Phonemic Tasks Research Articles

The Relationship Between Phonemic Awareness and Later Reading Achievement

ABSTRACT Two longitudinal studies were conducted to examine the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading achievement in the primary grades. In Study 1, scores on a test of phonemic awareness given in kindergarten were compared with scores on a standardized reading achievement test given in 2nd grade. A series of stepwise regression analyses confirmed a significant correlation between performance on some phonemic awareness tasks and reading achievement in 2nd grade. A 3-year follow-up of the children who scored in the lowest quartile was conducted in Study 2. Most of those students could not read fluently; however, they were not a homogeneous group. Early identification of children who lack phonemic awareness is useful for providing appropriate instruction, but it should not be used to justify retention or to infer within child deficits for identification of learning disabilities.

A reading-level match study of phonemic processes underlying reading disabilities in a transparent orthography

The current study examined the relationship in Spanish (i.e., a transparent orthography) between different levels of phonological awareness and reading disabilities. In addition, the strategies used by the children when they resolved phoneme segmentation and reversal tasks were analyzed. A sample of 133 subjects were selected and organized in three different groups: (1) A group of 45 reading-disabled children, (2) A comparison group of 44 normal readers matched in age with the reading disabled, and (3) A reading level match group of 44 younger normal readers at the same reading level as the reading disabled. Three phonological awareness tasks were used to measure levels of intrasyllabic and phonemic awareness. The reading disabled group was equivalent to the younger reading level-matched control group in the odd-word-out task. However, there were differences in the phonemic tasks (e.g., phoneme segmentation and reversal) because the reading disabled group performed more poorly than the younger children. Overall, the children matched in age with the reading disabled group were superior in all phonological awareness tasks. There were differences between the groups when the strategies used by the children were analyzed.

The Language Skills and Concepts of Early and Nonearly Readers

Abstract Individually matched early and nonearly readers were compared in terms of their language concepts and skills, as well as their reading achievement, in kindergarten through 2nd grade. The early readers, particularly those who learned to read before kindergarten, were found to be superior to nonearly readers on preschool measures of general language development, verbal intelligence, and phonemic segmentation measured using an invented spelling task. These measures were significant predictors of reading achievement through 2nd grade for both early and nonearly readers. Early readers maintained their advantage in reading achievement throughout the grades studied. The early readers did not perform in a homogeneous fashion on certain tasks, nor did they differ from the nonearly readers in their performance in kindergarten on the phonemic segmentation task.

Metaphonological Abilities of Spanish Illiterate Adults

The metaphonological abilities of illiterate Spanish‐speaking people were evaluated. A group of rudimentary readers who have had deficient schooling was taken as control. The subjects were asked to discriminate between pairs of syllables that are minimally different in terms of phonetic features, to evaluate rhyme relations, to judge whether or not a particular phoneme or syllable was present in an utterance, and to delete and reverse phonemes and syllables. The results show that illiterates are quite good at phonetic discrimination. Almost half of them demonstrated an unequivocal ability to appreciate rhyme. However, their performance on the syllable tasks, and especially on the phoneme tasks, was very poor. There was almost no overlap between the scores of illiterates and rudimentary readers in the phonemic tasks. The present study confirms previous indications that phonemic awareness does not develop as a mere consequence of cognitive or linguistic maturation. It extends this claim to languages that, like Spanish, possess only a small set of vowels. On the other hand, the lack of phonemic awareness does not imply any substantial inferiority in phonemic sensitivity, i.e. the ability to discriminate between minimal pairs.

Components of phonological awareness

The factorial structure underlying different types of tasks within the domain of phonological awareness was examined in two studies. Large sample sizes allowed for sensitive differentiation of constructs. In the first study, 128 preschool children without any experience of formal reading instruction were tested with a battery of tasks intended to tap various aspects of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, syllable counting, initial-phoneme matching, initial-phoneme deletion, phoneme blending, and phoneme counting. Three basic components were extracted in a principal component analysis: a phoneme factor, a syllable factor and a rhyme factor. Cross-tabulations indicated considerable dissociation between performance on phoneme, syllable, and rhyme tasks. The structural relationships were replicated on a much larger sample (n=1509) in the second study. Subjects in this study were one year older and were attending grade 1 thus providing an opportunity to test their reading achievement. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the phonemic factor was by far the most potent predictor. However, the rhyming factor made an independent (although small) contribution to explaining the reading variance. Among the phonemic tasks, phoneme identification proved to be the most powerful predictor.

