Effects of visual aids and word structure on phonemic segmentation

Abstract

This study examined the effects of visual aids and word structure on kindergarten children's learning of phonemic segmentation—a skill recently shown to correlate highly with reading achievement in first grade. Visual aids used were three items of equipment—counters, squares, and pictures—previously utilized by Soviet researchers; these were combined in all possible ways in a 2 3 factorial arrangement. Within each equipment condition, half of the subjects were trained and tested on CV words and the other half on VC words. In addition, subjects who did well on either type of two-phoneme word were subsequently tested on CVC words, using the same equipment as before. Results indicated that squares made a significant contribution to segmentation of two-phoneme words, but none of the visual aids made a difference on three-phoneme words. There was no significant difference in difficulty between CV and VC words, but subjects trained on CV words did significantly better on the CVC test than those trained on VC. Implications of error patterns and directions for future research are discussed.