Journal of Literacy Research

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The Concurrent Development of Spelling and Decoding in Two Different Orthographies Esther Geva, Lesly Wade-Woolley and Michal Shany Journal of Literacy Research 1993 25: 383 DOI: 10.1080/10862969309547827 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jlr.sagepub.com/content/25/4/383

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Journal of Reading Behavior 1993, Volume 25, No. 4

THE CONCURRENT DEVELOPMENT OF SPELLING AND DECODING IN TWO DIFFERENT ORTHOGRAPHIES

Esther Geva and Lesly Wade-Woolley Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Michal Shany Beit Berl College of Education

ABSTRACT The hypothesis that differences between first language (LI) and second language (L2) reading and spelling profiles could be accounted for by lack of proficiency in the L2 or differences in orthographic complexity was explored in a longitudinal study of 45 children acquiring reading and spelling skills concurrently in English (L1) and Hebrew (L2). The children were tested in Grades 1 and 2 on literacy measures in both languages. Neither of these explanations alone sufficed to explain the development of reading and spelling in the two languages. The less complex Hebrew orthography facilitated subjects' decoding performance, but failed to maintain that facilitation in spelling. Depressed second language effects were apparent in spelling but not in decoding, which actually favoured the subjects' L2. Developmental findings showed that, despite L1-L2 differences in orthographic complexity and language proficiency, the profiles of emergent spelling in both languages are strikingly similar. The rate of acquisition of conventional spelling, however, differentiates L1 from L2 performance.

The Role of Language Proficiency There is ample evidence to show that reading comprehension in second language (L2) is related to L2 proficiency. The role of language proficiency needs to be examined also in considering the development of basic decoding skills in L2. An intuitively appealing hypothesis is that individuals would read more accurately 383

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Journal of Reading Behavior

in their first language (LI) than in their L2. Two complementary perspectives on language proficiency, varying in level of specificity, can be conceptualized as contributing to the development of basic decoding skills in L2. According to a global perspective, it could be argued that language profiency can be mapped onto components such as fluency, syntactic and lexical knowledge and sensitivity to psycholinguistic appropriateness of utterances (Carroll, 1981; Geva & Ryan, 1993; McLaughlin, 1991). Alternatively, viewed from a perspective focusing on cognitive processing, it should be possible to map linguistic proficiency onto more basic individual differences in underlying processes, such as auditory discrimination, phonological representations, memory for phonemes and for verbal information, and speed of lexical access. All these components, regardless of level of specificity, should be more developed in LI than in the early stages of L2 development, and should therefore lead to relatively better reading skills in LI than in L2. The Role of Orthographic Depth According to the "Orthographic Depth Hypothesis" (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987; Katz & Frost, 1992; Turvey, Feldman, & Lukatela, 1984) there are differences between alphabetic orthographies in terms of how systematically spelling and pronunciations can be mapped onto each other. A shallow orthography allows a simple one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Conversely, a deep orthography, although still abiding by the alphabetic principle, employs a more complex set of relationships between letters and sounds. Relatedly, frequency and lexicality effects in word recognition (e.g., word/nonword judgments) are larger with deep orthographies such as unvowelized Hebrew and English than with shallow orthographies such as Serbo-Croatian (Peeremen, 1992). The effects of orthographic depth on beginning readers has been recognized by educators for several decades; early studies using modified teaching orthographies showed a facilitating effect when compared with readers' performance on traditional English orthography (Gillooly, 1973). It is possible that the facilitating effects of a shallow orthography will be observed in reading and spelling regardless of whether it is the learners' LI or L2. One hypothesis, therefore, is that individuals will learn to read and spell accurately faster when a shallow orthography is involved; in fact, the regular structure of the orthography may override whatever processing difficulties may be imposed by weaker proficiency in the L2. Orthographic depth is typically used to describe a factor that influences the process of decoding. The fact that it influences spelling as well is generally tacitly assumed; however, it must be made clear that the level of orthographic depth does not necessarily remain the same for decoding and spelling. The translation of phonemes to graphemes and graphemes to phonemes may require different rules (Venezky, 1970). In consequence, it is possible for the same language to be shallow for decoders but deeper for spellers. When there is more than one graphemic candidate for a given sound, the speller must evaluate each possibility; this is an added

