Background: Both academic research and educational policy have focused on the diverse language resources of young schoolchildren. African American Language (AAL) in particular has a rich history of scholarship that both documents its historical evolution and sociolinguistic complexity and reveals the persistent lack of knowledge about AAL in our…

A practical orthography is presented for Kuuk Thaayorre, which is spoken by over 300 Aborigines in Australia. The phonemes in Thaayorre and the way they are symbolized in normal writing practice are presented. Frequent occurrence of six conventional digraphs for some Thaayorre consonants has given rise to complementary orthography as an initial…

Although approximately one-half of the English lexicon can be spelled according to phoneme-grapheme correspondences, many words in the remaining half of the lexicon can also be spelled systematically on the basis of their morphemic properties rather than on the bases of their pronunciations. This paper discusses the bases for assuming that English…

Two nonword spelling and two orthographic awareness experiments examined production and awareness of sound-spelling relationships. Results of the nonword spelling experiments suggest people use phoneme-grapheme sized relationships when spelling nonwords. Orthographic awareness experiments suggest, under some circumstances, people can use larger…

The main objective of the present study was to examine the contribution of phonological and orthographic skills to Persian reading and spelling. The Persian language is of interest because it has very consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, but somewhat inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences. Reading, spelling, phonological, and…

The order of difficulty of positions and the segmentability of phoneme categories are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that phonemes are functioning units in the perception and production of speech. The final version of the program for teaching phonemic segmentation is described. (Author/LMO)

Assesses the extent to which 30 third graders employ phonetically-based spelling strategies in representing synthetic words with high and mid front vowels. Finds spelling of good readers rule-governed and derived from judgement about language while that of poor readers showed less awareness of written language patterns. (LFL)

The purpose of this study was to determine the significance of teaching phonological awareness directly in the classroom. Student samples were conducted of both special education and general education students. Teacher interviews and observations were also used in this process. This research was conducted in an elementary school with approximately…

A study of acquisition of the alphabetic principle in 64 preliterate children, aged 3 to 5 years, is reported. It appears that phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowledge are needed in combination for acquisition of the alphabetic principle. Once gained, alphabetic insight proved relatively robust. (TJH)

Studies elementary students' ability to match up graphemes to phonemes within individual words. Shows that older students exhibited greater graphophonemic awareness and greater digraph knowledge than younger students. Results are interpreted to bear on Ehri's phrase theory of word reading acquisition and on connectionist models of word reading.…

Argues that phonemic awareness instruction should be a thoughtful, conscious component of early literacy programs (without replacing other crucial areas of instruction). Discusses what phonemic awareness is and how it differs from auditory discrimination, phonetics, or phonics. Describes what phonemic awareness instruction looks like in the…

Relationships among articulation, vocabulary, phonemic awareness, and word reading were examined in 45 children who spoke either Hmong or Spanish as their primary language. A theoretical perspective suggesting that English articulation and vocabulary would influence children's English phonemic awareness and English word reading was developed.…

Sound symbolism is the notion that the relation between word sounds and word meaning is not arbitrary for all words, but rather there is a subset of words in the world's languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. This research investigates sound symbolism as a possible means of gaining semantic knowledge of…

Major theories of how skilled readers recognize, understand and pronounce written words include processes for phonological recoding (i.e., translating segments of print to their corresponding segments of sound) and processes by which direct access is achieved from printed words to their meanings. If these are the processes employed in skilled…

Two studies examined whether young children use their knowledge of the spelling of base words to spell inflected and derived forms. In Study 1, 5- to 9-year-olds wrote the correct letter (s or z) more often to represent the medial /z/ sound of words derived from base forms (e.g., "noisy," from "noise") than to represent the medial /z/ sound of…