Wrong place, wrong time: Children’s sensitivity to present tense spelling conventions

Spelling has been found to be influenced by the frequency with which certain orthographic patterns occur. We examined whether Grade 2-to-5 children were already sensitive to orthographic frequency in spelling present tense verb inflections that sound the same but are spelled differently. Children were asked to spell present tenses in two homophonous forms; both inflections are pronounced with final /t/ but are spelled with final -d (‘ik vind’, I find) or -dt (‘hij/zij vindt’, he/she finds). Previous research has shown that adolescents and adults make inflection errors based on the relative frequency within a pair; as ‘vind’ is more frequent than ‘vindt’, ‘vind’ is often used incorrectly. The children showed low correct scores for third person singular spellings, and overall better performance for -d dominant verbs. Surprisingly, they did make errors related to homophone inflection but in the wrong place, marking the wrong time: homophone-based errors occurred in present tense non-homophone verbs and in past tenses. We take our findings to mean that the children were not sensitive to homophone dominance. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the importance of specific graphotactic patterns in literacy development and call for attention to these patterns in models and teaching of spelling.