Retention of visually presented information in children's spelling

Abstract

One hundred and thirty-six 8-year-old children participated in two studies of their ability to spell familiar or nonsense words which they had seen or heard for 2-5 sec. A visual or auditory task was interpolated for 12-15 sec before spelling began. Spelling of meaningful words was most accurate when words were presented visually, except when the interpolated task was watching random letters of the alphabet. Nonsense spelling did not show a similar pattern. The theoretical implication of this difference is that, under certain conditions, visual word presentation provides more efficient pointers to long-term memory information than auditory presentation does. A model of the facilitation process is offered. © 1975 Psychonomic Society, Inc.