Children’s own names influence their spelling

We analyzed spellings that were produced by children in kindergarten (N = 115), first grade (N = 104), and second grade (N = 77) in order to determine whether children’s own names influence their spellings of other words. Kindergartners overused letters from their own first names (or commonly used nicknames) when spelling. Kindergartners with longer names, who had more own-name letters available for intrusions, tended to produce longer spellings than did children with shorter names. Moreover, the spellings of kindergartners with long names tended to contain a lower proportion of phonetically reasonable letters than did the spellings of children with short names. These effects appeared to be confined to children who read below the first grade level. The results support the view that children’s own names play a special role in the acquisition of literacy. They further show that children choose letters in a way that reflects their experience with the letters. The names that parents give to children play an important role in the children’s development. Infants frequently hear the spoken forms of their names, and they prefer to listen to their own first names rather than to the names of others by as early as 41⁄2 months of age (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1996). As children get older, they see the printed forms of their own names on a regular basis. In day care centers, for example, children’s cubbyholes and art projects are often labeled with their first names. As early as 2 years of age, some children can identify their printed names without any contextual cues (Villaume & Wilson, 1989). Children’s own names also play an important role as they learn to write. A child’s name is often the first word that he or she attempts to write (Clay, 1975; Temple, Nathan, & Buriss, 1982). Children’s earliest signatures may be unrecognizable scribbles. By the age of 5 or 51⁄2, however, children can usually print their first name in a conventional or largely conventional manner (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Hildreth, 1936).  2001 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/01 $9.50 Applied Psycholinguistics 22:4 556 Treiman et al.: Children’s own names Our interest here is in the role of names in the acquisition of literacy. Given children’s frequent exposure to the printed forms of their names, and given the importance of the name to children, it has been hypothesized that names play a special role in literacy development (e.g., Bloodgood, 1999; Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Villaume & Wilson, 1989). Empirical evidence for the idea that names are especially important in early literacy development comes from a study that assessed children’s knowledge about letters (Treiman & Broderick, 1998). When children were shown the letters of the alphabet and were asked to provide the name of each letter, they did better on letters that were in their own first name (or commonly used nickname) than on letters that were not. Across three samples of children (preschoolers from the United States, kindergartners from the United States, and first graders from Australia), a significant advantage for the first letter of the first name was found. Tendencies in the same direction were generally observed for the second, third, and fourth letters of the first name, but these were not significant. Thus, children named Eva or Ethan were more likely to know the name of the letter e than were children named Sam or Maya. An advantage for the initial letter of the first name was also found in a letter production task. Children named Dan or Donna, for example, could produce better quality ds than could children named Chuck or Sarah. Thus, there is evidence that children’s own names influence their ability to label and form letters. Do personal names affect the way in which children actually spell words? A number of researchers have suggested that they do. These suggestions are based on observations of children from the United States (Sulzby, 1985; Temple et al., 1982), Israel (Levin, Share, & Shatil, 1996), and France (Gombert & Fayol, 1992). According to these researchers, the child’s own name is a repertoire of learned letters. Children often use the letters from this familiar set to write new words. Most of the studies, however, failed to adopt stringent statistical techniques in order to determine whether own-name letters occur more often in children’s spellings than would be expected by chance. If a child named Emily writes “pelot” for potato, for example, is she really using e and l because they are letters from her own name? E and l are common letters, and it may be that Emily uses them no more often than other children. Given isolated examples such as these, it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of the intrusions. The best quantitative evidence to date on own-name intrusions in spelling was provided by Bloodgood (1999). She studied spellings produced by 30 children aged 4 or 5, who, according to her description, were not able to connect letters and sounds with any degree of consistency. Bloodgood’s analyses focused on the letters l, n, r, and s: the consonants that most commonly appeared in the children’s first names. For each of these four letters, children who had the letter in their first name used the letter more often in their spellings than children who did not have the letter in their first name. These results support the idea that children use the letters from their own first names when spelling other words. However, the conclusions are limited by the fact that the statistical analyses were performed for only four letters, all of them consonants. Applied Psycholinguistics 22:4 557 Treiman et al.: Children’s own names Bloodgood (1999) claimed that, as well as reproducing the specific letters from their own names, children imitate other aspects of the name’s spelling when they attempt to write other words. For example, she stated that children whose names contained doublets, such as Brittany, used many doublets in their spellings of other words. However, Bloodgood did not present quantitative support for this observation. Nor did this researcher carry out quantitative analyses to determine whether intrusions were more likely to involve the first letter of the first name than to involve subsequent letters. Such a difference might be expected given the finding of Treiman and Broderick (1988) that own-name effects on knowledge of letter names were primarily apparent for the first letter of the first name. To gather firmer and more comprehensive evidence on how children’s own names affect their spellings, we analyzed spellings that were produced by American children at three different grade levels: kindergarten, first, and second. We looked at own-name intrusions for a wide range of letters, and we also carried out quantitative analyses to examine other ways in which children’s own names may influence their spellings. To obtain good estimates of the effects of children’s names on their spelling, one needs data from a large number of children whose names contain a variety of letters. We therefore analyzed three sets of data that had been collected in our laboratory. The first, here called Sample 1, was from Experiment 1 of Treiman and Bourassa (2000). The second data set, Sample 2, was the real word spelling test used in Experiments 2 and 3 of Cassar and Treiman (1997). Sample 3 was the real words from Experiment 1 of Treiman, Berch, Tincoff, and Weatherston (1993). These were all of the studies from our laboratory that included children from each of the kindergarten, first, and second grades and in which children spelled entire real words that were dictated to them. In all, we analyzed data from 115 kindergartners, 104 first graders, and 77 second graders.