Spelling and Decoding

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dimension that contributes to a higher processing load for spelling than for decoding. It follows logically that the greater the number of candidates for a given spelling, the greater the chance of error on the part of a novice speller. This suggests that the orthographic depth hypothesis needs to be refined by taking into account a "depth differential" between the processing demands of decoding and spelling tasks. This depth differential may be equally applicable to beginning spellers in both their first language (LI) and second language (L2). The implications of this refinement of the orthographic depth hypothesis will become clearer in the comparison of features of Hebrew and English orthography below. English Orthography It is generally agreed that the orthographic cipher of English is complex. English has 26 letters which map onto more than 36 phonemes, and in order to determine the phonemic value of some graphemes one needs to consider more than one letter. For example, as Gough, Juel, and Griffith (1992) point out, in English the phonemic value of b, d, f, I, n, r, v, r can be determined in word-initial positions without considering other letters. For all the other letters, at least one additional letter must be identified before the value of the first phoneme in a word can be determined. Sometimes the reader needs to consider at least four more letters before the first phoneme can be unambiguously determined (e.g., "chord" vs. "chore"). At other times, the addition of one grapheme can radically change the pronunciation of a letter elsewhere in the word, as in the case for the "silent e" long vowel marker. In addition, there are idiosyncratic words in English, like "yacht," which need to be learned individually since they cannot be pronounced either by rule or analogy on the basis of their spelling. One of the chief causes of the depth of English orthography is its morphophonemic nature (Chomsky & Halle, 1968; Venezky, 1970). Both phonological and morphological information is encoded in the English writing system, and phonological regularity is often sacrificed for the sake of the preservation of meaning. For instance, health and heal have little phonological similarity, yet their semantic connection is obvious from their written forms. Hebrew Orthography Hebrew, like English, is an alphabetic orthography, but is read from right to left. Unlike English, Hebrew script in its vowelized version can be described as "shallow," in that there is a direct and systematic correspondence between the twenty two consonants and the associated phonemes (Frost & Bentin, 1992). Hebrew is an example, however, of a language where decoding depth and spelling depth are not identical. Five consonants have a different final form, employed when they appear at the very end of a word. Therefore, for these consonants, spellers must consider two orthographic candidates for a given phoneme, as opposed to the one-to-one

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relationship that holds in reading. Additionally, Hebrew orthography allows certain silent consonants in word final position (i.e., aleph n , heh 71 , ayin ¿i ). When decoding, these consonants receive a null phonological representation; the shallowness is preserved since these are always silent. When spelling, the individual must be aware, a priori, that these silent consonants are present, since no phonological stimulus signals their presence. For example, in the Hebrew word >&* (/imaJ, mother), the decoder pronounces a word that begins and ends with a vowel sound, but the speller must remember that the orthographic representation includes silent consonants at the beginning and the end. If, however, an emergent speller omits the silent consonants in phonetic spelling (e.g., $H ), the output can still be decoded unambiguously as /ima/. Therefore, even at its deepest, vowelized Hebrew is shallower than English. The difference between vowel sounds and vowel letters is paramount here. Hebrew vowel graphemes, in the form of dots and dashes, are placed below, above, or to the left of the consonants. These vowels are quite close to the cardinal vowels in their phonetic realization (Berman, 1978). Although it is a common practice for printers to omit vowels from texts designed for fluent readers, children (and L2 learners) learn to read first with the vowels intact. Likewise, expert spellers omit vowels when they write. Unlike English, the pronunciation of words in Hebrew very rarely requires readers to consider exceptions associated with specific letter strings, idiosyncratic spellings, or position in the word and vowel combinations. The formation of lettersound associations and word decoding requires the learner to master fewer rules, and does not entail the creation of a large repertoire of exception words read on the basis of analogy rather than rule (e.g., have vs. gave). For this reason, accurate word decoding in Hebrew can be learned easily, and can be executed in a linear and systematic fashion (Geva & Siegel, 1991). Modern Hebrew includes borrowed words, but their orthographic realization is, on the whole, transparent. It is possible to take advantage of Hebrew's regularity and learn to decode without any oral proficiency in or semantic knowledge of the language. This does not mean, of course, that lexical, syntactic and semantic information does not contribute to efficient lexical access and to comprehension (Shimron & Navon, 1982). The Relationship Between Early Reading and Spelling in LI There seems to be convergence among researchers as to subtle steps in the development of early reading skills by young children learning to read English as their LI (Perfetti, 1992). For instance, Gough et al. (1992) point out that the acquisition of the "cipher" (knowledge of spelling-sound correspondence rules) generally increases the child's ability to recognize words, and that it does not take place in a uniform fashion across different words (see also Perfetti, 1992). The acquisition of the cipher influences the probability that the child will commit reading errors, because English contains many words that cannot be successfully decoded


