What happened to the “n” of sink? Childrenʹs spellings of final consonant clusters

Childrenʹs spellings provide a window on their representations of spoken words. These representations may not always match those assumed by the conventional orthography. We examined one specific case in which this may be true, that of CVCC (consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant) syllables. In three experiments, first graders often produced spellings such as “sach” for the nonword /sænt∫/ and “pit” for the nonword /pılt/. We suggest that many children consider these syllables to contain three phonemes instead of four phonemes. Rather than treating the postvocalic nasal or liquid as a separate phoneme, children consider it an attribute of the vowel. This suggestion was supported by the results of a phoneme counting test in which children often used three tokens for syllables such as /sænt∫/ and /pılt/. The results suggest that, in addition to difficulties in gaining access to phonemes, nonstandard phonemic representations may be a stumbling block in the acquisition of alphabetic literacy.