to sometimes say that wife started with y or thatseem started with c. Previous studies have shown that youngchildren sometimes spell initial /w/ with y (Treiman et al.,1994). The present results suggest that this error is more com-mon for words that begin with /w/ followed by /ai/, such aswife, than for words that begin with / w/ followed by some othervowel, such as wait.

One of the 16 children tested sometimes made up letternames that had the structure of real English letter names. Forexample, this child said that loose began with /li/ , that moonbegan with /mi/, and that group began with /gri/. Some chil-dren seem to go through a phase during which they have ab-stracted some of the salient characteristics of letter names—forexample, the fact that many consist of a consonant onset fol-lowed by /i/—but are not sure which syllables that fit the pat-tern are real letters of the alphabet and which are not. However,this phase may not occur among all children or may last just ashort time.

The results of Experiment 1 suggest that knowledge of letternames helps children to understand the important concept thatprint represents spoken language. By noticing connections be-

510 TREIMAN, TINCOFF, AND RICHMOND-WELTY

tween letters in printed words and letter names in spoken words,children come to realize that printed words are not arbitrarystrings of letters or direct representations of the words' mean-ings. Instead, the spellings of words are motivated by the words'sounds. Thus, letter names may play an important role in help-ing children to grasp the fundamental nature of writing. Learn-ing that print is a representation of spoken language is a precon-dition for learning the specific mappings between spellings andphonemes that characterize English or any other alphabeticwriting system.

Ferreiro and Teberosky (1982) proposed that children's firstconnections between print and speech are at the level of sylla-bles. Connections at the level of phonemes, as are found in En-glish and other alphabetic languages, are a later developmentalstep. If so, children might do better at providing the first lettersof bisyllabic words such as beaver than the first letters of mono-syllabic words such as bead. The /bi/ in the spoken form ofbeaver is a syllable on its own. The /bi/ in the spoken form ofbead is part of a larger syllable rather than a separate syllable. Ifchildren link print to speech at the level of syllables, they mayfind it easier to determine that beaver starts with b than to de-termine that bead starts with b because /bi / is a syllable in bea-ver but part of a syllable in bead. Experiment 2, therefore, in-cluded correct letter-name words such as beaver (bisyllabic) andbead (monosyllabic) and corresponding control words such asbonus (bisyllabic) and bait (monosyllabic). We also includedfalse letter-name stimuli like those of Experiment 1 to furtherassess whether some children make up letter names such as/mi/and/wi/.

Experiment 2

Method

Participants

There were 26 children (12 boys, 14 girls) with an average age of 4years 11 months (range = 4 years 5 months to 5 years 7 months). All ofthe children were native speakers of English and attended one of severaldaycare centers in the Detroit area that served middle-class populations.An additional 17 children in the same age range (15 boys, 2 girls) werenot included in the study because they could not orally provide the firstletter of their first name. Pilot work suggested that children who couldnot give the first tetter of their own name were very poor at giving thefirst letters of other words. Two additional boys were dropped becausethey did not wish to participate in the entire procedure.

Procedure

The procedure was similar to that of the beginning condition of Ex-periment 1. However, if the child could not tell the experimenter thefirst letter of his or her name, the experiment was discontinued. Theexperiment was divided into two sessions. Thirty of the 48 words werepresented in the first session and the remainder were presented in thesecond session. The two sessions were an average of 3 days apart.

At the end of the second session, each child was given tests of letter-name and letter-sound knowledge. The procedures for these tests werethe same as in Experiment 1.

Stimuli

There were a total of 48 words. The words were divided into eightcategories. Table 5 shows examples of the words in each category andthe number of words in the category; the Appendix provides a completelist of stimuli along with information about the words' frequencies. Thewords used in Experiment 2 were less frequent than those used in Ex-periment 1 by both the Carroll etal. (1971) and Kolson( 1961) norms.

