Syllable-first rather than letter-first to improve phonemic awareness

Maria Vazeux,Marie-Line Bosse,Nadège Doignon-Camus,Daniel Zagar,Gwendoline Mahé,Teng Guo

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-79240-y

Abstract

The present study investigates the nature of the spelling-to-sound correspondences taught to enhance phonemic awareness in prereaders. The main assumption in the literature is that learning the alphabetic code through letter-to-phoneme correspondences is the best way to improve phonemic awareness. The alternative syllabic bridge hypothesis, based on the saliency and early availability of syllables, assumes that learning to associate letters to phonological syllables enables phoneme units to be the mirror of the letters and to become accessible, thereby developing phonemic awareness of prereaders. A total of 222 French-speaking prereaders took part in a 4-session learning program based on correspondences either between letters and syllables (letters-to-syllable group) or between letters and phonemes (letter-to-phoneme group), and the fifth last session on coding and decoding. Our results showed a greater increase in phonemic awareness in the letters-to-syllable group than in the letter-to-phoneme group. The present study suggests that teaching prereaders letters-to-syllable correspondences is a key to successful reading.

Highlights

The present study investigates the nature of the spelling-to-sound correspondences taught to enhance phonemic awareness in prereaders
The phonological awareness level predicts the left lateralization of the N170 c omponent[42], which reflects the neuronal specialization of the visual word form area and visual expertise for print p rocessing[43,44,45]
Knowledge of letter names and letter sounds increased between T1 and T3 more in the letter-to-phoneme group (58.4% vs. 85.1% of correct responses) than in the letters-to-syllable teaching group (58.8% vs. 68.9%; F(1,220) = 60.21, p < .0001, Fig. 1A)

Summary

Introduction

The present study investigates the nature of the spelling-to-sound correspondences taught to enhance phonemic awareness in prereaders. The main assumption in the literature is that learning the alphabetic code through letter-to-phoneme correspondences is the best way to improve phonemic awareness. The present study suggests that teaching prereaders letters-to-syllable correspondences is a key to successful reading. Learning to read is considered to be a code-cracking a ction[1] as beginning readers learn the associations between letters and sounds. Phonemic awareness—the endpoint of phonological awareness because it reflects the capacity of organization of the finest level of phonology—is the strongest longitudinal predictor of reading and spelling s kills[12,13,46,47,48,49,50]. The mastery of phonemic skills helps beginning readers to organize and master the alphabetic code in order to spell and read[53,54]. Phonemic awareness performances can be used to capture the very first signs of alphabetical code acquisition

Methods

Results

Conclusion