Literacy training and speech segmentation

Abstract

New groups of illiterate and ex-illiterate adults, comparable to those of Morais et. al (1979), were given a battery of tasks designed to assess the specificity of the effect of literacy training on speech segmentation. As in the previous study, a strong difference was observed between the two groups on the task of deleting the initial consonant of an utterance. The illeterates displayed the same incapacity to deal with phonetic segments in a detection task and in a progressive free segmentation task. Their performance was better, although still inferior to that of ex-illiterates, on both deletion and detection when the critical unit was a syllable rather than a consonant, as well as in a task of rhyme detection. No significant difference was observed in a task of melody segmentation, on which both groups performed poorly. The high specificity of the differences in performance level implies that they cannot result to an important extent from differences in general ability or motivation between the two groups of subjects. They rather mean that while sensitivity to rhyme and analysis into syllables can develop up to some point in the absence of the experience normally provided by reading instruction, analysis into phonetic segments requires that experience. Finally, in a picture memory task, the illiterates showed a phonological similarity effect, which is consistent with other results suggesting that the use of phonological codes for short-term retention does not require explicit phonetic analysis.