No abstract

The author suggests that some preschool children have an unconscious knowledge of aspects of the sound system of English; that these children tacitly organize phonetic segments into categories defined by articulatory features; and that these children base their judgments of phonological relationships on certain specifiable features.

We tested the basic reading and spelling skills of50 men of low literacy, from prisons. We describe in detail their skills in decoding and encoding, performance IQ and short-term memory, judgments of phonetic similarities, and segmentation, all measured with multiple tasks. Compared with children at the same grade levels in reading, the men performed better on some tasks but worse on those that required a knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences, on which they resembled children who are poor readers. The men in this sample were surprisingly uniform in lacking segmentation and decoding skills. Our measures of segmentation turned out to be of two types, one of which is closely related to the ability to read and spell new words. PurposesThe purposes of our study were • To describe accurately and in greater detail than previous studies the basic skills of adults who are poor readers and spellers; in particular, we have focused on wordlevel skills often called "decoding" and "encoding."RASE 6(6), 43-52 (1985) 074l-9325/85/0066-0043$2.00 © PRO-ED Inc. 43

No abstract

Performance characteristics are reviewed for seven systems marketed for acoustic speech analysis: CSpeech, CSRE, ILS-PC, Kay Elemetrics model 5500 Sona-Graph, MacSpeech Lab II, MSL, and Signalyze. The characteristics reviewed include system components, basic capabilities (signal acquisition, waveform operations, analysis, and other functions), documentation, user interface, data formats and journaling, speed and precision of spectral analysis, and speed and precision of fundamental frequency analysis. Basic capabilities are also tabulated for three recently introduced systems: the Sensimetrics SpeechStation, the Kay Elemetrics Computerized Speech Lab (CSL), and the LSI Speech Workstation. In addition to the capability and performance summaries, this article offers suggestions for continued development of speech analysis systems, particularly in data exchange, journaling, display features, spectral analysis, and fundamental frequency analysis.