To test how phonemic awareness influences reading, two experiments were conducted in the northwestern part of England in which twenty pairs of children possessing phonemic awareness (pa+) and lacking phonemic awareness (pa-) and matched for reading and chronological age were compared. In the first experiment, the subjects' ability to detect…

There are at least two kinds of phonetic knowledge: phoneme synthesis and analytic knowledge. In phoneme synthesis a person demonstrates phonetic knowledge by being able to assemble segments into larger units. With analytic knowledge one knows that syllables or words are analyzable into constituent segments. One type of knowledge enables learning…

A study investigated the relationship among the linguistic units that make up spoken language, the symbols of written language, and how spoken language is mapped onto written language (the alphabetic principle). Subjects, 79 kindergarten children from 5 classrooms in 4 schools in a large southeastern school district, were tested for their…

The Auditory Discrimination in Depth (ADD) program, an oral-motor approach to beginning reading instruction, causes students to become aware of the oral-facial characteristics of phonemes by calling conscious attention to the motor characteristics of each sound. This aspect of phoneme production is connected to visual and auditory cues to provide…

The purpose of this paper is to present two studies, one which questions some previously reported data on phonemic recoding and another which suggests an alternative interpretation for the evidence that Rubenstein and Lewis claimed in support of phonemic recoding. In one experiment three subsets of nonsense words were presented to 35 paid graduate…

Reading researchers and theorists are sharply divided as to how meaning is obtained from the printed word. Three current explanations are that (1) meaning is accessed directly, without any intermediate processes; (2) meaning is accessed only through an intermediate phonemic stage; and (3) both direct access and phonemic mediation can occur. To…

Blending means smoothing together subword segments to try to identify a spoken word. Research suggests that beginning readers need to blend to combine the phonemes they "sound out" into a recognizable approximation of a known word. Popular wisdom presumes blending is easiest when the segments of words are whispered and when syllables are…

To examine the relationship between spelling and reading using full graphemic cues, a study administered tests of oral reading, verbal IQ, reading comprehension, knowledge of letter-sound correspondences, and spelling achievement to 47 fifth-grade students. In addition, data was collected relative to gender and time spent reading outside the…

The purpose of this study was to determine how well children can identify the number of phonemic segments in spoken words and how this compares with their ability to deal similarly with syllables. The subjects were 46 preschoolers, 49 kindergarteners, and 40 first graders. Alphabetized class registers were used at each grade level to divide the…

Forty kindergarten children participated in a study to determine (1) whether significant relationships existed among children's scores on various word boundary tasks, (2) whether scores on the individual tasks were significantly related to the children's ability to represent phonemic segments in their spelling, and (3) whether different…

A 40-item nonsense word list was administered to 27 first-graders who had been taught letter-sound correspondences in isolation. The results displayed a succession of stages through which subjects apparently passed. At the second stage, subjects could sound letters but not blend the sounds into words; at the third stage, subjects could sound some…

This study attempted to compare the phoneme shifting ability of nonreading adults, and remedial elementary and good elementary students. The Phoneme Shifting Test was used to evaluate the phoneme shifting skill, specifically the shifting of the first and the last letters of words. Individual testing was done during October 1974. Phoneme shifting…

To test F. J. Morrison's conceptualization of reading disability as the failure to master the complex irregular system of rules governing sound-symbol correspondence in English (1980), a study investigated the speed with which disabled and normal readers processed short vowels, long vowels, and vowel digraphs. Subjects consisted of two groups of…

A study was conducted to investigate the ability of children to determine meanings of derived words that have undergone a pronunciation shift while retaining a close orthographic relationship to their base words. A researcher-designed test was constructed using derived words that had their base word included in a "core list" of words at or below…

This paper discusses some psycholinguistic and psychological bases of learning to read in two apparently disparate writing systems, English and Chinese. As an alphabet, English orthography has "more reason than rhyme"; relational units and markers (e.g., "hens" and "hence") are important. The combinatory properties of…