Phonemic Training Modulates Early Speech Processing in Pre-reading Children.

Anne Bauch,Ulrike Schild,Claudia K Friedrich

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.643147

Abstract

Phonemic awareness and rudimentary grapheme knowledge concurrently develop in pre-school age. In a training study, we tried to disentangle the role of both precursor functions of reading for spoken word recognition. Two groups of children exercised with phonemic materials, but only one of both groups learnt corresponding letters to trained phonemes. A control group exercised finger-number associations (non-linguistic training). After the training, we tested how sensitive children were to prime-target variation in word onset priming. A group of young adults took part in the same experiment to provide data from experienced readers. While decision latencies to the targets suggested fine-grained spoken word processing in all groups, event-related potentials (ERPs) indicated that both phonemic training groups processed phonemic variation in more detail than the non-linguistic training group and young adults at early stages of speech processing. Our results indicate temporal plasticity of implicit speech processing in pre-school age as a function of explicit phonemic training.

Highlights

Previous research has provided evidence for an intimate relationship between speech processing and literacy
We investigated whether phonemic awareness alone or in combination with grapheme knowledge shapes implicit phonological processing in preliterate children, or whether phonemic awareness rather leads to more elaborated strategic processing beyond obligatory processing levels of speech recognition
We provided 10 weeks of daily training sessions to three groups of preliterate children: (i) one group received a training on phonemic awareness only, (ii) another group received a combined training on phonemic awareness and on some letters, and (iii) a third group received a non-linguistic training on finger-number associations

Summary

Introduction

Previous research has provided evidence for an intimate relationship between speech processing and literacy. Experienced readers who command an alphabetic writing system show spelling biases in some purely auditory tasks requiring specific linguistic decisions. Spelling biases appeared in lexical decisions, requiring participants to decide whether a spoken string is a word or not. Experienced readers recognized spoken words with rhymes that can have several spellings “flow–though”) slower than they recognized spoken words that have consistently spelled rhymes (e.g., “house–mouse”; Ventura et al, 2004; Ziegler et al, 2004, 2008; Pattamadilok et al, 2007, 2014; Perre et al, 2011). Spelling biases appeared in phoneme detection, requiring participants to indicate the presence of a specific speech sound in a spoken word or in a non-sense word. In auditory tasks, experienced readers detected phonemes that can have several spellings

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