| Abstract: | This experiment examines children's use of spelling conventions as a guide to pronunciation, and their ability to handle stress assignment rules. The subjects, 7-year-old school children, of whom half had learned to read and write using traditional orthography (t.o.) and half had learned using the initial teaching alphabet (i.t.a.), read out short simple sentences each containing a two-syllable nonsense word. The grammatical category and the spelling of the nonsense words were varied systematically. It was found that, in assigning stress, both groups of children were influenced by phonemic and grammatical features in a manner similar to that predicted by Chomsky and Halle (1968), but they differed in their handling of the silent final e. It was the i.t.a. children whose use of this orthographic device was more in accordance with Chomsky and Halle's theory, despite their relative lack of experience with it. A comparison with Smith and Baker's (1976) adult subjects indicated substantial differences between adults and children, particularly in their treatment of words with a lax final vowel. |