The monosyllabic correct letter-name and correct letter-name controlwords were similar to the correct letter-name and control words in Ex-periment 1. Specifically, the spoken forms of the monosyllabic correctletter-name words began with the name of the first letter in the word'sspelling. For example, the spoken word bead begins with /bi/ and b isthe first letter in the spelling of this word. The corresponding controlwords were spelled with the same first letters as the correct letter-namewords. However, the first two phonemes of control words such as bail(/be/) do not form the name of the word's first letter (b).

The bisyllabic correct letter-name and control words were similar tothe monosyllabic ones except that the first two phonemes of each wordwere a separate syllable according to the view that a syllable boundaryoccurs after a long vowel such as the j'\j of beaver. This assumption ismade by dictionaries and by some linguistic theories (Pulgram, 1970).Psychological evidence, as well, points to a role of vowel length in syl-labification (Treiman&Danis, 1988). However, it should be noted thatsyllabification is not an all-or-none matter according to psychologicalevidence and some linguistic theories. The first syllable of the bisyllabiccorrect letter-name word beaver was assumed to be /bi/, which is thename of the word's first letter. The first syllable of the control word bo-nus is /bo/, which is not the name of this word's first letter.

The false letter-name words began with a consonant phoneme fol-lowed by / i / that did not form the name of a real English letter. Forexample, the monosyllabic false letter-name word meat begins with/mi/ and the bisyllabic false letter-name word weasel begins with /wi/.Neither /mi/ nor / wi/ is the name of an English letter. The control falseletter-name words were spelled with the same initial letters as the falseletter-name words. However, the initial consonant phoneme was not fol-lowed by / i / . For example, the monosyllabic control word moan beginswith /mo/ and the bisyllabic control word waiter begins with /we/. If

Table 5Sample Stimuli for Experiment 2 and Number of Stimuli of Each Type

Type

Correct letter-nameCorrect letter-name controlCorrect letter-nameCorrect letter-name controlFalse letter-nameFalse letter-name controlFalse letter-nameFalse letter-name control

Number of syllables

MonosyllabicMonosyllabicBisyllabicBisyllabicMonosyllabicMonosyllabicBisyllabicBisyllabic

Examples

bead, peekbait, polebeaver, peacockbonus, poodlemeal, leapmoan, laneweasel, meterwaiter, motor

n

88884444

CONNECTING PRINT AND SPEECH 511

Table 6Proportion of Correct Responses in Experiment 2

No. of syllables

MonosyllabicBisyllabic

Word type

Correctletter-name(e.g., bead,

beaver)

M SD

0.40 0.420.42 0.41

Correctletter-name

control(e.g., bait, bonus)

M SD

0.29 0.400.27 0.42

children sometimes make up letters that are similar to the letters withconsonant + / i / names that they have encountered, they might say thatmeal begins with the "letter" /mi/.

For the tests of letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, the letters b,d, p, t, v,,m,f, I, and w were printed in upper-case letters on individual3 '/2in. by5'/2in. cards.

Results

Table 6 shows the proportion of correct responses to correctletter-name and control words. The children did better on cor-rect letter-name words such as bead and beaver than on controlwords such as bait and bonus. ANOVAs using the factors ofword type (letter-name vs. control) and number of syllables(monosyllabic vs. bisyllabic) showed a main effect of word type,Fl( 1, 25) = 7.79, p = . 010; F2( 1,28) = 43.41, p<. 001, butno effect of number of syllables (p > .90) and no interactionbetween word type and number of syllables (p > .27). The lackof an interaction means that the superiority for words whosefirst consonant and vowel formed the name of their first letterwas similar whether the consonant and vowel formed a syllableon their own, as in beaver, or whether they formed part of asyllable, as in bead. Pooling over monosyllabic and bisyllabicwords, the superiority for correct letter-name words over con-trol words was 13%.

