Spellen is onverwacht gemakkelijker dan segmenteren

Abstract

In early phases of learning to write, spelling is assumed to be based on the partitioning of words into phonemic segments. The current study tests this assumption by investigating the relation between segmentation and spelling errors. After a few months of spelling instruction, children were required to segment and - on another occasion - to write the same words. A high correlation between segmentation and spelling scores was found, as predicted. Spelling, however, appeared to be easier than segmentation. Words were spelled correctly despite wrong segmentation. Some explanations for this unexpected finding are suggested. The use of the segmentation task for diagnosing and remediating spelling problems is discussed.