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Purpose: Punctuation is traditionally seen to represent grammatical structures in writing, but some authors argue that it can also reflect the intonation and pauses of speech. In two experiments, we examined the influence of grammar and prosody on adults' judgments of comma placement. Method: University students rated the appropriateness of commas in various sentence structures. These included sentences in which the subject and verb were disrupted by a comma. These commas were ungrammatical, but prosodically appropriate, in that they marked where a slight pause could naturally occur in speech. Results: In Experiment 1, 192 students rated ungrammatical commas as more appropriate if they occurred at prosodic pause points than at no-pause points. In Experiment 2, 235 students rated prosodically appropriate commas as more appropriate if they were also grammatical than if they were not. Overall, participants with better written language skills distinguished more between grammatical and ungrammatical commas, but acceptance of prosodically appropriate commas occurred across levels of written language skill. Conclusion: Literate adults use prosody, as well as grammar, to judge the appropriateness of comma use. These findings have implications for theories of punctuation, and can inform debate on students' and teachers' treatment of punctuation.

Purpose: Using data from 1,868 children from the US, Australia, and Sweden who took a 10-word spelling test in kindergarten and a standardized spelling test in Grades 1, 2, and (except for the Australian children) Grade 4, we examined two questions. First, does the quality of a child's errors on the kindergarten test help predict later spelling performance even after controlling for the number of correct responses on the kindergarten test? Second, does spelling develop at a faster pace in Swedish than in English? Method: We measured kindergarten error quality based on the number of letter additions, deletions, and substitutions by which each error differed from the correct spelling. Using mixed-model analyses, we examined the relationship of this and other variables to later spelling performance. Results: Kindergarten error quality contributed significantly to the prediction of later spelling performance even after consideration of the number of correct spellings in kindergarten and other relevant variables. The Swedish children showed more rapid growth in spelling than the U.S. and Australian children, a difference that may reflect the greater transparency of sound-to-spelling links in Swedish. Conclusion: Information from a spelling test that is typically discarded--information about the nature of the errors--has value.

Learning the orthographic forms of words is important for both spelling and reading. To determine whether some methods of scoring children's early spellings predict later spelling performance better than do other methods, we analyzed data from 374 U.S. and Australian children who took a 10-word spelling test at the end of kindergarten (M age = 6 years 2 months) and a standardized spelling test approximately 2 years later. Surprisingly, scoring methods that took account of phonological plausibility did not outperform methods that were based only on orthographic correctness. The scoring method that is most widely used in research with young children, which allots a certain number of points to each word and which considers both orthographic and phonological plausibility, did not rise to the top as a predictor. Prediction of Grade 2 spelling performance was improved to a small extent by considering children's tendency to reverse letters in kindergarten.

Two studies compared children's knowledge about the letters in their name with knowledge of other letters. Findings indicated that Australian first graders and U.S. kindergartners and preschoolers had superior knowledge of letter-name, but not letter-sound, for first letter of their first name. Also, U.S. preschoolers were better at printing the initial letter of their first name than other letters. (Author/KB)