Background: A large amount of evidence highlights the obvious inequalities in literacy results of South African learners. Despite this, a sound understanding of how learners approach the task of reading in the African languages is lacking. Aim: This article examines the role of the syllable, phoneme and morpheme in reading in transparent,…

Individuals with acquired phonological dyslexia experience difficulty associating written letters with their corresponding sounds, especially in pseudowords. Several studies have attempted to improve reading in this population by training letter-to-sound correspondence, general phonological skills, or a combination of these approaches; however,…

The importance of phonological awareness for learning to read may depend on the linguistic properties of a language. This study provides a careful examination of this language-specific theory by exploring the role of phoneme-level awareness in Mandarin Chinese, a language with an orthography that, at its surface, appears to require little…

This article reports on an investigation of graphophonological processes in deaf readers of French over a 1-year period. Deaf readers are known to have a phonological deficit compared to hearing peers, and conclusions from studies on this question are often conflicting. Among the different types of phonological processing, we can identify…

The ability to identify stop consonants from brief onset spectra was compared between a group of Chinese children with phonological dyslexia (the PD group, with a mean age of 10 years 4 months) and a group of chronological age-matched control children. The linguistic context, which included vowels and speakers, and durations of stop onset spectra…

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…

Describes a study of the developmental ordering of syllable and phoneme segmentation abilities in preschool, kindergarten and first-grade children. Results indicate that both syllable and phoneme segmentation increased with grade level, but analysis into phonemes is significantly harder and perfected later than analysis into syllables. (Author/SDH)

This literature-based review examines the relationship between the acquisition of segmental awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy. Cited studies show that the segmental analysis ability of most dyslexics is very poor and suggest one factor may be related to the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity…

Two cohorts of preschool children (n=238) were followed to determine whether tests of phonological awareness, orthographic processing, and serial-naming speed, added to a preschool battery, would improve prediction of reading. The major predictors of first-grade reading and spelling were preschool letter-naming and sentence memory for both…

While previous studies have investigated children's awareness of two units within words--syllables and phonemes, there is experimental evidence that children are also aware of intrasyllabic units (units intermediate in size between the syllable and the phoneme), and that these units may be useful for teaching phonological awareness and reading.…

Examines a program in Denmark that uses metalinguistic games and exercises to stimulate preschool children's discovery of the phonological structure of language. Concludes that phonological awareness can be developed outside the context of the acquisition of an alphabetic writing system, and that this awareness facilitates subsequent reading and…