Young Children's Awareness Research Articles

The effects of computer software for developing phonological awareness in low‐progress readers

This study examined the effectiveness of two computer programs designed to increase phonological awareness in young children. The programs, DaisyQuest and Daisy's Castle, provide instruction and practice in rhyme identification, phonological analysis (segmenting), and phonological synthesis (blending). Thirty‐six kindergarten and 36 first grade students, who demonstrated below grade level performance in reading, were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions, and participated in daily, 20 minute, small‐group training sessions, over a period of four weeks. Pre‐and posttests of rhyming, segmentation, phoneme isolation and blending were administered, and the effects of computer‐administered phonological awareness instruction were compared with teacher‐delivered phonological awareness instruction and an instructional technology control group. After five hours of instruction, children who received computer‐administered phonological awareness instruction and children who received teacher‐delivered phonological awareness instruction showed a significant increase in phonological processing over that of the instructional technology control group.

The young child's awareness of stuttering-like disfluency.

The emergence of awareness of stuttering has been an important factor in theoretical and clinical considerations for early childhood stuttering. The present research program is aimed at studying the development of awareness of stuttering-like disfluency in normally fluent preschool and first-grade children using responses to video speech samples. A total of 79 children in five different age groups were asked to discriminate between the speech (fluent and disfluent) of two puppets, identify with the one who speaks like them, and evaluate the disfluent and fluent speech of the puppets. It was found that from age 3, children show evidence of awareness of the disfluency used in the study, but most children reached full awareness at age 5. Also, negative evaluation of disfluent speech is observed from age 4. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

Environmental Education in Mexican Schools: The Primary Level

Schools–which play an important role in the formation of young children's positive attitudes toward the environment–can improve their environmental performance by working with all members of the school community. In this article, I discuss schools' relevance in developing environmental awareness in young children. This article also explains that the primary-level national curriculum and the Mexican educational system are working toward an environmental policy. A brief introduction describes some of the most significant educational changes in recent Mexican history, emphasizing the role of textbooks.

Young children's awareness of socially mediated rejection of food: Why is food dropped at the table “dirty”?

We sometimes drop food at mealtimes. Once dropped, the food becomes dirty or inedible not only in a physical but also in a social sense. Even without physical contact with contaminants, we may not eat fallen food in some social contexts, e.g., a high-quality restaurant. Such thinking is referred here as “socially mediated rejection.” In Study 1, Japanese children were observed during mealtimes at home and at school. Even 2-year-olds reacted to fallen food differently between at school and home. In Study 2, 4- and 6-year-olds and adults were presented several stories in an experiment, and were asked to predict the story character's bodily and emotional reactions to eating fallen food. Preschoolers noticed that physically contaminated food would cause bodily harm more than socially rejected food.

Metacognitive Development

Traditional developmental research in memory and reasoning, as well as current investigations in such disparate areas as theory of mind, episte-mological understanding, knowledge acquisition, and problem solving, share the need to invoke a meta-level of cognition in explaining their respective phenomena. The increasingly influential construct of metacognition can be conceptualized in a developmental framework. Young children's dawning awareness of mental functions lies at one end of a developmental progression that eventuates in complex metaknowing capabilities that many adults do not master. During its extended developmental course, metacognition becomes more explicit, powerful, and effective, as it comes to operate increasingly under the individual's conscious control. Enhancing (a) metacognitive awareness of what one believes and how one knows and (b) metastrategic control in application of the strategies that process new information is an important developmental and educational goal.

Preschool Children's Classification Skills and a Multicultural Education Intervention To Promote Acceptance of Ethnic Diversity

Previous studies on the ethnic awareness of young children have identified a developmental sequence of ethnic understanding based on cognitive-developmental theories. The present study extends earlier findings by using measures that include classification tasks. Nineteen preschool participants were randomly assigned either to an intervention group or a control group. The children were pre-tested to obtain a baseline measure of their classification skills (i.e., classified by age, gender, race/ethnicity). Following the pre-test measures, children in the experimental group participated in an eight-week intervention program designed to reduce racial/ethnic stereotyping. Increases in classification skills were observed in the experimental group at post-test. Upon conclusion of the eight-week intervention, children in the experimental group were less likely to sort photo cards by race/ethnicity and more likely to sort them by gender and age. These results suggest that interventions for preschoolers can expand young children's ability to classify individuals on multiple dimensions (i.e., age, gender, race/ethnicity).

