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This study tested how name writing affects young children's emergent writing. Beginning with a group of 96 Dutch children ages 3 1/2-5, we selected more-advanced children who were producing strings of conventional letters but, apart from very few words, no correct or readable (invented) spellings (N = 35). All children recruited from middle-to-high socioeconomic status (SES) Dutch families were asked to write, in their native Dutch language, their name as well as a set of 16 words such as "baby" and "flower" that were not likely to have been practiced before. The children's control for writing their own proper name influenced spellings of unpracticed words. Fifty-two percent of the letters used to represent unpracticed words were letters from the child's proper name and, more importantly, the first letter of the name was the first one to be written phonetically. These effects of name writing were replicated in a second study with another sample of slightly older children (ages 4-6) from low SES Dutch families (N = 79). We speculate on factors that may explain why a shift to phonetic writing starts with the first letter of a child's name. (Contains 2 tables.)

Does alphabetic-phonetic writing start with the proper name and how does the name affect reading and writing skills? Sixty 4- to 5 1/2-year-old children from middle SES families with Dutch as their first language wrote their proper name and named letters. For each child we created unique sets of words with and without the child's first letter of the name to test spelling skills and phonemic sensitivity. Name writing correlated with children's knowledge of the first letter of the name and phonemic sensitivity for the sound of the first letter of the name. Hierarchical regression analysis makes plausible that both knowledge of the first letter's name and phonemic sensitivity for this letter explain why name writing results in phonetic spelling with the name letter. Practical implications of the findings are discussed.