Spontane Spellingen.

Charles Read described a spelling system for English created by some American preschool children. They represent English words with the standard alphabet and are thus compelled to classify distinct phones in some way. Read inferred from the children's spelling system aspects of their implicit categorization of speech sounds. He found that children related speech sounds( phonemes ) on a phonetic basis, represen-ting these phonemes with the same grapheme. These 'judgements' could be described in terms of phonetic features. The feature place of arti-culation appeared more important than any other feature. We studied the spellings of Dutch preschool children and first graders. We reached the same conclusions as Charles Read for the spellings of Dutch preschool children, but not for Dutch first graders. Moreover we found a pattern of clusterreduction ( spellings like SOM for 'storm' ) and a number of spellings that consisted of consonants only ( e.g. KT for 'kat'). We interpreted these consonantal spellings as syllabic spellings, analogue to Liberman's (1973) findings of speech segmentation by young children.