The three articles in this monograph describe and analyze the graphoneme (a closed syllable that begins with a vowel and ends with a consonant, semivowel, or silent "e") and its usefulness in the teaching of reading. The first article discusses the graphoneme concept as a systemized approach to initial reading instruction, while the…

Analyzes phoneme-grapheme relationships of vowels and reports common phonemes in accented and unaccented, open and closed syllables. Bibliography and tables. (MD)

Investigated the ability of children aged five, six, and seven years to categorize rhyming words. Children were better able to group words that shared rimes (speech units) than those with common syllable onsets. Results suggest that children who are not yet able to read are aware of single phonemes when they coincide with onset. (SAK)

Use of the syllable as a unit for initial acquisition of reading is advocated. It is argued that since English alphabetic writing is based on a mapping between sound-stream and symbol, a decoding approach is necessary at early stages of the acquisition process. However, conventional phonics methods confound two very difficult tasks in initial…

The paper describes a method of estimating a person's oral reading rate from a small sample (a short sentence) of his speech. Reading rate was obtained by measuring the speaking portion of a considerable amount of reading, and dividing it by the number of phonemes in the material. (Author/PHR)

Research shows that a simple 23 element syllabary can be acquired with ease by innercity and suburban kindergartners. See related article by Kenneth S. Goodman, CS 705 852. (Author/RB)

This investigation was undertaken to identify the graphonemes inherent within the structure of those English words most likely making up the reading vocabulary of elementary school children. Such knowledge was deemed to be important in determining which words should be included in the content of reading materials designed for initial reading…

Children, four, six, eight, and twelve years old, and adults participated in a study of judgments of syllable similarity. Subjects listened to a disyllabic nonsense unit (the standard) followed by two comparison stimuli; they were then asked to choose the comparison stimulus "most like" the standard. Changes between the comparison stimuli and the…

The purpose of this study was to determine how well children can identify the number of phonemic segments in spoken words and how this compares with their ability to deal similarly with syllables. The subjects were 46 preschoolers, 49 kindergarteners, and 40 first graders. Alphabetized class registers were used at each grade level to divide the…

Strategies children use when they recognize words were explored. To measure the effectiveness of two different methods of training children to attend to the critical features of letters, 40 first-grade urban children were presented two pairs of letters (similar and dissimilar) simultaneously or successively. Unexpectedly, it was found that with…

Explores children's ability to segment utterances into syllables and phonemes, and their skills in the recall of sentences of low and high complexity. (HOD)

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…

A study examined the usefulness of two rules of syllabification: (1) if the first vowel or vowel digraph in a word is followed by two consonants that are not parts of a consonant digraph, the first syllable ends with the first of the two consonants, such as, nor-mal; and (2) if the first vowel or vowel digraph in a word is followed by a single…

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.…

This paper contends that children's failure to demonstrate predictable gains in reading ability may be attributable to the failure of the teaching program to focus on strategies involving larger and larger chunking of the language accesses. Teaching programs in reading should be constructed to develop middle-level reading skills. Such programs…