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on the basis of simple letter-sound correspondences. Cipher reading also influences the nature of errors. When children begin to internalize the cipher they are more likely to commit nonword errors than real word errors. With the development of the cipher, the child's ability to generate spellings increases, but it does not happen across the board in an all or none fashion. Juel, Griffith and Gough (1985) found a significant correlation between a decoding task and a spelling task. Gough, Juel, and Roper/Schneider (1983) maintain that the acquisition of the cipher enhances correct spelling, and that the quality of children's spelling errors is affected by the acquisition of the cipher. Support for this comes from Gough et al. (1983) who found that cipher readers make more phonetic spelling errors than "code" readers, who rely on a selective association of words based on distinctive visual cues in written words. Furthermore, Juel et al. (1985) found that code readers perform poorly on pseudoword reading, and in spelling often include one salient correct letter of a target word, but all other letters may be random. A complementary position holds that children pass through an intermediate stage between the code and cipher stages proposed by Gough et al. (1992) to describe how children read words. In this stage, "phonetic-cue reading" (Ehri, 1992), only a few relevant cues are considered by the child; these important cues link the spelling to the pronunciation of the word. The crucial element in this process is the linkage of the grapheme with its phonemic value, which for most English letters, is easily recoverable from the letter name itself. Bradley and Bryant (1985) argue that children use different strategies for reading and spelling. Gough et al. (1992), however, maintain that the cipher is the basis for skilled reading and skilled spelling. They agree, however, that in spite of a high degree of consistency between spelling and reading, which can be attributed to their common basis (i.e., the cipher), spelling cannot be seen as simply a reflection of reading, since "polygraphy is not the same as polyphony" (p. 47). Willows (1993) points out that the task demands involved in generating correct spellings are heavier than those involved in decoding. Early Reading/Spelling Acquisition in L2: Theoretical and Methodological Issues Not much is known on developmental stages in the acquisition of basic reading skills in L2. For this reason the relevance of the above discussion for comparing reading acquisition across different orthographies and for studying L2 reading acquisition requires careful examination. It is not completely clear on what basis one can determine the equivalence of task demands implicated in decoding isolated words in different languages. For example, word frequency is generally taken to reflect stronger lexical representation (Seidenberg, 1992), and frequency effects in LI readers are well-documented. However, one cannot assume that the frequency of a word in one language mirrors that of its translation in another Ian-

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guage. Furthermore, L2 learners by definition have limited lexical knowledge in their second language, so measures of word frequency which are derived from distributional characteristics in the target language cannot be used reliably to calculate L2 processing factors. Likewise, nonword error patterns in L2 decoding and spelling cannot be unambiguously attributed to a particular reading stage, as Gough et al. (1983) suggest for LI reading. For the less proficient L2 learner, there may be no qualitative difference between successfully decoding an unfamiliar word, and making decoding errors that result in a nonword, since nonnative speakers are accustomed to encountering unknown words which have the status of nonwords. Additionally, knowing the names of L2 letters may not be as good an index of knowledge of those letters' phonemic values, an observation often associated with research on English as LI (Ehri, 1992), simply because of the lack of early childhood experience with letter-naming activities typical of North American prereaders (Lundberg & Hoiem, 1991; Naslund & Schneider, 1991). Evidence for this comes from a recent study by Geva, Shany and Himel (1992), which found similar levels of decoding accuracy in both English (LI) and Hebrew (L2), despite the fact that children made no letter-naming errors in English, compared to a significant incidence of such errors in their second language. Another point that must be raised is the assumption of phonological competence in the L2. One of the challenges facing children learning a second language is the lack of phonological representation of L2-specific sounds. The theoretical link between phonology and reading skills is well established; however, most of the research that informs this position has focused on English native language readers. In studying differences between LI and L2 reading profiles, one may need to take into consideration the effects of interlanguage phonologies. It is possible that, as in English, the necessary cue resides in the letter name, but if there is no corresponding representation in the learner's L2 phonological repertoire, then errors on these elements may be expected to reflect this lack. Finally, existing literacy skills in the LI may influence the course of reading acquisition in the second language. Transfer effects of LI skills to L2 may be more substantial when older literate learners are considered. In this study, possible effects due to previous literacy instruction were minimized by investigating the parallel development of decoding and spelling skills in children who were acquiring these skills concurrently in their LI and L2. Notwithstanding the caveats listed above, an economical account of L2 reading development favours similar developmental stages in both LI and L2 (at least where alphabetic languages are concerned). Thus one would expect, for instance, that the progression from cipher to code stages of reading offered by Gough et al. (1992) would be evident in both LI and L2. A complementary hypothesis derived from the theoretical perspective that language proficiency is the primary influence on literacy acquisition might predict differences in rate of reading and spelling


