To examine the effects of phonemic awareness (defined as "conscious access to the phonemic level of the speech stream and some ability to cognitively manipulate representations at this level") on spelling development and to explore the relationship of phonemic awareness to recognized stages of spelling development, a study collected data…

The Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization (LAC) Test was constructed with the recognition that the process of decoding involves an integration of the auditory, visual, and motor senses. Requiring the manipulation of colored blocks to indicate conceptualization of test patterns spoken by the examiner, subtest 1 entails coding of identity, number,…

This paper presents three viewpoints of the coding of language in English spelling: the classical view (that letters are a code for phonemes but that English spelling contains much irregularity), the revolutionary position (that letters do not code phonemes at all), and the eclectic view (that English spelling does code phonemes but that it also…

Nursery rhymes and written phonics used in a meaningful context are valuable teaching methods which can be applied in a whole language classroom or in conjunction with a basal reading program. Because nursery rhymes are rooted in oral tradition they lend themselves to oral presentation. They provide forms for the oral beginnings of the best of…

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 rationale, development, and implementation of a reading program designed to teach disadvantaged children the skills prerequisite to learning to read are discussed in this paper. Of particular importance are skills in the recognition and manipulation of basic speech sounds, phonemes. The first of the program's three parts takes two and one-half…

Stop consonants after initial /s/ are standardly spelled as the unvoiced stops /p/, /t/, and /k/. Phonetically, however, they are similar to the voiced stops /b/, /d/, and /g/. Research suggests that many young children make consistent, reasonable, but unconventional, judgments about sounds and English spelling. This paper considers the case of…

The study was designed to explore whether learning a phoneme in a word-final position facilitated production of the same phoneme word medially or intervocalically in six 3 to 5 year olds with articulation disorders. A stimulus-response-reinforcement approach to treatment was used that elicited both imitative and spontaneous responses. Probe lists…

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…

Spectographic analysis of speech calls into question two common assumptions of reading teachers: (1) that words are independent units of speech, and (2) that phonemes, the minimal speech sounds needed to change meaning, actually exist. Spectographs reproduce the physical sounds made in speech without any human or psychological interpretation. When…

To measure the symmetry of adult categorical phoneme perception, 10 adult male undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory psychology class were the subjects for this study as part of their course requirements. The stimuli used in this study were prepared at Haskins Laboratories by means of a parallel resonance synthesizer and computer. The…

How syntax affects sentence prosody is explored. It is demonstrated that the lengthening of phase-final words and pausing afterward reflect a distinctly prosodic representation in which phonological constituents are arranged in a hierarchical nonrecursive structure. A model of prosodic pronunciation is also presented. (SLD)

In Quiegolani Zapotec (QZ), a language spoken by approximately 3,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico, words contain minimal consonant clusters of two or even three consonants, and most of these clusters show a decreasing scope of sonority. This violates sonority constraints proposed by Greenberg (1978) and further discussed by Bell and Saka (1983). QZ,…

A series of phonetic production and perception experiments were designed to describe the phonological or phonetic domains of two effects in spoken English: final lengthening, generally interpreted as a mark for the edge of some linguistically-defined unit of speech production, and stress-timed shortening, generally interpreted as evidence for…