This groundbreaking study on the psycholinguistics of spelling presents the author's original empirical research on spelling and supplies the theoretical framework necessary to understand how children's ability to write is related to their ability to speak a language. The author explores areas in a field dominated by work traditionally concerned with the psychodynamics of reading skills and, in so doing, highlights the importance of learning to spell for both psycholinguists and educators, since as they begin to spell, children attempt to represent the phonological, or sound form, of words....

are the findings that Wade-Woolley and Siegel obtained when they studied children for whom English was a second language. Although the second language speakers performed more poorly than the native speakers on tests of syntactic knowledge, phoneme deletion, and pseudoword repetition, the second language speakers were not worse than the native speakers in spelling. These results suggest that, even if children have not fully mastered the sound system of their second language, they need not be disadvantaged in spelling it. The findings appear to pose a challenge to views of reading and spelling...

are the findings that Wade-Woolley and Siegel obtained when they studied children for whom English was a second language. Although the second language speakers performed more poorly than the native speakers on tests of syntactic knowledge, phoneme deletion, and pseudoword repetition, the second language speakers were not worse than the native speakers in spelling. These results suggest that, even if children have not fully mastered the sound system of their second language, they need not be disadvantaged in spelling it. The findings appear to pose a challenge to views of reading and spelling...

Writing allows people to convey information to others who are remote in time and space, vastly increasing the range over which people can cooperate and the amount they can learn. Mastering the writing system of one's language is crucial for success in a modern society. This book examines how children learn to write words. It provides a theoretical framework that integrates findings from a wide range of age groups--from children who are producing their first scribbles to experienced spellers who are writing complex words. To set the stage for these discussions, early chapters of the book...

Writing is one of humankind's greatest inventions, and modern societies could not function if their citizens could not read and write. How do skilled readers pick up meaning from markings on a page so quickly, and how do children learn to do so? The chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Reading synthesize research on these topics from fields ranging from vision science to cognitive psychology and education, focusing on how studies using a cognitive approach can shed light on how the reading process works.

To set the stage, the opening chapters present information about writing...