The research discussed in this report is a continuation of an effort to develop a set of diagnostic subtests in phonics and structure with empirically determined mastery levels. The complete test will assess the word identification skills of elementary school children. Revisions made in the test battery following administration of the Phonics and…

Two experiments explored the effects of one aspect of English phonology, syllabic consonants, on young children's spelling. For first graders, vowel omissions and misorderings occurred primarily for syllabic /r/ and /l/, whereas by second grade only orthographically influenced errors on syllabic /l/ remained. Results show that the sound form of…

To help reduce the guess work that underpins many phonics programs, a study comprehensively examined the phonic elements of 17,211 words drawn from the 17,310 word list originally compiled by Thorndike and Lorge and later updated by members of the Stanford Spelling Project. Each word in the list was assigned its corresponding respelling that was…

In response to criticism of a previous study, this paper reports a revision of a proposed phonics rule "when there are two vowels, one of which is a final e, the first vowel is long and the final e is silent" (cradle), which is called the VCE (Vowel Consonant E) rule. Following an introductory section, the paper examines previous research, citing…

Two experiments with moderately mentally retarded students found that (1) adequate verbal instruction had a modest but significant effect on the subjects' ability to blend consonant sounds, and (2) training without pictorial prompts resulted in better blending than training with pictorial prompts. (Author/DB)

Sixteen kindergarten children were instructed in grapheme-phoneme correspondences according to two methods that were identical except that in one method the children were instructed individually and in the other the children received group instruction. The number of learning trials given to each child was the same in both situations. However, in…

A small-group procedure for teaching consonant sounds was tested in two studies with rural kindergarten and first-grade students whose teachers had been trained to use the procedure by means of a videotape model and a live demonstration. In the first study, done at the end of the 1974-1975 school year, the kindergarten and first-grade participants…