389

acquisition due to L1-L2 proficiency differences, with an advantage to LI due to higher proficiency in LI. In such a scenario, the transition from stage to stage may be slower in the L2 than in the LI. At the same time, the role of differences in orthographic depth cannot be ignored. A hypothesis derived from the theoretical position that orthographic depth is the primary influence of literacy acquisition might predict differences in the rate of acquisition favoring the less complex orthography, regardless of language proficiency. Thus, Hebrew, as the shallower orthography, would be acquired faster than the English, despite its status as the subjects' less proficient second language. As well as considering orthographic depth across languages, one must also take the task-specific "depth differential" into account. For example, it is generally agreed that English is equally deep for spellers and decoders; therefore, one might expect a similar level of performance on spelling and reading measures in English, since both require an elaborated knowledge of complex orthographic patterns. In Hebrew on the other hand, knowledge of orthographic complexity associated with silent letters and homophones is challenged to a much greater degree in spelling than in decoding. As a result, one might expect learners to perform better on Hebrew decoding than on Hebrew spelling tasks. Whereas the relationship between reading and spelling has been amply researched in first language studies, there is no corresponding theory in the arena of second language. A parsimonious account of these processes in L2 favours similar developmental stages in both LI and L2 (at least where alphabetic languages are concerned). At the same time, the development of a more realistic model also requires an examination of differential language proficiency and orthographic complexity.

METHOD Subjects Children participating in the study came from an elementary, English-Hebrew private day-school in a large metropolitan area. The classes in the school range from junior kindergarten (age 4) to Grade 8. The majority of children in the school come from middle-class homes in which English is the primary language. Beginning in Grade 1, children are exposed each day to a regular English program, as well as to 2-3 periods of Hebrew studies. The Hebrew program includes language and reading as well as cultural content. The academic program is fairly demanding; the school day starts at 9:00 in the morning and continues to 4:00 in the afternoon. Within each class the English and Hebrew programs are taught by different teachers. Reading instruction includes a combination of phonics and whole language methods.

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A letter was sent to all the children in the 3 Senior Kindergarten (SK) classes (age range 5 to 6). Only those children whose parents signed a consent form which described the nature of the study, the anonymity of participants, the confidentiality of individual scores and that they were free to withdraw from the study at any time, took part in the study. Results reported here are based on the performance of children with English as their first or best language (as determined by information provided by teachers as well as a brief student interview questionnaire). Of the 90 children in that age group, the parents of 55 children provided their consent. Of the original 55 subjects, 2 had Hebrew as their best language, and their data was not included in subsequent analyses. In addition, 3 of the children tested in SK did not continue attending this bilingual English-Hebrew day-school and 2 moved to another city. Three additional children left the school after Grade 1. Of the 55 children in the original SK cohort, complete data for all three years were available for 45 children (22 boys and 23 girls; average age 66.18 months).

Measures Independent Variables Language. The subjects in this study served as their own controls since they performed on parallel tasks in English and Hebrew. Grade level. Due to the longitudinal nature of this study, development is likely to be a factor in subjects' performance; therefore, dependent measures were taken on all tasks in both Grades 1 and 2. Receptive vocabulary. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT) (1981) was used as a measure of receptive vocabulary. Intervening Variables The following variables were conceptualized as component processing skills, and used as predictors in multiple regressions analyses: Phoneme segmentation. The Auditory Analysis Test (Rosner & Simon, 1971; hereafter, Rosner) is a measure of phonological awareness and segmenting ability, in which the child is asked to segment and delete syllables and phonemes from familiar words. Since this task was administered in SK, prior to any systematic instruction of Hebrew, only an English version was administered. Phonological recognition. A task developed by Olson, Kliegl, Davidson, and Foltz (1985) and revised by Siegel (1993) was administered to examine children's developing repertoire of English words they can recognize on the basis of assembled phonological information. In this task (hereafter EPHONO), the child is asked to


