Abstract
A relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability among children has been suggested by some researchers. Several studies also suggested that phonological deficits among children are related to impairments in speech perception. The goal of this study is to examine the ability to discriminate and categorize various speech sounds by school-aged good and poor readers. Subjects were 30 third and fourth graders recruited from a local elementary school in Gainesville, Florida. Based on the school’s, as well as, the State of Florida’s standardized test, half of these subjects will be classified as good readers and the other half as poor readers. All subjects are native speakers of English. They were asked to perform five speech perception tasks. The first task ‘‘tug-dug,’’ examined subjects’ categorization of a VOT continuum ranging from 10–80 ms long. The second task, ‘‘spy-sky’’ was designed to test subjects’ ability to detect onset frequency of formant transitions. The last three tasks, ‘‘shop-chop,’’ examined the combined effect of a gap and fricative noise duration in the categorization of fricative–affricate continuum. A relationship between subjects’ speech perception and their reading ability as measured by several standardized tests will be explored and discussed.
Published Version
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