This study investigated knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, their learning, and their contributions to word recognition. Of 123 preschoolers examined on letter knowledge, 65 underwent training on both letter names and letter sounds in a counterbalanced order. Prior to training, children were more advanced in associating letters with their…

All teachers recognize the importance of matching literacy instruction to the ability level and needs of each child--but how can this crucial goal actually be accomplished? This indispensable book provides a research-based framework and flexible, highly practical strategies for making differentiated instruction work. Written by leading experts,…

Purpose: Investigate training-related changes in acoustic-phonetic representation of consonants produced by a text-to-speech (TTS) computer speech synthesizer. Method: Forty-eight adult listeners were trained to better recognize words produced by a TTS system. Nine additional untrained participants served as controls. Before and after training,…

We report two studies examining the relations among three paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks (visual-visual, verbal-verbal, and visual-verbal), phoneme deletion, and single-word and nonword reading ability. Correlations between the PAL tasks and reading were strongest for the visual-verbal task. Path analyses showed that both phoneme deletion…

Do native readers segment polysyllabic words based on orthographic/morphological criteria or phonological criteria? Research by Taft (1979, 2001) argues in support of the former, as readers were faster in split-word lexical decision tasks when the words were segmented by orthographic/ morphological principles based on Basic Orthographic Syllable…

This longitudinal project identified young children at risk of literacy difficulties and asked why some of these children fail to benefit from phonologically based intervention. Reception class children were screened to identify a group at risk of literacy difficulties and a matched group of children not at risk. Profiles were compiled for each…

Two experiments investigated the role of subsyllabic components (groups of letters forming a single phoneme) for visual recognition of words in a perceptual identification task. Found that identification times were longer for words with fewer phonemes that for words with more phonemes. Findings suggest that subsyllabic components play a crucial…

Two phoneme monitoring experiments are reported that examine the amount of lexical activation produced by words containing initial, medial, or final mispronunciations. One showed that minimal mismatches in the initial phoneme produced lexical activation relative to a baseline control nonword, but only when the phoneme was situated at word offset…

Many models of spoken word recognition posit the existence of lexical and sublexical representations, with excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms used to affect the activation levels of such representations. Bottom-up evidence provides excitatory input, and inhibition from phonetically similar representations leads to lexical competition. In such a…

Are the visual word-processing tasks of naming and lexical decision sensitive to systematic phonological properties that may or may not be specified in the spelling? Two experiments with Hangul, the alphabetic orthography of Korea, were directed at the effects of the phonological process of assimilation whereby one articulation changes to conform…

This paper reports a study exploring the associations between measures of two levels of phonological representation: recognition (epi-linguistic) and production (meta-linguistic) tasks, and very early reading and writing skills. Thirty-eight pre-reading Ottawa-area children, aged 4-5 years, named environmental print (EP), wrote their own name,…

The rationale, development, and implementation of a reading program designed to teach disadvantaged children the skills prerequisite to learning to read are discussed in this paper. Of particular importance are skills in the recognition and manipulation of basic speech sounds, phonemes. The first of the program's three parts takes two and one-half…

Research with 32 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old British children demonstrated that children at different reading levels relied on different types of cues in recognizing words. Older children used grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules in recognizing words and were much more flexible than were beginning readers in their response patterns. (SLD)

THE PHONEMIC BEHAVIOR OF ALL VOWEL-PAIR SINGLE GRAPHEMES FOUND IN 17,310 COMMON ENGLISH WORDS WAS STUDIED, AND THE PHONEMIC BEHAVIOR OF VOWEL-PAIR GRAPHEMES FREQUENTLY FOUND IN THIS SAMPLE WAS ANALYZED. THE GRAPHEME TO PHONEME RELATIONSHIP FOR EACH POSSIBLE VOWEL PAIR IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WAS EXAMINED. TABLES SHOW THE FREQUENCY AND PERCENT OF…

The purpose of this paper is to present two studies, one which questions some previously reported data on phonemic recoding and another which suggests an alternative interpretation for the evidence that Rubenstein and Lewis claimed in support of phonemic recoding. In one experiment three subsets of nonsense words were presented to 35 paid graduate…