Effects of Dialect on American and British Children's Spelling

Abstract

Two experiments were carried out to compare the spelling of children who speak General American English and children who speak Southern British English. The first dialect is rhotic (/r/ may occur after a vowel in a syllable), and the second is nonrhotic (/r/ may not occur in this context). Young children's spelling errors reflected the characteristics of their dialect. For example, American children with spelling ages of about 671/2 often misspelled hurt as hrt whereas British children of similar spelling levels were more likely to misspell it as hut. Such errors were uncommon by spelling ages of greater than 71/2. Even at these spelling ages, however, the British children made overgeneralization errors that reflected their dialect. For example, they sometimes spelled bath as barth based on the fact that bath contains the same vowel sound as card in their dialect. The results show that phonology plays an important role in children's spelling development.

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