Young children's phonological awareness and nonword repetition as a function of vocabulary development.

Young children's phonological awareness and nonword repetition as a function of vocabulary development.

Young children's phonological awareness and nonword repetition as a function of vocabulary development.

The role of vocabulary growth in the development of two reading-related phonological processes was examined. In Experiments I and 2, 4- and 5-year-olds and a sample of first graders performed better on phonological awareness tasks for word versus pseudoword stimuli, and for highly familiar versus less familiar words. Three- and 4-year-olds in Experiment 3 performed better for words with many versus few similarly sounding items in a listener's lexicon. Vocabulary was strongly associated with nonword repetition scores for 3- to 5-year olds. The shared variance of this association was accounted for by phonological awareness measures and did not appear to be due to phonological short-term memory, as previously argued. The author proposes that vocabulary growth, defined in terms of absolute size, word familiarity, and phonological similarity relations between word items, helps to explain individual differences in emerging phonological awareness and nonword repetition.

Young Children's Awareness of Their Mental Activity: The Case of Mental Rotation

Young Children's Awareness of Their Mental Activity: The Case of Mental Rotation

Young Children's Awareness of Their Mental Activity: The Case of Mental Rotation

From Piaget's early work to current theory of mind research, young children have been characterized as having little or no awareness of their mental activity. This conclusion was reexamined by assessing children's conscious access to visual imagery. Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were given a mental rotation task in the form of a computer game, but with no instructions to use mental rotation and no other references to mental activity. During the task, participants were asked to explain how they made their judgments. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year-olds were comparable to adults both in their spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year-olds who referred to mental activity to explain their performance had reaction time and error patterns consistent with mental rotation; 4-year-olds who did not refer to mental activity responded randomly. A second study with 5-year-olds produced similar results. This research demonstrates that conscious access to at least 1 type of thinking is present earlier than previously recognized. It also helps to clarify the conditions under which young children will and will not notice and report their mental activity. These findings have implications for competing accounts of children's developing understanding of the mind and for the "imagery debate".

Articulation and phoneme awareness of 3-year-old children

ABSTRACTThis report presents findings from the first phase of a longitudinal study examining the development of articulation quality and specific phoneme awareness during the fourth year of life. Articulation and phoneme awareness of /r/ and a control phoneme were assessed for 80 3-year-old children. Children whose articulation of /r/ was accurate for all items were contrasted with those who were accurate on none. The groups differed in their awareness of /r/, after controlling for awareness of the control phoneme on two of the three phoneme awareness tasks and after controlling for relevant cognitive variables. These findings support the hypothesis that accuracy of articulation is related to quality of phoneme awareness in young children.

Thinking About Thinking. A Study of the Adult's Role in Providing for the Development of Number Awareness in Young Children

A number of studies have reported the importance of structured activity in early childhood settings for the intellectual development of young children. Environments which are materials‐rich, and experiences which are stimulating and challenging are reported to be the most conducive. This paper attempts to show that any provision of activities and experiences where young children are encouraged to discover solutions and to justify their actions must be accompanied by opportunities for them to reflect on their thoughts in order to confirm beliefs, or modify and change these. It is clear from research into the collaborative role of adults in this process, that the warmth of the interaction is another crucial factor in eliciting responses. Above all, such collaboration, it is claimed, should involve activities which pose significant challenges where the child is encouraged to think about solutions to problems rather than provide responses which merely involve rote learning and repetitive activity like counting. The study reported here shows that the role of the adult in eliciting informative responses from children in solving certain early maths problems, relied significantly on the kinds of tasks presented, and opportunities for the children to talk about and explain their responses. In a climate where children are rarely asked to explain how they arrive at solutions to problems, it is envisaged that these results and the prescriptions, will be useful to teachers and parents in both understanding more clearly just how young children think, and, how they make sense of their experiences, especially with collaborative adults.

