Phonemic Awareness Tasks Research Articles

Phonemic and graphemic consistency: Effects on decoding for German and American children

Speed, accuracy, and types of errors in decoding lists of words and pseudo words and performance in two phonemic awareness tasks were assessed for German and American children in the first and second grades. German children were significantly better than American children only in pseudo word decoding measures across grades. Between group analyses showed that American children committed more vowel and word substitution errors in both decoding accuracy tasks than German children. Word substitution errors were more likely in word decoding than in pseudo word decoding for children in both languages. Within group analyses indicate that variance in decoding errors and speed accounted for by word substitution versus nonword and vowel versus consonant errors differed dependent on grade and whether real or pseudo words were read. Results suggest successful reading in English depends upon more complex grapheme to phoneme correspondence rules than does reading in German.

Biological constraints on literacy acquisition

This paper investigates some of the biological constraints that shape the process of literacy acquisition. It explores the possibility of isolating processing components of reading which correspond to computational units of equivalent size in the neural architecture. After reviewing and evaluating the current approaches to the biology of literacy acquisition, the paper considers three interconnected topics: (a) developmental dissociations, (b) early stages of literacy acquisition (in a transparent orthography), and (c) effects of remedial intervention for children with reading disorders. Developmental dissociations between reading and severe mental retardation, motor impairment, congenital anarthria and inaccuracy in phonemic awareness tasks reveal the functional independence of the reading processes. The early stages of literacy acquisition in a transparent orthography show a very steep increase in word and non-word reading accuracy; a speed that could hardly be accounted for by unconstrained learning. Finally, rehabilitation treatments of reading disorders either produce no specific effects, or marginal improvements in reading accuracy, which fade away in the long term. Concurrently, these data suggest that the process of literacy acquisition is largely constrained by a specific biological architecture which mimics the functional properties of a modular system. It is speculated that the core component of reading is a metaphonological parser, designed to perform automatic cross-modal associations between visual and sublexical units, according to the paradigms set up by any orthographic system. The phylogenetic implications of the ‘specificity hypothesis’ are discussed.

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.

The Fate of Phonemic Awareness Beyond the Elementary School Years

Metaphonological sensitivity to the component sounds of spoken words has been shown to develop in conjunction with alphabetic literacy. It is generally presumed that skilled readers possess and display a high degree of phonemic awareness. Data are presented that challenge this claim and indicate that many mature readers are unexpectedly inaccurate on phonemic awareness tasks. Alternative hypotheses about the nature and development of phonemic sensitivity in children and adults are considered. Implications for teacher training are also discussed.

Children's Phonological Awareness: Confusions between Phonemes that Differ Only in Voicing

Given the role of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell, it is important to examine the linguistic factors that influence children's performance on phonemic awareness tasks. We found that, contrary to some previous claims, children did not perform better with fricative consonants (e.g., /z/) than with stops (e.g., /d/) in a phoneme recognition task. However, preschoolers and kindergartners were more likely to mistakenly judge that a syllable began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme of the syllable differed from the target only in voicing (e.g., /t/ for the target /d/) than when it differed in place of articulation (e.g., /b/–/d/) or in both place and voicing (e.g., /p/–/d/). These results shed light on the organization of children's phonological systems. They also have implications for the design and interpretation of phonemic awareness tasks.

Word reading in Spanish: A comparison between skilled and less skilled beginning readers

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to investigate word reading abilities in first and third grade Spanish-speaking children who were learning to read in Spanish; the performance of skilled and less skilled readers was compared across measures that assessed phonological recoding ability, knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and phonemic awareness. The findings suggest that Spanish-speaking children relied on phonological recoding strategies in the process of becoming readers. First grade, less skilled readers seemed to depend on partial letter-sound knowledge. Furthermore, spelling-sound correspondences appeared to be the main source of information used by first grade, skilled readers and third grade, less skilled readers. The latter seemed to lag behind skilled readers in the use of word-specific information. The phonemic awareness tasks displayed moderate to low correlations with reading ability in the less skilled groups. It is argued that the simple phonological structure of Spanish and its shallow orthography lead to the phonological processing of letter strings during reading acquisition.

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.

Developing phoneme awareness through alphabet books

Previous research suggests that children who are successful in phoneme awareness tasks also have high levels of alphabet knowledge. One connection between the two might be alphabet books. Such books typically include both letter-name information and phonological information about initial sounds (‘B is for bear’). It may be that children who are read alphabet books, and thus understand how B is for bear, will learn both letter names and be able to isolate phonemes. To examine this, we gave three treatments to different groups of prekindergarteners. In the first group, the teacher read conventional alphabet books. In the second, the teacher read books chosen to contain the letter names only, without example words to demonstrate sound values. The third group, a control, read only storybooks. We found that all groups gained in print concept and letter knowledge over the course of the study. The conventional alphabet group made significantly greater gains in phoneme awareness than the group that read books about letters without example words, suggesting that conventional alphabet books may be one route to the development of phoneme awareness.

