Children's Phonological Awareness: Confusions between Phonemes that Differ Only in Voicing (original) (raw)
Related papers
Does Strength of Phonological Representation Predict Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children?
Applied Psycholinguistics, 2001
Previous research has shown a clear relationship between phonological awareness and early reading ability. This article concerns some aspects of spoken language skill that may contribute to the development of phonological awareness, as manifested in rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness. It addresses the hypothesis that phonological awareness abilities are associated with measures that purportedly tap into the strength of phonological representations. We examined rhyme awareness, phoneme awareness, articulatory skill, speech perception, vocabulary, and letter and word knowledge in 40 children, aged 4 to 6, who were just beginning to be exposed to formal reading experiences in private preschools. The children also received cognitive tests and tests of reading ability. The results did not validate strength of phonological representation as a unitary construct underlying phonological awareness more generally, but instead revealed a selective pattern of associations between spoken language tasks and aspects of phonological awareness. Speech perception was closely associated with rhyme awareness measures when age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge were controlled. Children with a less developed sense of rhyme had a less mature pattern of articulation, independent of age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge. Phoneme awareness was associated with phonological perception and production. Children with low phoneme awareness skills showed a different pattern of speech perception and articulation errors than children with strong abilities. However, these differences appeared to be largely a function of age, letter knowledge, and especially vocabulary knowledge.
Does strength of phonological representations predict phonological awareness in preschool children?
Applied Psycholinguistics, 2001
Previous research has shown a clear relationship between phonological awareness and early reading ability. This article concerns some aspects of spoken language skill that may contribute to the development of phonological awareness, as manifested in rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness. It addresses the hypothesis that phonological awareness abilities are associated with measures that purportedly tap into the strength of phonological representations. We examined rhyme awareness, phoneme awareness, articulatory skill, speech perception, vocabulary, and letter and word knowledge in 40 children, aged 4 to 6, who were just beginning to be exposed to formal reading experiences in private preschools. The children also received cognitive tests and tests of reading ability. The results did not validate strength of phonological representation as a unitary construct underlying phonological awareness more generally, but instead revealed a selective pattern of associations between spoken language tasks and aspects of phonological awareness. Speech perception was closely associated with rhyme awareness measures when age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge were controlled. Children with a less developed sense of rhyme had a less mature pattern of articulation, independent of age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge. Phoneme awareness was associated with phonological perception and production. Children with low phoneme awareness skills showed a different pattern of speech perception and articulation errors than children with strong abilities. However, these differences appeared to be largely a function of age, letter knowledge, and especially vocabulary knowledge.
Phoneme Awareness in Children: A Function of Sonority
1999
This study tested the hypothesis that the sonority of phonemes (a sound's relative loudness compared to other sounds with the same length, stress, and pitch) influences children's segmentation of syllable constituents. Two groups of children, first graders and preschoolers, were assessed for their awareness of phonemes in coda and onset positions, respectively, using different phoneme segmentation tasks. Although the trends for the first graders were more robust than the trends for the preschoolers, phoneme segmentation in the two groups correlated with the sonority levels of phonemes, regardless of phoneme position or task. These results, consistent with prior studies of adults, suggest that perceptual properties, such as sonority levels, greatly influence the development of phoneme awareness.
Levels of Phonological Awareness
1987
While previous studies have investigated children's awareness of two units within words--syllables and phonemes, there is experimental evidence that children are also aware of intrasyllabic units (units intermediate in size between the syllable and the phoneme), and that these units may be useful for teaching phonological awareness and reading. Two experiments investigated children's awareness of phonemes and of two intrasyllabic units, onset (the initial consonant or consonant cluster) and rime (the vowel and any following consonants) in spoken words. Fifty-six kindergarten students participated in the first experiment, and results indicated that while they were aware of both syllables and intrasyllabic units in a word comparison task, they were not aware of phonemes in the same task. Results of the second experiment, in which 20 first grade students compared words differing only in onset complexity, yielded similar results, which again indicates that children find it easie...
Effects of linguistic structure on children's ability to isolate initial consonants
1992
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, /ยป/, 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.
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 1992
Preschool children's ability to segment and blend real words and nonsense words, with and without consonant clusters was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment, preschool children's ability to segment real words into phonemes was examined. Readers performed better than nonreaders on a phoneme counting task and words containing consonant clusters were harder to segment compared to words without consonant clusters. In experiment two, the ability to segment and blend nonsense words was investigated. Nonreaders had significantly more difficulty with nonsense words compared to readers in both a phoneme synthesis and a phoneme analysis task. A two-way interaction between reading level and word type showed that nonsense words containing consonant clusters were particularly difficult for nonreaders. The results were discussed in relation to theories suggesting that syllables consist of an onset and a rime.
Reading and Writing, 2017
The National Institutes of Health has deemed illiteracy a national health crisis based on reading proficiency rates among American children. In 2002, the National Early Literacy Panel identified six pre-reading skills that are most crucial precursors to reading mastery and predict future reading outcomes. Of those skills, phonological awareness, and in particular phonemic awareness, is the strongest independent predictor of early reading outcomes. However, limited research has addressed the development of these component skills due in part to the fact that many of the measures used to assess sub-skills such as phonemic awareness are oral production measures that cannot easily be administered with children under the age of five, and are not designed to detect implicit or emerging knowledge. To address this limitation, we developed and administered two receptive measures of phonemic awareness to 2.5-and 3.5-year-old children. We found evidence for the emergence of this component skill earlier in ontogeny than is currently acknowledged in the