In the present study, the nature of Dutch children's phonological awareness was examined throughout the elementary school grades. Phonological awareness was assessed using five different sets of items that measured rhyming, phoneme identification, phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme deletion. A sample of 1405 children from…

Several decades of research have established the critical role of phonemic awareness in the development of beginning reading. In particular, phonemic awareness makes early phonics instruction useful for children and facilitates their ability to blend letter sounds while decoding words, to learn sight words reliably, and to spell phonetically. A…

Examines the effects of onset and rime awareness on children's recognition of spelling patterns in written words. Reports that onset-rime awareness was associated with word ending similarities, whereas word beginning analogies appeared to involve higher-level phonological skills. Suggests longitudinal research regarding the issue. (SG)

In light of the proposal that a ratio of the maximum duration of sustained /s/ to /z/ sounds may be useful in determining the possible contributions of the respiratory and vocal mechanisms to a disordered voice, a study of /s/ and /z/ maximum phoneme duration in normal five-, seven-, and nine-year-olds was conducted. (Author/DLS)

This study evaluated the voiced/voiceless phonation time for /s/ and /z/ for 11 children (ages 5-10) with vocal pathology and 11 normal speaking children. Results showed no difference in /s/ durations between groups, but /z/ durations and s/z ratios were significantly different. Results are discussed in relation to task construction, instructional…

A study examined the use of a phonological awareness intervention program with three children with Down syndrome (ages 7-8). The intervention focused on key skills of alliteration detection, phoneme isolation, spelling of orthographically regular words, and rhyme detection. Results indicate participants improved the phonological awareness skills…

Investigates whether spelling models proposed to account for performance in languages with a deep orthography are applicable to a shallow orthography such as Spanish. Finds significant effects for the variables of grapheme frequency and lexical priming, coinciding with results found in the English language. (RS)

Two studies compare phonology-based instructional strategies designed for improving spelling skills of elementary school children against instruction strategies that rely only on visual exposure of words. In both studies, posttests showed that children taught through psycholinguistic and phoneme awareness methods significantly outperformed the…

The protocol materials on phonology in black nonstandard dialects prepared for use by a group of elementary teacher trainees are described. The thirteen phonological concepts studied include: (1) free variation of sounds or full phonemes; (2) the loss of the /r/ phoneme, except in initial position in a syllable; (3) the omission of final single…

Two types of phonological training of children with reading disabilities were compared. Children trained in speech discrimination, letter-sound correspondence, and phonemic awareness (SP/LPA) and children trained only in letter-sound correspondence and phonemic awareness (n=35) improved in phonemic awareness, but only the SP/LPA group scored…

In this interview, a neuroscientist explains possible applications of brain-imaging techniques to diagnose children's reading difficulties. When good readers do phonologic processing, they activate areas in the back and front of their brains. The brain systems of poorer readers process incoming print information differently. (MLH)

Reflecting the large amount of evidence linking children's progress in learning to read to their phonological awareness, this manual presents a program of phonological and phonological linkage activities, a set of reproducible record sheets, and 54 picture sheets used in the program. After an introduction and guide to the program, the manual…

Concludes that the regularity effect is phonologically, not orthographically, mediated; that good readers use a predominantly phonological strategy in lexical decisions, while poor readers do not; and that for the best readers-spellers, orthographically and phonologically irregular words have a special status, allowing them to gain fast and…

Conducted two experiments to investigate phonological and tactual coding in Braille reading by blind children. Results revealed a phonological effect in blind children's reading of single words. Also direct lexical access, from tactual input, proceeded with the same facility for the blind as does visual input for the sighted. (Author)

This study reports the effectiveness of a three-pronged (segmentation, phonological neighbor cues, and rehearsal) phonologically based strategy designed to reduce word finding errors of two third-graders. Results indicated an improvement in word finding in single-word contexts that was generalized to sentences and maintained during follow-up.…