The effect of phonological analysis training on naming performance

Abstract

Children who are poor readers have difficulty naming pictured objects. Previous research has shown that while poor readers have the same amount of tacit phonological knowledge about words they cannot retrieve as good readers, they cannot use this initial phoneme and rhyme information to produce these words. In this study, thirdgrade good and poor readers participated in a training session to explicitly teach them how to manipulate the phonological structure of words as a means of facilitating naming ability. Both groups benefited from training, even though the good readers performed consistently better than poor readers. It is suggested that with more extensive training, poor readers may learn to use their tacit phonological knowledge of words they have difficulty retrieving spontaneously, by generating and using their own phonemic and rhyme cues independently.