Abstract
AbstractCurrent theories of phonological development make contrasting predictions about the role of vocabulary growth and orthographic knowledge in the emergence of segmental phonological representations. Testing these predictions in children is made difficult by the metacognitive nature of tasks used to assess phonological representations. In this study, we used novel tasks to measure the sensitivity of 88 children (3 years 2 months–5 years 7 months) to phonological segments, without requiring them to have any explicit awareness of the sounds in words. We contrasted these measures with measures requiring explicit segmental analysis of word forms. Results showed that, although explicit segmental analysis is related to letter–sound knowledge, tasks measuring implicit segmental sensitivity provide evidence of segmental phonology related to vocabulary growth and not mediated by orthography. Findings highlight the importance of tapping into the structure of children's phonological representations using tasks that minimize the requirement for explicit awareness.
Highlights
Phonological representations are mental categories of the sounds in a language
How Are Segmental Sensitivity, Phonological Awareness, Vocabulary, and Letter–Sound Knowledge Related to One Another? Our finding that vocabulary growth was a significant predictor of segmental sensitivity whereas letter–sound knowledge was not provides support for the lexical restructuring model (Metsala & Walley, 1998), which argues for vocabulary growth as a key driver of segmentation
In conclusion, our study tested predictions made by key theoretical accounts of phonological development using novel measures of segmental sensitivity alongside traditional measures of explicit phonological awareness
Summary
It is important to understand the nature and development of phonological representations because they are linked to children’s explicit knowledge of phonological elements—known as phonological awareness—and this explicit knowledge in turn has been linked to later reading success (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000). Any comprehensive model of reading acquisition needs to include a detailed account of how phonological representations develop and how they interact with children’s explicit phonological awareness and their knowledge of letter–sound correspondences. We halted testing if participants failed to say the sounds for eight consecutive letters and scored these participants as knowing the number of letters answered correctly up to that point. In this article, when we use the term letter–sound knowledge, we refer broadly to all grapheme–phoneme correspondences (e.g., including the mappings for digraphs like sh–/S/) and not just to the mappings between single letters and sounds
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