  English has a convoluted relationship between its pronunciation and spelling,
which obscures its phonological structure for early literacy learners. This
convoluted relationship has implications for early literacy software,
particularly for open-ended, child-driven designs. A tempting way to bypass
this issue is to use manipulables (blocks) that are directly tied to phonemes.
However, creating phoneme-based blocks leads to two design challenges: (a) how
to represent phonemes visually in a child-accessible way and (b) how to account
for context-dependent spelling. In the present work, we approached these
challenges by developing a set of animated, onomatopoeia-based mnemonic
characters, one per phoneme, that can take the shape of different graphemes.We
applied the characters to a construction-based literacy app to simplify
independent word-building for literacy beginners. We tested the app during a
13-week-long period with 4- to 5-year-olds in kindergarten classrooms. Children
showed visible interest in the characters and properly grasped the principles
of their functioning. However, the blocks were not sufficient to scaffold
independent word building, leading children to rely on other scaffolding
mechanisms. To test the characters' efficiency as mnemonics, we evaluated their
effect on the speed and accuracy of finding phonemes on a keyboard. The results
suggest that there were both children who benefitted from the characters in
this task and those who performed better without them. The factors that
differentiated these two categories are currently unclear. To help further
research on phonetic mnemonics in literacy learning software, we are making the
characters available to the research community.