Adams, Marilyn Jager, Foorman, Barbara R, et al. (1997). Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum. Baltimore, MD : Paul H. Brookes.

Adams, Marilyn Jager, Foorman, Barbara R, et al. (1997). Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum. Baltimore, MD : Paul H. Brookes.

Schooling, the Hidden Curriculum, and Children's Conceptions of Poverty

Schooling, the Hidden Curriculum, and Children's Conceptions of Poverty

Young children's awareness of the origins of their mental representations.

A series of studies addressed preschool-age children's ability to identify and remember the epistemic and imaginal origins of their mental representations. Study 1 revealed that children as young as 3 were able to differentiate imaginal from perceptual origins. Study 2 explored children's ability to differentiate representations formed through inference from those formed through imagination and seeing. Results revealed that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds differed significantly in their ability to identify and remember the sources of their mental representations. Identifying and remembering inference was the most difficult for all age groups. Results from Study 3 rule out the possibility that incorrect performance in Studies I and 2 resulted from an inability to remember the objects used in the tasks. Results from these studies indicate that children as young as 3 are able to differentiate mental representations based on fiction from those based on fact, but that this ability continues to develop throughout the preschool years.

Young children's awareness of the origins of their mental representations.

Young children's awareness of the origins of their mental representations.

A Test for Assessing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children

Two decades ago few educational re searchers and practitioners were familiar with the concept of phonemic aware ness. In the last several years, however, phone mic awareness has captured the attention of many individuals in both the research commu nity and elementary classrooms, and this in terest is likely to continue for some time. What is this concept that has attracted so much at tention? Phonemic awareness, as the term sug gests, is the awareness of phonemes, or sounds, in the speech stream. It is the awareness that speech consists of a series of sounds. Most youngsters enter kindergarten lacking phonemic awareness. Indeed, few are conscious that sentences are made up of individual words, let alone that words can be segmented into phonemes. By the end of first grade, however, many (but not all) children have gained this aware ness and can manipulate phonemes in their speech. For example, they can break spoken words into their constituent sounds, saying /d/-/i/-/g/ when presented with dig; they can remove a sound from a spoken word, saying rake when asked to take the Ibl off the

Linguistic awareness in young children with phonological disorder

Linguistic awareness in young children with phonological disorder

Bilingualism and language awareness in young children

Abstract This paper explores the concept of Language Awareness (LA) in relation to the acquisition of two languages by very young children. It has become a commonplace to allege the heightened LA of young bilinguals, and tests have been devised to characterise its features. A distinction is drawn between fully‐fledged LA and what may be its rudimentary forerunner — ‘speaker awareness’, preceding the child's apprehension of codes as such. Factors favouring bilingual development, and bilingual outcomes, are reviewed, as the background to the argument that bilinguals’ enforced awareness of linguistic diversity triggers their response to codes. Recent research (Karniol, 1990, 1992) has purported to reveal new types of LA, and claimed that awareness of codes per se is a prerequisite for the ability to develop a second language. The data supporting this claim, and its consequences, are investigated, and earlier studies of bilingualism reviewed in order to throw light on the type of evidence young children might...

Recognition of phoneme invariance by beginning readers

This paper reports an experimental study of a possible confound in measures of young children's phoneme awareness — that of global similarity between words. We developed two otherwise identical versions of a test of phoneme invariance (typical item, ‘which starts the same asbeak, bowl orshed?’), one version controlling for global similarity and the other not. We administered both tests to 27 kindergarten children, along with three criterion measures of early literacy skill. Three converging results supported the importance of controlling for global similarity when attempting to measure phoneme invariance: (1) the subjects attained higher scores on the uncontrolled version, and half of those passing this version (11/22), were ‘false positives’ in that they did not pass the controlled version, (2) a metric of global similarity was significantly related to the proportion of children passing an item on both versions, and (3) there was a stronger relation between the controlled version and the criterion literacy measures of spelling and decoding than was found for the uncontrolled version. The educational implications of the results are discussed.