Phonemic and Semantic Processing in Aphasia

The aim of this study was to investigate the phonemic and semantic input and output processes that underlie overt speech and language behaviour in aphasic syndromes. To this end, two non-oral tasks involving word identification and matching were employed. Twenty-five aphasic and 22 matched controls were required to identify pictures of spoken words from arrays of either phonemic or semantic distractors. In the matching tasks, which attempted to mimic the phonological and semantic processes involved in picture naming, (that is, output), subjects had to match pictured words on the basis of phonemic and semantic similarity. Results showed that the pattern of phonemic and semantic impairment observed within individual aphasic syndromes was generally consistent with their overt speech and language behaviour. Of particular interest was that the phonemic matching task presented particular difficulty for all aphasic groups regardless of type. Further studies into phonemic output processing may hold the key to the...

The Effects of Blending and Spelling Training on the Decoding Skills of Young Poor Readers

Blending and spelling training were compared in this experiment to determine which intervention would improve the decoding skills of two first-grade boys with learning disabilities who were in the phonetic cue stage of reading. Additionally, the two boys received pre- and posttest administrations of a phonemic segmentation task. Although neither intervention proved superior, the children met the learning criterion for both interventions and demonstrated both maintenance and generalization of their skills. They also improved their phonemic skills, even though independent training in this area was not provided. It appeared that the equivalence of the interventions may have been due to the intensive instructional setting and use of systematic error analysis procedures.

Training Phonemic Segmentation Ability with a Phonemic Discrimination Intervention in Second- and Third-Grade Children with Reading Disabilities

The present study examined the possibility that phonemic discrimination training could improve the phonemic segmentation ability of children with reading disabilities. Half of the 32 children with reading disabilities (14 male and 4 female second graders and 10 male and 4 female third graders, with mean ages of 99.2 and 109.7 months, respectively) deficient in phonemic segmentation skills were assigned to the training group, while the other half acted as a nontrained control group. The trained children were successful at significantly improving their performance on the phonemic segmentation task. The control group made no improvement. Requiring children with reading disabilities to make discriminations concerning phonemic information may have helped them discover properties of the phoneme that they previously did not know.

Lateralisation of Language Functioning by the Wada Procedure and Divided Visual Field Presentation of a Verbal Task

In cases of intractable epilepsy, language and memory functioning in the hemisphere contralateral to the lesion is determined prior to unilateral temporal surgery. Patients with unilateral temporal lobe lesions were assessed using the intracarotid sodium amytal (Wada) procedure to determine the lateralisation of language and memory functioning. They also performed a divided visual field task in which letters were presented in pairs for brief durations on a computer screen in a phonemic matching task. The results showed only moderate agreement between the two methods with regard to identification of the speech-dominant hemisphere, indicating the divided visual field matching paradigm to be unsuitable as a basis for surgical decision-making.

Comparison of dyslexic and nondyslexic adults on decoding and phonemic awareness tasks

This study was conducted to determine if the phonemic awareness skills of college-aged dyslexic students (n=10) differ from those of their nondyslexic peers (n=10). Both groups were tested on reading of real and nonsense words and a phoneme reversal task. Although the dyslexic subjects had received considerable language remediation and were all succeeding at their college studies at a level that did not significantly differ from the nondyslexic subjects, they performed significantly poorer on two measures of phonemic awareness: reading of nonsense words and increased error rate and response time on reversal of common three phoneme words. These results were interpreted to suggest that although the dyslexic subjects had improved their reading skills there remained a fundamental deficit in their ability to process phonological information quickly and accurately.

