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.

Issues of representation and limited capacity in the auditory short‐term store

“…Some important features of acoustic reality apparently are not available to conscious experience. The ability to become aware of phonemes apparently is an acquired skill (Chinnery, 1985;Mann, 1986;Marcel, 1980;Morais, Bertelson, Cary & Alegria, 1986), so for some people the smallest unit of awareness is the syllable. For most people, however, the smallest unit of speech in conscious awareness is the phoneme (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967).…”