One of a series of reports on the status of speech investigation, this collection of articles deals with topics including intonation and morphological knowledge. The titles of the articles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Integration and Segregation in Speech Perception" (Bruno H. Repp); (2) "Speech Perception Takes Precedence…

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…

Defining regularity in the English language is not a straightforward matter because of the complex relations between sound and spelling. Predictable patterns are those spellings that can be readily predicted from pronunciation. Rare and unpredictable spellings are found only in a small set of words--probably 10% or less of the vocabulary in…

Literature related to orthography, phonology, and reading is reviewed and synthesized in order to develop a rationale for a "goodness of fit" hypothesis. This hypothesis asserts that a writing system which is more consistently fit to the phonological structure of a particular language is more likely to facilitate learning to read.…

An informal diagnostic spelling test of Hebrew as a second language was constructed and administered to 30 students, 8 boys and 22 girls, in a Jewish middle and high school. As evidenced by the subjects in this study, spelling errors in Hebrew tended to centralize in four areas: (1) the spelling patterns according to grammatical and phonetic…

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…

To determine the degree of emphasis on phonics instruction necessary for beginning readers, a study was conducted involving five pairs of four-year-old monozygotic twins. Randomly selected twins from each pair were exposed to two different levels of phonics instruction. In one group, the reduced treatment group, only one sound equivalent per…

This paper challenges from a practical point of view the idea that the phonemic principle is the most adequate or the optimal theoretical basis for devising a romanized alphabet for a language. In the past, romanization of languages, written or unwritten, have largely been based on the phonemic principle and have unnecessarily burdened the learner…

Three reputed advantages of using a letter-combination (LC) approach, as opposed to a grapheme-unit (GU) approach for initial word-attack and spelling instruction are critically analyzed. While LC reduces the number of elements per word, it also reduces the number of words that can be generated. LC eliminates distortion in the final…

This paper analyzes evidence related to the effectiveness of vowel generalization from two viewpoints: the nature of letter-sound and sound-letter relationships as derived from Dewey, Hanna, and Hillerich, and the nature of these relationships as derived from results of teaching vowel generalizations to children. From the evidence and the research…

Thirty third graders, divided into three equal groups, were used to determine the extent to which good, average, and poor readers depend upon two types of reading cues--Graphic features of word and of context. To hold error quantity differences constant, materials were chosen at different levels of vocabulary and syntactic difficulty. Each subject…

Tests for four letter-sound generalizations--"c" pronounced as [k] or [s] and "a" pronounced as [ae] or [e]--were given to 73 first, second, and third grade children at six-week intervals during a single school year. Each test included five synthetic words (e.g., cipe, acim, bice, cib, ocet) for each generalization. Children responded individually…

Discusses a study conducted to determine the approaches and techniques pupils used to pronounce actual unknown words. (JM)

This article presents the results of a questionnaire sent to Spanish teachers regarding possible orthographic reforms in Spanish. Changes considered included elimination of certain letters and representation of each phoneme by only one letter. Responses to each question are classified and explained. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)

Investigates monolingual Spanish-speaking children's acquisition of Spanish orthographic structure. Results indicate that the students' decoding skills and their later reading achievement are not significantly related. (Author/CB)