Two groups of grade school children were tested for their ability to use orthographic rimes as functional units of reading by reading pseudowords. The results suggest that the size of the orthographic rime frequency effect reflects the operation of two factors: vocabulary size and grapheme-phoneme conversion skill. (SW)

Examines the auditory evoked potentials (AEP) in the left and right hemispheres of the brain in response to variations in voice onset time (VOT) differences within and between phoneme categories. Subjects were 12 preschool children. (BD)

Administered phonological awareness and phoneme identification tasks to dyslexic children and chronological age (CA) and reading-level (RL) comparison groups. Found no real differences in categorical perception between dyslexic and RL groups; however, more dyslexics (7 of 25) had abnormal identification functions. Results suggest that some…

This study examined consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllable splitting among literate (Grade 2) and preliterate (kindergarten) Hebrew speakers. Consideration of both the architecture of Hebrew orthography and phonology led to the prediction that a body-coda rather than an onset-rime subdivision would predominate. Structured and unstructured tasks…

Although developmental increases in the size of the position effect within a mispronunciation detection task have been interpreted as consistent with a view of the lexical restructuring process as protracted, the position effect itself might not be reliable. The current research examined the effects of position and clarity of acoustic-phonetic…

Investigated the processes that 158 children in grades 3 through 6 used for spelling. Children had the most difficulty with spellings based on morphological information and the least with those based on invariant sound-spelling relationships. (SKC)

Three studies examined linguistic factors influencing preschooler's phonemic awareness task performance. Results indicated no performance differences between fricatives and stops. Subjects were more likely to mistakenly judge that syllables began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme differed from the target only in voicing than when it…

Young Portuguese-speaking children have been reported to produce more vowel- and syllable-oriented spellings than have English speakers. To investigate the extent and source of such differences, we analyzed children's vocabulary and found that Portuguese words have more vowel letter names and a higher vowel-consonant ratio than do English words.…

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between "ch" and "tch" is determined by the preceding vowel ("coach," "roach" vs. "catch," "hatch"). We investigated children's sensitivity to vowel context when spelling…

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…

Four experiments examined whether letter names at the ends of words are equally useful as letter names in the initial position. Findings indicated that 4- and 5-year-olds derived little benefit from such information in reading or spelling, although adults did. For young children, word-final information appeared to have less influence on reading…

This study tested the segmentation hypothesis of dyslexia by measuring implicit phonological representations in reading-disabled 11- to 13-year-olds. Implicit measures included lexical gating, priming, and syllable similarity tasks designed to reduce metalinguistic demands. Children with dyslexia performed consistently worse than CA and RA…

Evaluates use of spelling-sound correspondences to read and spell by third-graders defined as good readers and good spellers, good readers and poor spellers, or poor readers and poor spellers. Indicates that all groups used correspondences but that children in mixed and poor groups used them less systematically and had weaker knowledge of…

Three experiments using beginning readers of Dutch (seven and eight years old) as subjects provide evidence that visually recognizing the unique graphemic structure of words is important in word identification, even in early stages in learning to read. Results are discussed regarding the importance of building accurate graphemic entries in the…