What have we learned about the transition phases to the syllabic and alphabetic systems?

In Spanish speaking children, as in Catalan, Portuguese and Italian speaking ones, most children arrive at the syllabic hypothesis with mainly a quantitative control over their written productions. They follow the hypothesis that, for writing words, you need to have at least four written letters; monosyllabic nouns cannot be written. Those last ones are rather rare in languages like Italian and Spanish ones, while they are very frequent in other writing systems like the English one. At the very beginning all children try to differentiate qualitatively the writing of different words by using diverse variations in function of the letter repertoire available to them. They prefer not to use equal marks subsequently; for this reasons they avoid the use of double letters, both in Spanish and Italian language (Ferreiro, Pontecorvo & Zucchermaglio, 1987). In order to produce an internal variation within the word, some of the children accept to produce order permutations. One of the first tool to introduce variations in writings is to permute the order of the letters available To represent differences in children's writings children are asked to write diminutives like cane- cagnolino (Italian words for dog-doggie), singular-plural words like gatto-gatti (Italian words for cat-cats) and semantic similarities like gallo-gallina (Italian words for cock-hen. A big step is when the child recognizes that the writing has to do with the sound value of the spoken word analyzed in a syllabic way. Another important passage is to recognize the syllabic articulation of the words that are written and read in a syllabic way, distinguishing the phonemes C, SC and G in words like (e.g.) cavallo (Italian word for horse), pesce (Italian word for fish), coccinella (Italian word for labybird), pulcino (Italian word for chick), oca (Italian word for goose). A particular status of children's productions is the writing of their proper noun which is often the main source of their letters repertoire. Following this premise, my contribution will conclude on showing the transition to a syllabic way to reading-writing within a peer work of five preschool children in a 30 minutes interaction. I will also refer to more recent contributions (Ferreiro & Zamudio, 2008; Pontecorvo & Rossi, 2012) about how children can reach a syllabic-alphabetic way of reading-writing when they are submitted to three individual interview repeated by two months one another.