Relations between children’s invented spelling and the development of phonological awareness

The objective of this study was to assess the impact on phonological skills of a training program that was intended to lead preschool children to move from prephonetic spellings to early phonemic spellings. The participants were 30 preschool children who were divided into two groups (experimental and control groups) that were equivalent in terms of the children’s intelligence, the number of letters with which they were familiar and the nature of their invented spelling. The intervention proved effective, inasmuch as the children in the experimental group moved to early phonemic spellings, whereas those in the control group did not. This conceptual evolution entailed enhanced performance in phonemic classification, segmentation and deletion tests, in which the children in the experimental group displayed a degree of progress which differed significantly from that achieved by the members of the control group