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identify which of two pseudowords in a stimulus pair (e.g.,joak-joap) "sounds like a real word." A parallel task (hereafter HPHONO ) was developed in Hebrew with the real words drawn from the repertoire of words taught in the Grade 1 program (e.g., spinning top, /s'vivon/-/s'vivod/). There are 26 stimulus pairs in EPHONO and 20 pairs in HPHONO. Results are based on percent correct. Visual recognition. A task developed by Olson et al. (1985) and revised by Siegel (1993) was administered to examine children's developing repertoire of words they can recognize from visual memory. The task (hereafter EVISUAL) consists of 26 homophonic word pairs, where one of the items is spelled correctly (e.g., rain-rane). Subjects must identify which of the items in each stimulus pair is spelled correctly. A parallel task consisting of 20 stimulus pairs was developed for Hebrew (hereafter HVISUAL). All the correctly spelled words consist of words taught in the Grade 1 program (e.g., /torah/-/tora/). Results are based on percent correct. Dependent Variables English word recognition. To assess children's ability to read isolated words in English, the word recognition subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test-Revised (WRAT-R) (Jastak & Jastak, 1984) was used. This test (hereafter EWORD) consists of 75 unrelated words. It begins with highly familiar and short words, but as the child progresses through the list the words become less frequent, longer and orthographically more complex. In keeping with the administration directives of this test, responses arrived at through slow syllable-by-syllable decoding were scored as incorrect. Testing stops when the child commits 10 consecutive errors. The content validity of the WRAT has been questioned; critics have charged that the items have not maintained pace with changes in curricula. Given that the predominant philosophy in current reading instruction does not favour the use of basal readers, it becomes increasingly difficult to assume that any one standardized test of word recognition can fulfill the content validity requirements across different reading programs. Additionally, some concerns have been raised about the test standardization and norming properties of the WRAT and its applicability for diagnostic purposes (Conoley & Kramer, 1989). Yet, since one of the key research questions in this study revolves around the development of reading from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and the subjects act as their own controls, these criticisms, although valid in themselves, may be less crucial. Hebrew word recognition. To test children's ability to read words in their L2, a test developed by Geva (see Geva & Siegel, 1991) based on the vocabulary taught in the Grades 1-5 program in the bilingual Hebrew day-school system was used. This test (hereafter HWORD) consists of 60 unrelated words with the vowels intact. Two variables were manipulated in the design of this test: familiarity and word length. The first 30 words come from the school curriculum and should be familiar to all children even in Grade 1. The familiar list was constructed in two

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steps: The first involved the selection of common, recurring words in the curriculum identified during classroom observations by the test developer. The second step involved teacher judgments of word familiarity. Only words judged to be familiar in the second step were included. The remaining 30 words are highly infrequent in everyday Hebrew, a fact confirmed by judgments of 4 Hebrew native speakers with graduate degrees, and do not appear in the curriculum. Within each familiarity condition, the first 10 are one-syllable words, the next 10 are two-syllable words, and the last 10 are three- or four-syllable words, for example, /ner/ (candle), /shanah/ (year), and /maxberet/ (notebook) in the familiar set, and /tel/ (archaeological digging site), /meitzar/ (strait), and /anafah/ (heron) in the unfamiliar set, respectively. Administration procedures are identical to those described above for EWORD. Based on data of 245 Grades 1-5 children, Geva and Siegel (1991) report that the Cronbach alpha for this test is 0.92. English pseudoword decoding. The Word Attack subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (Woodcock, 1987) was used to assess children's ability to employ various orthographic rules to decode pseudowords. This test (hereafter EPSEUDO) consists of 50 pseudowords which comply with English orthographic rules. Testing stops when the child makes 6 consecutive errors. Pseudoword decoding is taken to be a reliable measure of phonological skills. Results are based on percentage scores. Hebrew pseudoword decoding. To test the ability of children to employ word attack skills in Hebrew, a pseudowords task (hereafter HPSEUDO) was employed (Geva & Siegel, 1991). The test consists of 44, two-syllable pseudowords. Administration procedures are identical to those described above for EPSEUDO. Results are based on percent correct. The Cronbach alpha for this test is >95. English spelling. The Developmental Spelling Task (Ferroli & Shanahan, 1987) was used to find out about children's development and knowledge of word elements in English, as revealed in their spelling and error patterns. The list consists of 12 simple and frequent words which reflect various aspects of English orthography (e.g., long vowels, morphological endings). Hebrew spelling. A parallel task in Hebrew was created for this study. In an attempt to minimize the effects of lack of familiarity with word meanings and exposure to the written form of words in Hebrew, the Hebrew spelling task was developed from the range of vocabulary explicitly taught in the Grade 1 curriculum. It includes 15 words which address various orthographic principles in Hebrew such as the marking of plurality (e.g., /tsva'im/, colors), the spelling of the /ax/ syllable in word final position (e.g., /tapuax/, -apple), and the spelling of the /ts/ sound in word final position (e.g., /mits/, juice). Three scoring systems, varying in level of specificity, were used in this study to encode various levels of spelling knowledge in both English and Hebrew. First, an overall measure of absolute accuracy was taken. Words were counted as cor-