The tendency for better performance on correct letter-namewords as compared to control words was a strong one. Of the 26children, 15 did better on correct letter-name words than oncontrol words and only 1 showed the opposite pattern. The re-maining children did not show a difference between the twotypes of words, 4 because they performed perfectly on bothtypes of words and 6 because they performed at or close to floorlevels. As in Experiment 1, then, one could get very differentideas of a child's knowledge about the initial letters of wordsdepending on the type of word one employed. For example, onechild produced correct responses 75% of the time when askedto give the first letters of words such as bead and beaver, forwhich the first two phonemes are the name of the initial letter.In contrast, this child was never correct at giving the first lettersof words such as bait and bonus.

The children in this experiment rarely produced false letternames that consisted of a word's initial consonant and vowelThey did not produce a higher proportion of such responses tofalse letter-name stimuli such as meal and weasel than to falseletter-name control stimuli such as moan and waiter (.02 vs..02). Such a difference would have been expected if the children

had a special tendency to produce false letter names such as/mi/ and /wi/, which are similar to real letter names in thatthey consist of a consonant phoneme followed by / i / .

The children's errors, rather than being syllables that weresimilar to but not identical to letter names, were predominantlythe names of real letters (80%). For 5 of the children, over halfof the erroneous letter names were the first letter of their ownname. For example, Nicholas said that most of the words beganwith n. This was not true for any of the children in Experiment1. The next most common type of error (11%) was a numberrather than a letter. This is another primitive error that rarelyoccurred in Experiment 1(3%).

As in Experiment 1, children did better at giving the namesof letters than at giving their sounds. The mean proportion ofcorrect responses on the letter-name task of this study was .59,as compared to. 18 for the letter-sound task, Fl (1,25) = 36.39;F2{ 1, 8) = 136.00; ps < .001 for both. Children who did wellon the letter-name task tended to perform better on both correctletter-name and control words than children who did not (r =.47 and .56, respectively; ps < .015 for both). However, a childcan know that /bi/ is the name of a letter and that beaver startswith this letter but not know what the letter b looks like. Thisappeared to be true for several of the children in thisexperiment.

Discussion

The children in this study were better at giving the first lettersof words such as bead than the first letters of words such asbait. These results with monosyllabic words replicate those ofExperiment 1. Because the bead-type words and the fort-typewords were similar in other ways, the difference between themmust reflect the fact that the spoken form of bead begins with aletter name, /bi/, whereas the spoken form of bait does notbegin with a letter name. Similar results were observed withbisyllabic words, which had not been investigated in Experi-ment 1. The children in Experiment 2 were better at giving thefirst letters of words such as beaver, which begin with a lettername, than the first letters of words such as bonus, which do notbegin with a letter name. The magnitude of the superiority forletter-name words over control words was 13%, identical to thatobserved in Experiment 1. This was true even though overalllevels of performance were lower in Experiment 2 than in Ex-periment 1. This difference probably reflects the lower mean ageof the children in this experiment, their lower levels of letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, and the lower frequency ofthe words.

An important finding of Experiment 2 was that the superior-ity for letter-name words over control words was not signifi-cantly larger in the beaver-bonus case than in the bead-bait case.Although null results must be interpreted with caution, the re-sults do not appear to support Ferreiro and Teberosky's (1982)claim that children relate print and speech at the level of sylla-bles before they are able to relate print and speech at the levelof phonemes. If so, one would have expected many children tosucceed at giving the first letter of beaver, which requires themto pick a syllable out of a bisyllabic spoken word, but fail atgiving the first letter of bead, which requires them to pick aconsonant -I- vowel sequence out of a syllable. Apparently, chil-dren find it equally natural that beaver should start with b as

512 TREIMAN, TINCOFF, AND RICHMOND-WELTY

that bead should start with b even though /bi/ is a completesyllable in beaver but only part of a syllable in bead. Perhaps thepresent task's focus on initial segments makes the remainder ofthe word less relevant.

