Examined the effects of rounded and unrounded vowels on the perception of the voiceless fricatives "s" and "sh" by adults and by young children who could and could not produce both sounds. Concluded that productive mastery is not critically responsible for perception of the distinction between the two phonemes or the…

This article reviews the literature on the importance of phonological awareness within the context of language/literacy learning and discusses the developmental continuum of phoneme awareness skills. Specific techniques are suggested to guide the speech-language pathologist in the assessment of phonological awareness skills. (Author/DB)

This study, with 30 language learning-disabled, reading-disabled, and normal primary school children, found that clause structure complexity, fluency, and grammatical and phonemic accuracy tended to be highest when children were discussing absent referents, providing explanations and stories, and giving unshared information. These effects were…

This study examined whether toddlers build a repertoire of words as integral sequences of gestures and then differentiate these sequences into their gestural and segmental components. Results demonstrate clear differences in duration and coordination of gestures between children and adults and a shift toward the patterns of adult speakers during…

The phonemic awareness of 100 children in the second semester of kindergarten was evaluated through analysis of their invented spelling patterns. A taxonomy of 10 invented spelling patterns and 21 response types was developed. A developmental ordering of spelling patterns is proposed and relationships among phonological awareness, spelling, and…

This literature-based review examines the relationship between the acquisition of segmental awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy. Cited studies show that the segmental analysis ability of most dyslexics is very poor and suggest one factor may be related to the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity…

This study examined the development of metaprocessing abilities in children with varying degrees of language abilities and sought to determine if the patterns of metaprocessing development that emerged were similar for these ability groups. Subjects were 141 children ages 4-5 at the beginning of the study, divided into a control group, a low…

Examines the development of word recognition skills of 80 school children (grades two-four). Good beginning readers rapidly learn to recognize high frequency words from visual input alone and simultaneously expand and consolidate spelling sound correspondences. Younger and poor readers rely more on phonological information in word decoding.…