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rectly or incorrectly spelled, according to the rules of conventional spelling, and the percentage of correctly spelled words was calculated. These measures will be referred to hereafter as ESPELL% and HSPELL%. The second scoring scheme locates spellings along a continuum conceptualized by Ehri (1986). This model of emergent spelling comprises three stages; a score of 0 was given to spellings that were reflective of the "semiphonetic" stage; characteristic errors at this stage may involve lack of medial vowels, incomplete spellings, or arbitrary extra letters (e.g., dlake for lake; stk for stick). Spellings that were typical of the "phonetic" stage received a score of 1. Children spelling at this level adhere rigorously to a "one letter per sound" principle, and consequently represent both long and short vowels by one letter. They may also tend to add nonarbitrary letters that they hear when they stretch the word out as they spell it (e.g., deragin for dragon). Spellings reflective of the final stage in this scoring scheme, the "morphemic" stage, receive a score of 2. At this stage, children start to become cognizant of particular spelling patterns, word families and morphemic encodings. For example, they may show an understanding that the past tense is spelled ed, regardless of the fact that it sometimes has a phonological realization of N, as in peeked. Conventional spellings received a score of 3. The third scoring system provided a sublexical analysis to detect specific areas of difficulty. The spelling items were divided into sublexical units that appeared to be most interesting on the basis of the preceding scoring. These orthographic elements were classified into two categories. The first category contained transparent elements; these are orthographic patterns that are easily recoverable from their phonological representations, such as "bl" in black and simple short vowels. The second category contained opaque elements which cannot be unambiguously derived from their pronunciations, but they may be the product of a highly productive rule (e.g., the "silent e rule" for long-vowel formation in English and final-form consonants in Hebrew). For scoring purposes, each spelling element in each of the two categories received a 0 if it was not represented at all, a 1 if the representation was partial or incorrect, and a 2 if conventional spelling was achieved. Procedures The data reported here are part of a longitudinal project concerned with the development of parallel LI and L2 literacy indices, and the role of various linguistic and cognitive measures (e.g., phonological awareness, verbal ability, memory) in understanding and predicting this development. Children were tested in late winter or early spring in each of 3 consecutive years. Children were first tested when they were in Senior Kindergarten (SK), and then again in Grade 1 and Grade 2. The PPVT-R and Rosner were administered in SK; The parallel LI and L2 reading and spelling measures, as well as the parallel LI and L2 visual recognition and phonological recognition tasks, were administered to these children in Grade 1, and a year later when they were in Grade 2. Testing was done on an individual

