Does Phoneme Awareness Training in Kindergarten Make a Difference in Early Word Recognition and Developmental Spelling?

1991 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen W. Ball ◽  
Benita A. Blachman
1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne van Kleeck ◽  
Ronald B. Gillam ◽  
Teresa U. McFadden

Sixteen preschool children with speech and/or language disorders received phonological awareness training for a period of 9 months. Eight children attended a preschool classroom, and 8 children attended a pre-kindergarten classroom. The classrooms were located in a private school for children with speech and language disorders. A group of older children with speech and/or language disorders served as a nontreatment comparison group. Children in the treatment groups received 15 minutes of small-group lessons twice each week for two semesters. Classroom-based treatment focused on rhyming the first semester and on phoneme awareness the second semester. Rhyming and phoneme awareness activities were adapted from the literature on the development of phonological awareness in typically-achieving children. Results revealed that preschool children with speech and/or language disorders made significant improvement in rhyming and phoneme awareness. Comparisons with the non-treatment group indicated that gains in phoneme awareness were likely a result of the treatment rather than maturation or other aspects of the curriculum. We recommend the inclusion of some form of phonological awareness training, particularly phoneme awareness training, in intervention programs for preschoolers.


1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darlene M. Tangel ◽  
Benita A. Blachman

The purpose of this study was to determine if children trained in phoneme awareness in kindergarten would differ in invented spelling from children who did not have this training. A reliable scoring system was created to evaluate the invented spelling of the kindergarten children. The children were selected from 18, all-day kindergartens in four, demographically comparable low-income, inner-city schools. Prior to the intervention, the 77 treatment children and the 72 control children did not differ in age, sex, race, PPVT-R, phoneme segmentation, letter name and letter sound knowledge, or word recognition. During March, April, and May of the kindergarten year, treatment children participated in an 11-week phoneme awareness intervention that included instruction in letter names and sounds. After the intervention, the treatment children significantly outperformed the control children in phoneme segmentation, letter name and sound knowledge, and reading phonetically regular words and nonwords. Of primary interest in this study is the fact that the treatment children produced invented spellings that were rated developmentally superior to those of the control children. The 7-point scale created for scoring the developmental spelling test was found to be highly reliable using either correlation ( r = .98) or percent of agreement (93%).


1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenyatta O. Rivers ◽  
Linda J. Lombardino ◽  
Cynthia K. Thompson

The effects of training in letter-sound correspondences and phonemic decoding (segmenting and blending skills) on three kindergartners' word recognition abilities were examined using a single-subject multiple-baseline design across behaviors and subjects. Whereas CVC pseudowords were trained, generalization to untrained CVC pseudowords, untrained CVC real words, untrained CV and VC pseudowords, and untrained CV and VC real words were assessed. Generalization occurred to all of the untrained constructions for two of the three subjects. The third subject did not show the same degree of generalization to VC pseudowords and real words; however, after three training sessions, this subject read all VC constructions with 100% accuracy. Findings are consistent with group training studies that have shown the benefits of decoding training on word recognition and spelling skills and with studies that have demonstrated the effects of generalization to less complex structures when more complex structures are trained.


Author(s):  
Manuel Perea ◽  
Victoria Panadero

The vast majority of neural and computational models of visual-word recognition assume that lexical access is achieved via the activation of abstract letter identities. Thus, a word’s overall shape should play no role in this process. In the present lexical decision experiment, we compared word-like pseudowords like viotín (same shape as its base word: violín) vs. viocín (different shape) in mature (college-aged skilled readers), immature (normally reading children), and immature/impaired (young readers with developmental dyslexia) word-recognition systems. Results revealed similar response times (and error rates) to consistent-shape and inconsistent-shape pseudowords for both adult skilled readers and normally reading children – this is consistent with current models of visual-word recognition. In contrast, young readers with developmental dyslexia made significantly more errors to viotín-like pseudowords than to viocín-like pseudowords. Thus, unlike normally reading children, young readers with developmental dyslexia are sensitive to a word’s visual cues, presumably because of poor letter representations.


Author(s):  
Diane Pecher ◽  
Inge Boot ◽  
Saskia van Dantzig ◽  
Carol J. Madden ◽  
David E. Huber ◽  
...  

Previous studies (e.g., Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005) found that semantic classification performance is better for target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the same semantic class (e.g., living) compared to target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the opposite semantic class (e.g., nonliving). In the present study we investigated the contribution of phonology to orthographic neighborhood effects by comparing effects of phonologically congruent orthographic neighbors (book-hook) to phonologically incongruent orthographic neighbors (sand-wand). The prior presentation of a semantically congruent word produced larger effects on subsequent animacy decisions when the previously presented word was a phonologically congruent neighbor than when it was a phonologically incongruent neighbor. In a second experiment, performance differences between target words with versus without semantically congruent orthographic neighbors were larger if the orthographic neighbors were also phonologically congruent. These results support models of visual word recognition that assume an important role for phonology in cascaded access to meaning.


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