The development of spelling skill.

. By the time the children were 4, adults could easily tell which of the children’s productions were meant as writing and which were meant as drawing. The 4-year-olds’ writings generally consisted of linearly arranged strings of units separated by blanks. The writings tended to be smaller than the drawings. When writing, 3-year-olds either used characters of unidentifiable origin, mostly undifferentiated into units, or nonletters that bore some resemblance to Hebrew letters. Four-year-olds used a combination of real Hebrew letters, digits, and letters of the Roman alphabet, which these children had probably seen in addition to Hebrew letters. It was not until age 5 that children predominantly used real Hebrew letters in their writing. Still, these letters were often not the ones found in the conventional spelling of the utterance. The majority of 5-year-olds wrote in the direction that is standard for Hebrew, from right to left. Although children as young as 3 or 4 know that writing looks different than drawing, they do not yet understand that the function of alphabetic writing is to represent the sounds of language. Instead, young children seem to believe that the written forms of words reflect their meanings. Children think that