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basis. Each of the LI and L2 reading and spelling task clusters was administered in separate sessions by university students. LI testing was done by English native speakers, L2 testing was carried out by Hebrew native speakers.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The Relationships among Emerging Reading and Spelling Skills in LI and L2 Table 1 provides a summary of the relationships among spelling and reading indices in Grades 1 and 2, as well as the correlations among these measures, receptive vocabulary (PPVT), the phonological segmenting task (Rosner), and the visual and phonological recognition tasks. Four general observations can be drawn from an examination of this table. First, one notes that within each language, even though the words used to assess word recognition and spelling were not identical, all tasks were positively and highly intercorrelated. For instance, in Grade 1 the correlation between ESPELL% and EWORD was r=.82, and with EPSEUDO it was r=.81. Although the overall strength of the correlations remained high for the Hebrew tasks, there was a drop in the strength of the correlations. For instance, the correlation between HSPELL% and HWORD was r=.57, and between HSPELL% and HPSEUDO r=.62. This pattern of strong within-language correlations not only confirms previous findings reported in the literature on the fact that the emergence of decoding and spelling skills tend to be strongly interrelated but also extends it to L2 acquisition. The second observation concerns the extent to which the same facilitative interrelationships between reading and spelling hold across languages. The answer to this question is not straightforward. Hebrew spelling correlated equally with reading measures in both languages. For instance, the correlation between HSPELL% and EWORD was r=.12, and with EPSEUDO r=.65. However, English spelling correlated significantly but only moderately with the Hebrew word recognition and pseudoword measures (r=.39, and n=.44, respectively). Next, one notes that in Grade 2 the within-language correlations among spelling and reading measures were somewhat attenuated. At the same time the cross language patterns described above continue to be evident, namely, positive and significant relationships between the Hebrew spelling and the English decoding tasks, but virtually no correlation between the English spelling measure and the Hebrew reading measures. On the whole, the generally high intercorrelations among English and Hebrew measures in Grade 1 and their subsequent drop in Grade 2 suggest that as the children develop there is a gradual "unpacking" and increased differentiation of LI and L2 linguistic skills. This trend is also evident by an examination of the correlations among the Rosner and the measures in English and Hebrew. In fact, a striking result can be seen in the highly predictive role of the Rosner vis-à-vis

Table 1 Intercorrelations Matrix of Reading and Spelling Indices in Grade 1 and Grade 2 (n=45)a E

Grade 1

Grade 2

WORD

H WORD

E H E H E PSEUDO PSEUDO VISUAL VISUAL PHONO

EWORD H WORD EPSEUDO HPSEUDO E VISUAL H VISUAL EPHONO HPHONO ESPELL% H SPELL % ROSNER PPVT

1 .554 .855 .588 .734 .492 .707 .494 .823 .722 .615 .039

1 .504 .876 .331 .454 .397 .560 .386 .569 .316 .010

1 .532 .667 .566 .660 .563 .812 .648 .679 .011

EWORD H WORD EPSEUDO HPSEUDO E VISUAL H VISUAL EPHONO HPHONO ESPELL% H SPELL % ROSNER PPVT

1 .543 .670 .395 .607 .314 .450 .346 .655 .519 .413 .023

1 .565 .664 .481 .403 .477 .554 .293 .619 .374 .009

1 .319 .516 .461 .637 .437 .618 .385 .033

1 .428 .609 .242 .719 .565 .477 .015

1 .404 .432 .520 .563 .301 .008

1 .451 .666 .600 .449 .027

H PHONO

E H SPELL% SPELL% ROSNER

1 .457 .531 .505 .068

1 .655 .581 .004

1 .409 .010

1 .064

a. O

1 1 .472 .475 .196 .534 .360 .675 .487 .439 .015

a. 1 .454 .429 .281 .624 .158 .524 .256 .002

1 .381 .372 .660 .569 .413 .367 .036

1 .030 .684 .203 .320 .216 .023

•Correlations above .29 are significant atp ) and "sin" ( u ). From the point of view of the "emerging" LI or L2 speller, these are opaque elements which represent sources of orthographic complexity'since both candidates need to be considered in spelling. The task complexity is compounded when the same homophone "xaf ' ( 3 ) also requires a different graphemic representation when it appears in word final position ( 7 )• Likewise, the sound /ts/ ( X ), which cannot occur word-initially in English, needs to be disambiguated from its neighbour /s/. Furthermore, in word final position, /ts/ takes a different graphemic representation ( y ). If it is true that the last two examples are more complex because they require the coordination of orthographic and phonological decisions, then children should have more difficulties with them than when the source of the difficulty is only orthographic. We examined this question by collapsing relevant Hebrew spelling elements into an "orthographic" or an "orthographic/phonological" category. Results of this analysis are summarized in Figure 3. Clearly, children were more likely to provide only a partially correct spelling to word-elements which require the coordination of orthographic and phonological information than to items which tax only their orthographic knowledge. However, they were more successful in carrying out this coordination in Grade 2 than they were in Grade 1. We come to conclude, therefore, that in learning to spell in Hebrew one source of difficulty rests with items which are homophones and which require special attention to orthographic rules such as letter shape in word-final position. The latter may be a source of difficulty also to children learning to spell in Hebrew as their LI. When Hebrew is learnt as L2, however, these problems are exacerbated by reduced exposure, less frequent practice and less accurate phonological representation. We concur, therefore, with Gough et al. (1992) who remind us that "polygraphy is not the same as polyphony." Results of this research extend the relevance of this remark to the development of reading and spelling in L2.