General Discussion

North American children learn the names of letters of thealphabet well before they learn the sounds that the letters make(Mason, 1980; Worden & Boettcher, 1990). The preschoolersin the present studies were no exception. Given a printed letter,they were better able to provide its name than its sound. Thesepreschoolers seemed to benefit from their knowledge of oral let-ter names to make rudimentary links between print and speech.Thus, the children in Experiments 1 and 2 were relatively goodat telling that beech and beaver began with b and that deaj'endedwith/ It makes sense to children that beech and beaver shouldbegin with b because the spoken words begin with / bi /; it makessense that dea/should end with / because the spoken word endswith /ef/. The children were less likely to know that bone andbonus began with b and that loaf'ended with / . This is becausebone and bonus start with /bo/ rather than /bi/ and becauseloaf ends with /of/ rather than /ef/. Moreover, some of the chil-dren in Experiment 1 thought that wife began with y and thatseem began with c. These errors reflect the initial /wai/ and/si/ in the spoken forms of the words.

As discussed in the introductory remarks, very young chil-dren seem to think that writing represents the semantic charac-teristics of words. For example, they expect that bigger objectswill be represented with longer words. A critical step in the ac-quisition of literacy involves learning that writing represents thelinguistic forms of words rather than representing meaning di-rectly. Without this fundamental insight, children will not beable to learn the mappings between letters and phonemes of En-glish or any other alphabetic writing system. Children mayachieve the insight that the printed forms of words reflect theirsounds by noting that the names of letters in printed wordssometimes match sounds or sequences of sounds in the corre-sponding spoken words. For example, the p in the written formof Peter fits with the /pi/ in the spoken form of this word.

Our results are consistent with the suggestion that childrenbegin to create links between printed words and spoken wordsfrom an early age (Ehri, 1993; Perfetti, 1993; Stuart & Colt-heart, 1988). In these views, young children use their knowl-edge of letter names or letter sounds to create connections be-tween some of the letters in a printed word and some of thesounds in the corresponding spoken word. As Stuart and Colt-heart (1988) suggested, children may develop expectationsabout how a word should be spelled even before they have seenit in print. At first, the links between spellings and sounds areincomplete. They involve just the initial letters of words or justthe initial and final letters. Over time, more of the letters inwords' spellings are connected to sounds. Our results suggestthat some children develop expectations about the initial and,to a lesser extent, the final letters of words even before they go tokindergarten and even before they have been exposed to formalreading instruction. The present results go beyond previousfindings by indicating that expectations that are based on letternames, such as the idea that beech starts with b, emerge earlier

than expectations that are based on letter sounds, such as theidea that bone starts with b.

Children may use their expectations about how words shouldbe spelled when learning to read the words. For example, chil-dren who can read few isolated words but who know the namesand sounds of most letters learn to read phonetically basedspellings such as msk for mask and knd for candy more easilythan spellings that are more visually distinctive but that do notreflect the sounds in words (Ehri & Wilce, 1985; Scott & Ehri,1990). In contrast, prereaders who know less about letternames and sounds appear to learn arbitrary, visually distinctivespellings more easily than systematic phonetic spellings (Ehri &Wilce, 1985). The present results suggest that spellings that arebased on letter names should be easier for children to learn thanspellings that are based on letter sounds. For example, youngchildren should learn to read bt more easily when it is presentedas a spelling for beat than when it is presented as a spelling forboot.

Children's expectations about the letters in words shouldshow up more directly in their spelling than in their reading.Our results indicate that even preschoolers can sometimesorally spell the first or last letter of a word when that letter makessense given a letter name in the spoken form of the word. Trei-man (1994, Experiment 2) reported similar results when chil-dren used magnetic letters to spell nonsense words such as/tib/, /pig/, and /zef/. Only preschoolers who could name theletters were selected to participate in the 1994 study. Althoughless than one third of the preschoolers screened met this crite-rion, those who did often spelled the nonsense syllables witha single consonant. For example, they used t to represent thesyllable /tib/ and / to represent the syllable /zef/. Kindergar-teners and first graders tended to use more letters in their spell-ings, often including vowels. Still, kindergarteners sometimesproduced spellings such as tb for /tib/, using the single letter /to represent the entire /ti/ unit. Thus, letter names continue toinfluence spelling for children who are older than the preschool-ers studied here (see also Durrell, 1980; Gentry, 1982; Ehri,1986; Henderson, 1985; Read, 1975; Treiman, 1993). Indeed,Henderson (1985) labeled one of the early stages of learning tospell the letter-name stage.

