Learning how to read and spell can be one of the biggest challenges in children's lives. Although interest in spelling development has increased in recent years, the study of spelling has still not attracted as much attention as the study of reading. This article reviews three perspectives in the study of spelling development: phonological, constructivist and the statistical learning perspectives. We devote special attention to studies that have examined spelling development cross-linguistically, as these studies are crucial for differentiating universal properties of spelling development from those that are adaptations to specific features of the child's language or target writing system. The traditional phonological and constructivist perspectives will be reviewed and evaluated and a new perspective, statistical learning, will be introduced, along with a revision of its fundamental concepts and recent studies that corroborate its claims.
Constructivism; Spelling; Statistics