The phenomenon of "invented spelling" in young children, observed in many preschool age children who produce written messages using words that are generated through an original system of orthography, was researched with Spanish-speaking children. The following conclusions were made from previous research with English-speaking children concerning the central features of the invented spelling phenomenon: (1) it is systematic, (2) it is based initially upon phonetic principles, and (3) the major principles of invented spelling are virtually identical among children at the same developmental stage. Any non-standard spellings that the children produced were studied to see if they had been generated by principles similar to those that had been observed in the invented spelling of English-speaking children. The first, second, and third graders from the Dominican Republic in this study used generalizations or concepts about spelling as a system to generate their spellings. Even when they guessed, they rarely guessed wildly. The children produced a very small subset for any given word of all the possible variations of letters that might have been produced to spell the word. This study indirectly demonstrated the shortcomings of an orthography based largely on phoneme-grapheme correspondence. (NCR)