Phonemic segmentation skill and spelling acquisition

ABSTRACTA spelling-age match design was used to test the hypothesis that deficits in phonologically related skills may be causally related to difficulties in acquiring basic spelling knowledge. Poor grade 5 spellers, average grade 3 spellers, and good grade 2 spellers matched on a standardized spelling test, and a group of good grade 5 spellers matched by chronological age with the poor grade 5 spellers were administered a phonemic segmentation test containing nondigraph pseudowords and an experimental spelling test containing words of the following four types: exception, ambiguous, regular, and pseudowords. Consistent with the hypothesis, it was found that when compared with the poor spellers, the average and good spellers performed better on the phonemic segmentation task, made fewer errors in spelling pseudowords, and made spelling errors that were more phonetically accurate.

Auditory P3 correlates of phonemic and semantic processing.

Auditory evoked potentials were recorded in twelve healthy subjects using phonemic and semantic word tasks. The late positive component (P3), analogous to tonal P300, varied as a function of cognitive task with increased latency and amplitude associated with semantic processing. These data are consistent with levels of processing theories in which semantic analysis is associated with a greater elaboration of stimulus evaluation.

Learning to read and discriminate phonemes

Abstract For natural speech syllable stimuli, kindergarten and first-grade children found target fricative and stop phonemes less easy to discriminate when the context phoneme changed from stimulus to stimulus than when it was held constant. In further experiments comparing stop and fricative discrimination, stop targets were more easily discriminated than fricative targets from other stops and fricatives. Regarding reading ability and phoneme awareness, positive correlations were found between performance on the phoneme tasks and word reading ability for some groups of beginning readers. In addition, independent groups of good and poor readers differed significantly on phoneme discrimination ability. The pattern of results suggested a developmental lag for the poor readers not a qualitatively different processing difficulty.

Domains of Processing and Effort

The evidence for qualitatively distinct domains of processing was examined using both recall and recognition measures. The study involved a test of the prediction made by Craik and Tulving (1975) that any semantic analysis would be more beneficial than even a complex physical analysis. In addition, a test was made of processing load involved in tasks representative of the processing domains. Although the strong version of the domain hypothesis proposed by Craik and Tulving (1975) was supported for recognition, there were no differences in levels of recall or recognition for physical and phonemic tasks. Recognition for words on an unattended list was at similar levels for all tasks, suggesting that the tasks did not differ with respect to processing load. Problems with the domains of processing hypothesis are discussed.

Speech recoding in silent reading

Theoretical controversy surrounds the issue of whether or not silent reading involves speech recoding. This was investigated in two experiments by assessing performance on a Stroop color-word task carried out with subjects either silent or articulating irrelevantly (saying “bla” continuously). It was found that the usual decrement in performance resulting from lack of congruency between ink color and color word was attenuated in the articulation condition. The results provide evidence for the presence of speech recoding in silent reading. As a second test of this hypothesis, the Stroop task was also carried out in conjunction with either a graphemic or a phonemic task. The usual decrement in performance was attenuated more by the phonemic than by the graphemic task, therefore providing further support for the hypothesis. The relationship between individual differences in Stroop performance and those in reading speed and in personality (as assessed by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire) were also examined.

Effects of Structural, Phonemic, and Semantic Orienting Tasks on Cued and Free Recall of Words: An Independent Test

A recent reformation of the depth of processing hypothesis concerning verbal memory identifies two major determinants of memory for words: the nature of input processing performed, and the elaboration of that processing. The elaboration hypothesis was tested by exposing 36 subjects to 24 words and requiring subjects to perform a structural task, a phonemic task, or a semantic task on the words in an incidental orienting procedure. Half of the subjects then were asked for free recall, and the other half were cued for recall by supplying information concerning the input task performed on each word and the outcome of the input task decision process. The principal results showed that cuing did not significantly aid recall, while both the input task variable and the input decision variable (yes or no answer to the orienting question) did yield significant results. Examination of significant interactions showed that cuing does aid retrieval of semantically encoded items, particularly when the input decision outcome is positive. The results are interpreted to mean that elaboration of encoding may occur at deeper levels of processing, but not at shallow levels, as in the structural input task.