Auditory event-related potentials, dichotic listening performance and handedness as indices of lateralisation in dyslexic and normal readers

Evidence suggests that children with developmental dyslexia have poor phonological processing skills, are less likely to show lateralised activation during the processing of verbal information than children with normal reading ability and tend towards the left of the handedness continuum. The present study investigated this relationship between cerebral lateralisation and reading ability in children with and without dyslexia, directly using a dichotic listening paradigm with contemporaneous recording of auditory evoked potentials and indirectly using measures of hand preference and hand skill. The two groups were significantly different on a phonemic awareness task, particularly with reference to rime rather than phoneme onset. The two groups performed equally well on the dichotic listening task. However, normal readers produced significantly greater N100 amplitudes in the left temporal region during dichotic listening than the dyslexics who displayed approximately equivalent levels of amplitude bilaterally. In terms of hand preference the dyslexics were significantly less right-hand preferent than the controls, although the groups did not differ on a measure of right/left hand skill. The AEP lateralisation indices and the hand preference scores were significantly related to phonemic awwreness performance. The different patterns of AEP activity produced by the two groups of children during the dichotic listening task and the differences in hand preference may be related to abnormal cerebral lateralisation of language functions. The failure of the dichotic listening task to discriminate between the two groups in spite of evidence of differences in cortical activation suggests that the processing difficulties which may be indexed by these differences in cortical activation affect the reading process at a later stage than that tapped by dichotic listening.

Phoneme awareness in language-delayed children: comparative studies and intervention

Our initial study compared 15 normally- developing and 13 language- delayed four- and- five- year- olds on a range of phoneme awareness tasks differing in the degree of explicit linguistic analysis required. The language- delayed group performed more poorly than the normally- developing children, and there were significant group differences on several tasks. A significant interaction effect reflected the particular difficulty the language- delayed group had with the more explicit tasks. Follow- up testing suggests that group differences are maintained over time and that the language- delayed children perform more poorly than the normally- developing children on tests of decoding and spelling at the end of first grade.An intervention study, training phoneme awareness skills in language-delayed kindergarten children, was undertaken with a new group of subjects. Fourteen language- delayed children participated in 16 training sessions over eight weeks. Fourteen normal and 14 language- delayed children served as controls. Only the language- delayed training group made significant gains from pre- to posttraining measures. Following training, the language-delayed training group performed similarly to normal controls and significantly better than language- delayed controls whom they had matched before intervention. One year later, the language-delayed children who received training maintained their gains on phoneme analysis tasks and performed significantly better than the language-delayed controls on reading measures. Educational implications are discussed.

Effects of linguistic structure on children's ability to isolate initial consonants.

In 4 experiments, preschoolers and kindergarteners were asked to pronounce the initial consonants of spoken words. Children performed better on short words, such as bay, than on long words, such as bonus. Words with initial consonant clusters, such as brow, were more difficult for the children than words without initial consonant clusters, such as bar. A consonant cluster at the end of the word did not harm performance. Children did relatively well on words like suppose, for which the word's first syllable, /»/, constitutes a correct answer on the initial consonant isolation task. Children did more poorly on words like satin, for which this was not the case. Thus, the linguistic structure of a word affects children's ability to isolate the initial consonant. Implications for the design of phonemic awareness instruction are discussed. Children's ability to analyze spoken words into phonemes has received a good deal of attention from researchers and educators in recent years (see Adams, 1990; Brady & Shankweiler, 1991; Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Gough, Ehri, & Treiman, 1992; Rieben & Perfetti, 1991; Sawyer & Fox, 1991). The research reviewed in these volumes shows that phonemic awareness plays an important role in learning to read and write an alphabetic system. The research further shows that children who lack phonemic awareness skills are at risk for developing reading problems. On a more positive note, phonemic awareness can be taught. Such teaching improves children's reading and spelling performance. To design effective phonemic awareness instruction, detailed information about specific phonemic awareness tasks is needed. How do children perform these tasks? Do they do better with some kinds of words than others? Answers to these questions can help in the design of phonemic awareness instruction. For example, if some types of words are easier to analyze than others, the easy words can be taught first. Harder words can be introduced only after children have mastered the easier ones. The long-term goal of the research reported in this article is to improve phonemic awareness instruction, and ultimately reading, through the study of linguistic factors that affect children's performance in phonemic awareness tasks. Researchers and teachers have used a variety of phonemic awareness tasks. These include counting phonemes (How many sounds do you hear in fishT), deleting phonemes (Say fry without the/), comparing phonemes (Does dog end with

Phonological Processing Skills and Deficits in Adult Dyslexics

This article presents 4 experiments aimed at defining the primary underlying phonological processing deficit(s) in adult dyslexia. 5 phonological processes, all involving spoken language, were studied: phoneme perception, phoneme awareness, lexical retrieval of phonology, articulatory speed, and phonetic coding in verbal short-term memory. 2 differently ascertained adult dyslexic groups, familial dyslexics (n = 15) and clinic dyslexics (n = 15), were the subjects in each experiment. These dyslexic groups were chosen because deficits that persist until adulthood and that are found in differently ascertained dyslexic groups are more likely to be primary. Each dyslexic group was compared to 2 control groups, chronological age (CA) controls who were similar in age and sex, and younger reading age (RA) controls who were similar in reading age and sex. The main finding was a clear deficit in phoneme awareness in both dyslexic groups, with each dyslexic group performing significantly worse than both CA and RA controls. Moreover, performance on the 2 phoneme awareness tasks together uniquely accounted for substantial variance in nonword reading. The clinic but not the familial dyslexics appeared to have an additional deficit in verbal short-term memory. No clear deficits were found in either dyslexic group in phoneme perception, lexical retrieval, or articulatory speed.

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.