Journal ol' Hduuitional Psychology 2001. Vol. v.l. No .1. 554-562 "' Copyright 2001 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0O22-O663/0I/$5.OO DO1: I0.1037//0022-0663.93.3.554 Variability in Deaf Children's Spelling: The Effect of Language Experience Jacqueline Leybaert and Josiane Lechat Universite libre de Bruxelles French-speaking hearing and deaf children, ranging in age from 6 years 10 months to 14 years 7 months were required to spell words including phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences that were either statisti- cally dominant or nondominant. Of interest was whether the nature of linguistic experience (cued speech vs. sign language) and the precocity of such experience (early vs. late exposure) determines accuracy in the use of phoneme-to-grapheme knowledge. Cued speech is a system delivering phonemically aug- mented speechreading through the visual modality. Hearing and deaf children exposed to cued speech early at home relied on accurate phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, whereas children exposed to cued speech later and at school only, and children exposed to sign language, did not. A critical factor in the development of the phonological route for spelling seems to be early and intensive exposure to a system making all phonological distinctions easily perceivable. Most of the spelling errors made by hearing children are com- patible with the word phonological form. They reflect incomplete knowledge at three possible levels: word-specific orthographic information (e.g., "brane" /brein/ for brain in English, or "trin" krsl for train in French), contextual rules (e.g., "woz" for was in English, or "janbon" /jfib5/ for jambon in French), and morpho- logical relationship (e.g., "speld" for spelled in English, or "peti" /psti/ for petit in French). By contrast, most of the spelling errors made by deaf youngsters reflect an incomplete knowledge of the word phonology (e.g., "vingear" for vinegar in English, "moule" /muls/ for moulin /mule/, and "escorle" /eskorla/ for escalier /eskalje/ in French). Why do deaf spellers make phonologically inaccurate errors? One hypothesis is that hearing is a necessary condition for the acquisition of phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences (Gates & Chase, 1926). In this view, the sensory deficit (i.e., profound hearing loss) necessarily leads to a cognitive deficiency (i.e., the lack of use of the phonological route for spelling). An alternative Jacqueline Leybaert and Josiane Lechat, Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, Universite libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium. This research was supported by a grant from Association Nationale d'Aide aux Handicapes (Belgium) and from the Fondation Houtman (Bel- gium). The writing of this article was partly supported by a grant from the Belgian Ministry of Scientific Policy (Action de Recherche Concertee; "The structure of the mental lexicon: A multilevel approach to the multiple representations of words"). To ensure the confidentiality of the partici- pants, we chose not to name the schools in which the research was carried out. However, we are grateful to all the children for their participation and the staffs for their assistance. We thank Charlotte Couplet and Murielle d'Hondt for their help in collecting the data, Carol LaSasso for checking the English, and Catherine Transler and Catherine Hage for commenting on an earlier version of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jacque- line Leybaert, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expeerimentale, Universite libre de Bruxelles. LAPSE-C.P. 191, 50 Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, B-1050, Bruxelles. Belgium. Electronic mail may be sent to leybaert@ulb.ac.be. hypothesis is that deaf children acquire a phonological system through the speechread input (Dodd, 1976, 1987). Deaf children's speechreading skills have been identified as the best predictors of their early reading and spelling development (Dodd, Mclntosh, & Woodhouse, 1998). However, the speech information seen on the lips is inherently underspecified (i.e., ambiguous), due to the similarity in appearance of speech elements sharing the same place of articulation and to the invisibility of features such as voicing and nasality (Erber, 1974; Walden, Prosek, Montgomery, Scherr, & Jones, 1977). Any given lip movement can potentially map onto more than one phoneme. Consequently, the deaf children's pho- nological representations tend to be inaccurate, and underspeci- fied. This situation does not preclude deaf children's use of phoneme-to-grapheme relationships, but strongly hinders the ben- efit they can get from that use (Burden & Campbell, 1994; Dodd, 1980; Leybaert & Alegria, 1995). If deaf children's spelling is limited by the inherent ambiguity of speechreading, the addition of complementary visual information that resolves this ambiguity could improve their ability to use the relationship between phonemes and graphemes. A recent study of the spelling of deaf children educated early and precociously with cued speech (CS) provides evidence for this hypothesis (Leybaert, 2000). In CS, the speaker complements speech (speechreading for the deaf receiver) with manual cues. A cue consists of two param- eters: handshape and hand placement around the mouth. Hand- shapes (eight in the French CS system) disambiguate the conso- nants, and hand placement (five in French) disambiguate the vowels. Consonants (or vowels) assigned to the same handshape (or hand placement) are easy to discriminate by speechreading, whereas those difficult to discriminate belong to two different handshapes (or hand placements). In CS, all the phonemic distinc- tions of spoken language can be naturally perceived by sight. The production of a consonant-vowel (CV) syllable requires a single cue (a particular handshape at a specific hand placement) that carries information about both the consonant and the vowel. Syl- labic structures like vowel-consonant (VC), CCV, and CVC need additional cues to reveal the supplementary phonemes (see Cornett 554