The syllabic bridge: the first step in learning spelling-to-sound correspondences*

Nadege Doignon-Camus,Daniel Zagar

doi:10.1017/s0305000913000305

Abstract

It is widely agreed that learning to read starts with the establishment of letter-to-phoneme correspondences. However, it is also widely agreed that prereaders do not have access to phoneme units. Here we show that the building of associations between letters and syllables, which we call the 'syllabic bridge', might be a faster and more direct way of learning spelling-to-sound correspondences in French. After a few minutes of exposure, prereaders are able to learn the statistical properties of letter co-occurrences. Statistical learning is boosted by explicit instructions about the associations between letter clusters and syllables. Building the syllabic bridge from available phonological syllables and frequent letter clusters may therefore be the first step in learning to read.

Highlights

The first steps in becoming literate require discovering the principles of phonological recoding and the acquisition of correspondences between orthographic patterns and speech sounds
Studies of phonological awareness show that prereaders do not have access to phoneme units (Demont & Gombert, 1996 ; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fisher & Carter, 1974) suggesting that a lack of phonemic awareness leads to difficulties in mapping letters with phonemes at the first steps of reading acquisition
The first result is that prereaders are able to learn statistical regularities of written language. This result provides evidence for a functional statistical learning mechanism (Kirkham et al, 2002). We showed that this mechanism allowed children to process letter strings even though they have not yet developed literacy skills

Summary

Introduction

The first steps in becoming literate require discovering the principles of phonological recoding and the acquisition of correspondences between orthographic patterns and speech sounds. Children must be able to recognize individual letters, to isolate and compare phoneme units, and to map letters onto phonemes. This hypothesis presents a major problem, referred to as the ‘availability problem’, acknowledged by Ziegler and Goswami (2005) in their psycholinguistic grain size theory: not all phonological units are consciously accessible prior to reading acquisition (see Anthony & Francis, 2005, for a review). Studies of phonological awareness show that prereaders do not have access to phoneme units (Demont & Gombert, 1996 ; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fisher & Carter, 1974) suggesting that a lack of phonemic awareness leads to difficulties in mapping letters with phonemes at the first steps of reading acquisition

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