For kindergarteners and first graders, letter-name effects ap-pear to be stronger for letters whose names are difficult to seg-ment phonemically, such as r and /, than for letters whose namesare easier to segment, such as b and t. These children often pro-duce spellings such as zr for /zar/ but are less likely to producespellings such as tb for /tib/ (Treiman, 1993, 1994). The pres-ent study was not designed to permit comparisons amongdifferent types of letters; this would be a direction for futureresearch.

Our results suggest that children take the first steps in learn-ing to relate print and speech by finding links between letters inprinted words and the names of the letters in the correspondingspoken words. This is a critical development, for it involveslearning that print is a representation of spoken language ratherthan a direct representation of meaning. To progress further, inthe case of an alphabetic writing system, children must learnthat the letters in printed words are linked to speech at the levelof phonemes. Thus, they must learn that it is not only wordsthat start with /bi/ that are spelled with initial b. Words startingwith /bo/, /bu/, and /be/ are also so spelled. By starting with

CONNECTING PRINT AND SPEECH 513

words such as bead and then proceeding to words such as boat,boot, and bake, teachers might take advantage of children's ten-dency to link letters with their names and then help children tomove beyond this strategy.

We did not find evidence for a special role of syllables in thepresent task. Children were not significantly better at sayingthat beaver began with b than at saying that head began with b.At least when children were asked to give the first letters ofwords, it did not seem to be easier to abstract out a consonant+ vowel sequence when that sequence formed a syllable (as withthe /bi/ of beaver) than when it formed part of a syllable (aswith the /bi/ of bead). Provided that /bi/ was present at thebeginning of the spoken word, children were equally likely tosay that the word was spelled with an initial b.

Another question addressed by these experiments waswhether children sometimes make up their own letter namesthat are similar in structure to real English letter names. Forexample, do children invent letter names that consist of a con-sonantal onset followed by /i/? One of the 42 children whocompleted our two experiments produced a number of suchovergeneralizations. This child made up letter names that beganwith a consonant or consonant cluster and ended with / i / , say-ing that loose began with /li/ , that moon began with /mi/, andthat group began with /gri/. Perhaps only some children pickup the phonological patterns that characterize the letter namesof English. Alternatively, only some children may produce newnames that follow this structure, with other children confiningtheir responses to the letter names they have learned. Childrenwho do invent letter names may do so only for a short period oftime, as suggested by the case of the 3'/2-year-old mentioned inthe introductory remarks who produced a number of inventedletter names over a 4-day period. Although letter-name overgen-eralizations are not lasting or widespread, they deserve to beexplored further because they suggest that at least some childrengo beyond rote memorization of letter names to implicitly learnabout the names' phonological structure.

Conclusions

A major step in the acquisition of literacy involves learningthat the printed forms of words are related to their spokenforms rather than directly to their meanings. Only when chil-dren have achieved this insight can they begin to learn specificmappings between letters and phonemes. Children may first re-alize that printed words are related to spoken words by observ-ing that one can sometimes predict the letters that will occur inprinted words from the letter names that occur in the corre-sponding spoken words. Thus, the letter b in bead is motivatedby the /bi/ sound at the beginning of the spoken word; the letter/ in deaf is motivated by the /ef/ sound at the end of the spo-ken word. The preschoolers in the two experiments reportedhere were better able to tell that bead started with b and thatdeaf ended with / than that bone started with b or that loafended with/. By noticing relations between letters in printedwords and letter names in the corresponding spoken words,children may begin to grasp the important concept that theprinted forms of words symbolize their linguistic forms.

