Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
This study investigates the use of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules assumed to underlie phonetic spelling errors. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds and adult literacy students did two spelling tasks employing real words and nonwords respectively. Good and poor readers were compared in their ability to produce graphemic representations for four specific phonemes. Two of these were relatively “ambiguous” and the real-word task investigated the effect of ambiguity as a function of reading skill. While good readers were significantly better than poor readers at representing the critical phonemes, ambiguity had a similar effect on good and poor readers. Nonword results indicate that poor readers can employ phoneme-grapheme correspondences more than is expected from their real-word spelling error patterns.