This report discusses the results of a study of children's spelling errors to determine whether vernacular black English (VBE) speakers and standard English speakers (SE) infer different underlying phonological representations according to their respective dialects. Subjects included two groups of beginning second graders from schools in two contrasting cities. Spelling results were scored both by VBE homophonous pairs and by individual words. The study found that blacks spelled significantly more of the VBE homophonous word pairs identically than did whites. Word pairs were categorized as identical, similar, or different. Spellings of individual words were analyzed according to the following categories: (1) correct and phonetic; (2) dialectal; (3) hypercorrect/intrusive; (4) consonant; and (5) uninterpretable. The study is said to support the hypothesis that children who speak different dialects have different underlying phonological forms. (ML)