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Appendix

Stimuli for Experiments and Word Frequencies According to Carroll, Davies,and Richman (1971) and Kolson (1961)

Experiment 1

Beginning Condition

Correct letter-name: beach, beat, jail, Jane, teeth, team (Carroll et al.mean frequency: 428, range = 51-633; Kolson mean frequency: 115,range = 0-507)

Correct letter-name control: bone, boat, joke, June, tail, tune (Carrollet al. mean frequency: 412, range = 111-959; Kolson mean frequency:69, range = 8-341)

Wrong letter-name: wife, wine, wide, seem, seed, seat (Carroll et al.mean frequency: 502, range = 111-792; Kolson mean frequency: 22,range = 0-71)

Wrong letter-name control: wait, woke, week, soup, sign, sight(Carroll et al. mean frequency: 504, range = 133-863; Kolson meanfrequency: 213, range = 8-1054)

False letter-name: feed, leaf, mean, green, fleet, breeze (Carroll et al.mean frequency: 576, range = 95-1344; Kolson mean frequency: 63,range = 0-162)

False letter-name control: folk, loose, moon, group, flute, broom(Carroll et al. mean frequency: 573, range = 80-1613; Kolson meanfrequency: 33, range = 0-131)

End Condition

Correct letter-name: deaf, Jeff, bell, fell, gem, hem, pen, ten, bar, jar,less, yes (Carroll et al. mean frequency: 526, range = 22-1329; Kolsonmean frequency: 472, range = 0-4917)

Correct letter-name control: loaf, beef, hill, ball, ham, room, pain,bean, fear, hair, pass, bus (Carroll et al. mean frequency: 520, range =70-1832; Kolson mean frequency: 80, range = 0-338)

False letter-name: web, bed, wet, west, desk, theft (Carroll, et al. meanfrequency: 465, range = 11-1077; Kolson mean frequency: 109, range= 0-503)

False letter-name control: job, hid, cat, lift, mask, raft (Carroll et al.mean frequency: 604, range = 57-1781; Kolson mean frequency: 81,range = 7-286)

Experiment 2

Correct letter-name, monosyllabic: bead, beach, deal, peel, peek,team, tease, veal (Carroll et al. mean frequency: 199, range = 9-633;Kolson mean frequency: 16, range = 0-54)

Correct letter-name control, monosyllabic: bait, bone, dive, pile, pole,tail, tame, veil (Carroll et al. mean frequency: 212, range = 14-624;Kolson mean frequency: 26, range = 0-106)

Correct letter-name, bisyllabic: beaver, beetle, deeper, peacock, pea-nut, teacher, teacup, Venus (Carroll et al. mean frequency: 180, range =5-890; Kolson mean frequency: 93, range = 0-733)

Correct letter-name control, bisyllabic: bonus, Bible, doughnut, py-thon, poodle, table, toenail, viper (Carroll et al. mean frequency: 222,range = 0-1563; Kolson mean frequency: 73, range = 0-574)

False letter-name, monosyllabic: feed, leap, meal, weed (Carroll et al.mean frequency: 202, range = 40-379; Kolson mean frequency: 26,range = 0-103)

False letter-name control, monosyllabic: folk, lane, moan, woke(Carroll et al. mean frequency 138, range = 29-291; Kolson mean fre-quency: 12, range = 0-46)

False letter-name, bisyllabic: meter, fever, leader, weasel (Carroll et al.mean frequency: 172, range = 21-310; Kolson mean frequency: 9,range = 0-26)

False letter-name control, bisyllabic: motor, fiber, layer, waiter(Carroll et al. mean frequency 138, range = 32-259; Kolson mean fre-quency: 22, range = 0-79)

Received March 15, 1995Revision received August 22, 1995

Accepted August 29, 1995 •