EVEN OBSCURE SCIENTIFIC WORDS NO BOTHER FOR YOUNG UTAH SPELLER

Tara Huber, Utah's delegate to the National Spelling Bee here, had no problem with the scientific word for the study of ferns.

By correctly spelling pteridology, the 11-year-old Vernal spelling champ was one of the 130 fourth-round survivors.She then correctly spelled renaissance in the fifth round to continue into the afternoon sessions.

Fourteen young spellers were eliminated from Thursday's opening round on day two of the national competition with such words as dyslexiac, quotidian, irascibility, theodicy and mycophagous.

On Wednesday, 56 youngsters were dropped from the competition.

Tara's other words in the bee were velocity, turnstile and voltolization.

A daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Huber and a sixth-grade student at Vernal Middle School, she won the Deseret News Spelling Bee April 8.

More than 150,000 youngsters throughout Utah participated in the program, and 40 district winners entered the finals in April. Nationally, an estimated 8-9 million students were involved on the local level.

Following a brief break Thursday morning, the 130 fourth-round spellers returned for the next round before lunch.

Along with Tara's parents cheering her on in the audience are two sisters. One, Colleen, placed fifth in a recent Deseret News Spelling Bee.

Tara said she has been able to spell most of the words given to other spellers. She was pleased to receive renaissance for her fifth word "although I could have spelled the others," she said.

Spelling Bee highlights:

-The spelling bee has possibly greater individual news coverage than the Moscow summit conference held this week. Most of the 200 sponsoring newspapers had representatives along with news-gathering or ganizations, more than 30 professional television news cameramen, scores of home video cameras and hundreds of still cameras.

-The winner will go to New York City to appear on morning television shows and then be flown to California for a guest appearance on the Johnny Carson show Wednesday.

-Many of the National Spelling Bee staff members are former spelling champions. One, Katie Kerwin, 1979 winner, is an English graduate of Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Her assignment is to turn quickly to each word in the official dictionary to answer any questions a speller may have regarding language origin or other forms of pronouncing a word.