Phonemic segmentation and spelling

Abstract

Consciousness of the phoneme has often been studied in relation to reading skill. However, it is possible that reported differences in segmentation performance between good and poor readers are due to subjects' differences in spelling skill. Using two novel tasks which required the production of spoonerisms and the judgement of phoneme length respectively, segmentation in a group of subjects who read well while spelling poorly was compared with that of good readers/spellers and poor readers/spellers. Irrespective of reading skill, the poor spellers showed difficulty in phonemic segmentation. Spelling error patterns of the two groups of poor spellers were similar and this was linked to their segmentation performance. Examination of spelling errors in two tasks suggested that error pattern can be manipulated by word characteristics and testing situations.Certain errors in Expt 1 indicated that the relationship between spelling and segmentation performance was due to the use of an orthographic code in segmenting phonemes. Expt 2 varied orthography in order to investigate this possibility. A clear effect of word type was found in all groups indicating that, although poor spellers have problems in phonemic segmentation, they employ strategies similar to those of good spellers, using spelling knowledge as a guide in their attempts to segment phonemically. Since reading level alone does not ensure phonemic awareness and since orthography affects segmentation performance, further studies of phonemic segmentation should take spelling ability into account.

A structural analysis of working memory and related cognitive skills in young children

“…An example of such a task is reading span, in which the participant judges the semantic properties of sentences while remembering the last word of each sentence in sequence (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980, 1983. According to a recent proposal, verbal complex memory tasks such as these may also rely on the verbal storage component of working memory, the phonological loop (Baddeley & Logie, 1999;Duff & Logie, 2001).…”

“…Tests of phonological awareness vary considerably in terms of both the size of the phonological units to be manipulated and the degree of explicit metalinguistic awareness they require. Examples include judgments of rhyme (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1983), blending phonological elements (Mann & Liberman, 1984), deletion of phonological segments (e.g., Treiman & Baron, 1981), phoneme and syllable counting (e.g., Liberman, Shankweiler, Liberman, Fowler, & Fischer, 1977), judgments of shared phonemes in sequences of words (Kirtley, Bryant, MacLean, & Bradley, 1989), and spoonerizing pairs of verbal stimuli (Perin, 1983). Proficiency in phonological awareness tasks is highly associated with reading ability (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1985;Goswami & Bryant, 1990;, and has also been linked with vocabulary learning abilities (De Jong, Seveke, & van Veen, 2000;Metsala, 1999).…”

Dyslexia and Handedness: Developmental Phonological and Surface Dyslexias are Associated with Different Biases for Handedness

“…This is demonstrated on tasks where one is required to repeat a word with a sound missing, such as, "Say sit without the "se"", or "Bind without the "ne"" (Stuart, 1990). For older participants the task might be to reverse the initial sounds of two words, such as "Chuck Berry" to give "Buck Cherry" (Perin, 1983). A problem characteristic of phonological dyslexics is inability to read nonsense words or new words that have to be constructed by translating letters into sounds (or graphemes into phonemes).…”

Phonological Awareness: A Bridge Between Language and Literacy

“…In the literature (e.g., MacLean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987;Perin, 1983), the Brussels group is sometimes (at least more frequently than we had hoped) presented as defending the view that literacy acquisition is cause but not effect of segmental awareness. Although we have tried to clarify our position in recent papers (e.g., in Morais, Alegria, & Content, 1987a, 3987b), I have the uncomfortable feeling that some continue to misunderstand it.…”