Phonological features that might appear in childrens

spellings
Feature

Means

Reasons / evaluation

Vowel
deletion

Missing out
vowels, e.g. trk,
doctr

Replacing
voiced
consonants
with
unvoiced, or
vice versa
th -fronting

td
fv
pb
sh zh
dg

Replacing
velar nasal
with dental
nasal
Syllable
deletion

Writing n
instead of ng

Very common in invented spellings

and early phonetic spellings,
because consonants are easier to hear
and identify
These pairs of phonemes are made in
exactly the same part of the mouth
and may change their sound
depending on where they are in the
word, eg Norwich often sounds like
Noridge, Scooby sounds like Sgooby.
This is a feature of traditional Cockney
and modern Estuary English
accents, as in I fink its a good idea.
Children who hear these accents have
to learn the standard pronunciation
before they can learn the spelling.
This is a common feature of many
accents in casual speech, so the child
is spelling phonetically according to
what they hear.
May happen because children dont
hear all the syllables when people say
the word, or because they get lost
when writing and lose track of what
they have done.

Vocalisation
of l

kg
sz
ch -

Replacing th
with f

Missing out
syllables,
especially those
which are not
stressed when
saying the word
Pronouncing L
as a w at the
end of words

Missing final
silent e

Writing fas
instead of face,
mad instead of
made

Incorrect
vowel teams

Using the wrong

combination of
vowel
graphemes to
represent a
phoneme.
Missing out one
phoneme from a
consonant

Cluster
reduction

This is a common feature of Essex /

Estuary accents. Little comes out as
littw and well as wew. These
sounds are quite vague and difficult to
differentiate.
The magic e rule turns short
vowels (the letter sound) into
letter names, eg hat (short vowel)
becomes hate (saying name of letter
A). Until children learn this rule they
will struggle to represent vowels
correctly.
The system for writing vowel sounds in
English is illogical and complex. Many
common words have to be learned by
heart as there is no way to guess
whether a word should be spelled with
ea, ee e-e or ie.
Children may miss out letters from
words with consonant clusters, eg
sting instead of string because that

cluster
Application of
wrong
spelling rule

Using a learned
rule or pattern to
attempt an
unfamiliar word

is how they pronounce the word

themselves.
If a child writes field as feeled, using
the ed suffix from past tense verbs,
or uses another appropriate technique
to spell new words this can be seen as
a virtuous error. Just as in speech
children overgeneralise grammar
rules, they can overgeneralise
spellings too.