According to traditional stage models of spelling development, children are thought to isolate the phonemes in the word and attempt to spell each with an appropriate grapheme without regard for acceptable letter sequences or other conventions of specific orthographies. In this paper, using nonwords in both judgement and production tasks, we show that French children (Grades 1 to 5) are sensitive to some orthographic patterns having no phonological counterparts (the use of double consonants and the transcription of /o/) much earlier than traditional stage models posit.