•°— •*•—

2.0

Grade 1 Grade 2

1.6-

e g 1.20.8

orthographic

ortho&phono

Figure 3. Alternative sources of spelling complexity in Hebrew in Grades 1 and 2.


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CONCLUSIONS The use of a developmental perspective provides one dimension for articulating component processes in learning to read and spell in different orthographies. First, we note that, as is the case with spelling development in English as U , it is inaccurate to assume that a child spells all L2 words at a certain stage. Instead, as we noted, the spelling of different words progresses at a different pace towards standard spelling; the errors children make reflect a combination of their "interlanguage" hypotheses about the nature of phonemes and their corresponding graphemes in the L2, with an increasing repertoire of word-specific orthographic knowledge. As the analysis of the spelling error data has revealed, despite L1-L2 differences in orthographic demands and despite differences in language experience, the developmental patterns noted for LI and L2 spelling are strikingly similar. What is not similar is the pace at which children approximate standard spelling, with a clear advantage to the LI. We conclude that similar developmental stages characterize the acquisition of reading and spelling skills associated with the onset of systematic literacy instruction in LI and L2. However, although overall developmental trajectories associated with LI spelling acquisition are mirrored in L2 spelling development, in L2, specific difficulties such as lack of phonological representations and opaque orthographic elements exert increased task demands. In other words, where an L2 effect is noticed, it is not generalized, but rather, can be localized to specific processing areas affecting phonological or orthographic features. An intuitive hypothesis regarding relative accuracy in reading and spelling in LI and L2 would favour a scenario in which due to global LI benefits, young children should perform more accurately in their LI. Clearly, this is not what we found in this study. Instead, we found that children could decode and access the lexicon via assembled phonology with greater ease in their second language. To explain this seemingly surprising result one could call on predictions derived from the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis; accordingly, one would anticipate that children should acquire with greater ease cipher-related rules in a shallow orthography such as vowelized Hebrew than in a deep alphabetic orthography such as English. Hence, one would expect decoding and spelling skills to develop with greater ease in Hebrew. However, results of the present study do not support this simple generalization, either. In fact, results of the present study indicate that asking questions such as which exerts more influence, differences in orthographic depth or experience with the second language, oversimplify a complex process. As we have shown, in English first graders perform equally on word recognition and spelling. In Hebrew, on the other hand, they perform much better in reading than in spelling. Most of the research on the decoding-spelling connection comes from English which is an alphabetic language with equally deep orthographic demands on spelling and decoding. However, in languages such as Hebrew, which is deeper for spellers than

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decoders, these two skills develop at a different pace. We must emphasize, however, that these results are based on the acquisition of Hebrew as L2, and additional research is needed to establish a Hebrew LI baseline. Although it seems that L2 proficiency does not play a crucial role in learning to decode in a shallow orthography, this does not preclude the essential role that proficiency plays in reading comprehension. The interplay of basic decoding processes and higher level processes such as reading comprehension and writing in context was, however, beyond the scope of the present study. It could be argued that differences in the rate of acquisition of reading and spelling skills in Hebrew and English reflect inequivalencies in the testing instruments rather than differential orthographic demands, despite the efforts to construct Hebrew tasks which reflect similar item properties. In other words, the stronger performance on the Hebrew reading measures might be due to the fact that the Hebrew instruments were somehow inherently "easier" than the parallel English ones. For this to be so, factors such as word length, frequency, and familiarity should be biased in favour of the Hebrew tasks. Given that Hebrew is the subjects' L2, and in light of the L2-specific methodological concerns raised earlier in this paper, it is difficult to see how this condition could obtain. The only variable on which the Hebrew tasks are demonstrably easier is the experimental variable in question: that of orthographic complexity.

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AUTHOR NOTE The research reported here was partially supported by Small Scale Grants from the Natural Sciences Research Council of Canada to the first author. Manuscript submitted: January Revision requested: March Revision received: April Accepted for publication: June

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