A study examined the phoneme-grapheme correspondence in native English-speaking kindergartners' spelling and compared it to the results of similar research with Spanish-speaking children. It tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children make their first grapheme-sound correspondences differently because of phonological differences in the languages. The subjects of the study were 192 kindergarteners from five public schools: 30 were suburban middle-class Caucasian, 20 suburban middle-class Black, and 47 urban lower-class Black children in Alabama, plus 54 middle-class and 41 lower-class Caucasian children in a small town in Nebraska. The English-speaking children were found to make their first correspondences by consonants rather than by syllables, and signs of conflict were found between children's construction of their own spelling systems and the instruction received at the alphabetic level. (Author/MSE)