Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-7jgsp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T16:35:03.128Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Writing in four- to six-year-olds: representation of semantic and phonetic similarities and differences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Liliana Tolchinsky Landsmann  and
Iris Levin
Liliana Tolchinsky Landsmann*
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
Iris Levin*
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
*
School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Israel69978.
School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Israel69978.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

When asked to write an utterance, nursery children and kindergartners often produce strings of unrelated characters. We analysed whether these invented writings reflect similarities and differences in the phonetic and semantic aspects of the utterance. One hundred and twenty Israeli children were asked to write pairs of nouns that share a syllable (e.g. pe ‘mouth’ and perach ‘flower’) and series of sentences that share either mainly nouns or mainly verbs. The older the children, the more their invented writing reflected common linguistic elements and length of utterance. Similarities and differences on the word level were represented at a younger age than those on the syllabic level. Nouns were represented in children's written productions earlier than verbs and adverbs. Invented writing was interpreted as a linguistic act, drawing on the semantic, syntactic and phonological levels of language.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 1987 , pp. 127 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

Thanks are extended to liana Halfon for her assistance in the statistical analysis of the data, and to Ruth Berman, Esther Dromi and Jacques Fijalkow, for significant comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

References

REFERENCES

Armstrong, S. (1984) Children's ability to distinguish names from referents. Paper presented at the Fourteenth Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society. Philadelphia, Pennyslvania.Google Scholar
Bentur, E. (1978) Some effects of orthography on the linguistic knowledge of modern Hebrew speakers. Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Berman, R. (1982) Verb-pattern alteration: the interface of morphology, syntax and semantics in Hebrew child language. Journal of Child Language 9. 169–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, Y., Feinberg, S. & Holland, P. (1975) Discrete multivariate analysis. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Bowey, J., Tunmer, W. & Pratt, C. (1984) Development of children's understanding of the metalinguistic term word. Journal of Educational Psychology 76. 500–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, C. (1970) Reading and phonology. Harvard Educational Review 40. 287–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehri, L. C. (1975) Word consciousness in readers and pre-schoolers. Journal of Educational Psychology 67. 204–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehri, L. C. (1979) Linguistic insight: threshold of reading acquisition. In Waller, T. & MacKinnon, G. E. (eds), Reading research: advances in theory and practice. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Erell, E. (1968) A traditional lexico-morphemic orthography and its reading facilitating qualities. In Figurel, J. Allen (ed.), Forging ahead in reading. Newark, Delaware: I.R.A.Google Scholar
Ferreiro, E. (1978) What is written in a written sentence: a developmental answer. Journal of Education 160. 25–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreiro, E. (1982 a) The relationship between oral and written language: the children's viewpoints. In Goodman, Y., Hausler, M. & Strickland, D. (eds), oral and written language development research: the impact on the schools. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.Google Scholar
Ferreiro, E. (1982 b) Literacy development: the construction of a new object of knowledge. Paper presented to the 27th Convention of the International Reading Association. Chicago.Google Scholar
Ferreiro, E. (1985) Literacy development: a psychogenetic perspective. In Olson, D., Torrance, N. & Hildyard, A. (eds), Literacy, language and learning. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Ferreiro, E. & Teberosky, A. (1979) Los sistemas de escritura en el desarrollo del niño. Mexico: Siglo XXI.Google Scholar
Goodman, N. (1973) Ways of world making. Indianapolis: Hackett.Google Scholar
Hohn, W. E. & Ehri, L. C. (1983) Do alphabet letters help prereaders acquire phonemic segmentation skill? Journal of Educational Psychology 75. 752–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holden, S. H. & MacGinitie, W. H. (1972) Children's conceptions of word boundaries in speech and print. Journal of Educational Psychology 63. 551–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hyman, L. (1975) Phonology theory and analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1986) From metaprocesses to conscious access: evidence from children's metalinguistic and repair data. Cognition 23. 95–147.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Karpova, S. N. (1955) Awareness of word composition of speech in the preschool child. Vaprosy Psikhologii 4. 43–55.Google Scholar
Kuelthau, K. A. (1979) The development of young children's metalinguistic understanding of letter, word and sentence. Technical Report No. 531. University of Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Markman, E. (1976) Children's difficulty with word referent differentiation. Child Development 47. 742–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Navon, D. & Shimron, J. (1984) Reading Hebrew: how necessary is the graphemic representation of vowels? In Henderson, L. (ed.), Orthographies and reading, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Papandropoulou, I. & Sinclair, H. (1974) What is a word? Experimental study of children's ideas on grammar. Human Development 17. 241–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, A. M. (1983) The units of language acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Piaget, J. (1929) The Child's Conception of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Saussure, F. de (1916) Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. (1973) Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I. (eds), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Tolchinsky Landsmann, L. & Levin, I. (1985) Writing in preschoolers: an age related analysis. Applied Psycholinguistics 6. 319–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Venezky, R. L. (1970) The structure of english orthography. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar