A study examined the invented spelling abilities demonstrated by hearing, hard of hearing, or deaf kindergarten and first-grade students. The students with deafness outperformed hearing students in two areas: concept of word and word recognition and performed less well on phoneme awareness. Spelling patterns differed between the two groups.…

A study investigated the literacy performance of 132 students (ages 9-19) with mild to moderate mental retardation. Twenty-two percent achieved "minimum literacy," which included the ability to recognize words, comprehend a narrative passage, write at least two letters representing sounds in words, and write at least two words. (Contains…

"Sounding out" is a cultural model capturing an image of reading that parents and children share, is found to enhance reading ability. The role played by "Sounding out" in parent's experiences with reading is described and how they apply their understanding of sounding out words to instructional interactions with their own children is described.

Phonological and metaphonological skills are explored in 97 Brazilian illiterate and semiliterate adults. A simple letter- and word-reading task was used to define the degree of illiteracy. Phonemic awareness was strongly dependent on the level of letter and word reading ability. Phonological memory was very low in illiterates and unrelated to…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…

A study used a primed lexical decision task to explore readers' use of "onset" and "rime" units in processing words. Onset segments include the initial consonant or consonant cluster of a syllable, while rime segments consist of the pronounced vowel group and any final consonants. Subjects were 32 fifth graders and 27 college…

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…

Underwater intelligibility of three standard word lists is evaluated in two experiments. Results indicate that words which are equated for difficulty in normal conditions are likewise equated under water. Phoneme distortion was examined in a multiple choice test which showed fricatives and place of production to be most affected under water. (SC)

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…

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…

The purposes of this study were to assess the effect of phoneme-grapheme consistency (PGC) and cue emphasis (CE) on the development of decoding skills in first graders and to determine the relationship of consistency of original lists to the recognition of new words. Subjects were 162 first graders, mean age 6.11 years and scoring above 30 on the…

Describes two experiments that investigate the relationship between beginning readers' concept of word in text and their awareness of phonemes in spoken words. (HOD)

Misspellings by first through fifth grade students were classified as to probable underlying spelling strategies. An overall shift strategy from sound to print was reflected in fifth grade errors independent of word difficulty. (FL)

Two experiments using the same Ss in one sitting tested the hypothesis that the temporal redundancy inherent in rhythmically structured sound sequences is used during listening by the perceptual mechanism. (Editor)

Fourteen two-year-olds were presented with minimal word pairs in a new and efficient experimental perception paradigm. Data provide a view of relative difficulty of various minimal phonological contrasts for children. (CHK)