Abstract
In orthographies studied to date, children learning to spell tend to omit one consonant of a cluster—for initial clusters, the second consonant, and for medial nasal clusters, the nasal. Explanations have included a special status for the initial consonant of a word, and the fact that in English nasal clusters are not true clusters but consist of a nasalised vowel plus a consonant. We tested children’s spelling of initial and medial clusters consisting of a nasal consonant followed by another consonant, but non-nasalised vowels, in Kiswahili. For both initial and medial clusters, the nasal was spelled wrongly more often than the other consonant. The initial position in a word does not seem to have special properties. Rather, the spelling of clusters seems to depend on the properties of the individual phonemes, nasals being particularly difficult to spell. It is concluded that cross-linguistic studies of spelling development are necessary to draw generalised conclusions about phonological processing.
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Acknowledgements
The study was carried out under the auspices of Partnership for Child Development (PCD, Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Disease, Department of Zoology, Oxford University), and Ushirikiano wa Kumwendeleza Mtoto Tanzania (UKUMTA)—The Tanzania Partnership for Child Development. Support for this research was provided by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, grant reference 94-13. We would like to express our thanks to Rebecca Treiman for design suggestions and theoretical advice as well as to Fausta Ngowi, Rajabu Mandali and Juliet Mdusi of the MAKWAMI project in Bagamoyo, Tanzania for their assistance in collection of the data reported in this paper. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Fausta Ngowi.
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Alcock, K., Ngorosho, D. Learning to spell and learning phonology: the spelling of consonant clusters in Kiswahili. Read Writ 20, 643–670 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-006-9043-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-006-9043-9