The spurt of written vocabulary in elementary school children

The written production of elementary school children has been investigated in several studies. These studies are mainly focussed on "how" a child writes (i.e., on the child's mastering of sound-to-print conversion rules), rather then on "what" a child writes. The aim of this paper is to "take a photograph" and to describe "what" Italian children of elementary school write. The data we present are based on the analysis of a child corpus of written language (Marconi, Ott, Pesenti, Ratti, Tavella 1994). The words used by children at different grades, the school grade in which they first write a word, and the increment of the written vocabulary from one grade to the next one, were analyzed. The analyses differentiated nouns from verbs. The spoken age-of-acquisition of words was also compared with written age (or order) of acquisition.