THE NATURE OF PHONOLOGICAL AND PHONEMIC …
THE NATURE OF PHONOLOGICAL AND PHONEMIC AWARENESS
IN LITERATE ADULTS
by
Susan Beth Lorenson
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
2 0 0 4
(final examining committee approval form to go here)
STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.
SIGNED: ________________________________
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DEDICATION
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0 Introduction
1. Thesis.................................................................................................p.
1.2 Phonemic awareness: definition and issues
1.3. Phonemic awareness and adults
1.3.1 Theory 1: The “no-relationship” relationship
1.3.2. Theory 2: Phonemic awareness skills play a negligible role in reading
1.3.3. Theory 3: Phonemic awareness plays a crucial role in adult reading
1.4. Thesis and motivation
1.4.1. Overview of experiments
1.4.2. Theoretical considerations
1.4.3. Pragmatic considerations
1.5. Organizational structure of the dissertation
2.0 Previous Research on Phonemic Awareness
2.1 Phonemic awareness research on beginning readers
2.1.1. Overview
2.1.2. Reading readiness
2.1.3. The predictive power of phonemic awareness
2.1.4. The value of phonemic awareness training
2.1.5. Levels of phonemic awareness
2.1.6. Summary & implications
2.2. Phonemic awareness research on special populations
2.2.1. Overview
2.2.2. Phonemic awareness in illiterates
2.2.3. Phonemic awareness in literates with nonalphabetic orthographies
2.2.4. Phonemic awareness in dyslexics
2.2.5. Phonemic awareness in Children with Down Syndrome
2.2.6. Summary & implications
2.3. Phonemic awareness and secondary language activities
2.4. Special considerations: the question of orthographic interference
2.4.1. The role of orthography in phonological access
2.4.2. Pilot: Delete Segment Task
2.5. Summary
3.0. The Experiments
3.1. Overview
3.2. Deletion Experiments
3.2.1. Experiment One: Delete Segment Task
3.2.2. Experiment Two: Delete Syllable Task
3.2.2. Comparison of Experiments One and Two
3.3. Substitution Experiments
3.3.1. Experiment Three: Substitute Segment Task
3.3.2. Experiment Four: Substitute Syllable Task
3.3.2. Comparison of Experiments Three and Four
3.4. Reversal Experiments
3.4.1. Experiment Five: Reverse Segment Task
3.4.2. Experiment Six: Reverse Syllable Task
3.4.3. Comparison of Experiments Five and Six
3.5. Summary of Experiments
4.0. Conclusion
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST OF TABLES
ABSTRACT
1. Introduction
1.1 Thesis
This dissertation is an examination of phonemic awareness in literate adults. Phonemic awareness, the ability to identify and manipulate the sound segments in a word, has long been associated with reading ability in children. Myriad studies on children’s phonemic awareness in the last two decades have consistently shown that good readers possess a high level of phonemic awareness, whereas poor readers do not. As Mann puts it, "phoneme awareness bears both a logical and a proven relationship to early reading success. Its presence is a hallmark of good readers, its deficiency one of the more consistent characteristics of poor readers" (Mann, 1991, p. 260).
Little is known about the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in literate adults, however, since no studies have previously been conducted on the subject. This dissertation reports the results of a study on phonemic awareness in adults, which was modeled on past phonemic awareness studies with children. The results of the study indicate that adults, like children, exhibit differing degrees of phonemic awareness, and that these levels of phonemic awareness are associated with reading ability. The implications of these findings, both practical and theoretical, are discussed.
An introduction to phonemic awareness is given below, followed by a section on the possible relationships between phonemic awareness and reading ability in adults, an expanded thesis statement with an outline of the experiments to be conducted and the motivations for the study, and an overview of the organizational structure of the dissertation.
1.2 Phonemic awareness: definition and issues
In this section, phonemic awareness is defined, and some of the most salient issues in previous phonemic awareness research are reviewed.
Phonemic awareness (which shall alternately be referred to in this dissertation by the abbreviation “PA”) is defined by Stanovich as “the ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable" (Stanovich, 1993, p. 283). That is, phonemic awareness is both the knowledge that the word cat consists of three distinct phonemes ([k..æ...t] and not just one inseparable syllable, [kæt]), and the ability to isolate those phonemes on command (such as stripping the first phoneme off cat and producing [æt]).
The term "phonemic awareness" has acquired quite a specific meaning in the field of reading education, referring to various levels of achievement on certain experimental tasks that are used as diagnostics of reading ability. For the last two decades, the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability has been poked, prodded and otherwise examined by researchers in the fields of Linguistics, Psychology, and Education.
In the last few years, however, phonemic awareness has become something of a hot topic, and the term “phonemic awareness” has migrated from the jargon of Linguistics and Educational Psychology into the mass media. It has even become a buzz phrase, a selling point for a number of products and services. Consider the excerpts on the following page, which illustrate the marketability of phonemic awareness:
New York Times article on the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development at the NIH, October 27, 1996
Auditory Discrimination in Depth. We offer three to five day Lindamood A.D.D. workshops which develop phonemic awareness - the ability to judge sounds within words. This awareness underlies decoding and spelling . The techniques begin orally with how speech sounds are articulated, and extend into multi-syllable and contextual spelling and reading. Additional training is available and highly recommended: 1 day on the LAC Test; 3 day practicum workshop with students.
Lindamood-Bell web page
Windows to Reading is a series of programs for students and teachers which will focus on early reading and writing instruction for grades K-3. Orientation Telecast on September 30, 1996. [Programs include:]
1. Phonemic Awareness
2. Spelling and Phonics Skill Development....
Windows to Reading promotion on the Web
Reading Who? Reading You! can help children achieve these important reading objectives:
3. Learn letter-sound correspondence
4. Develop phonemic awareness...
Description of interactive software © 1996, by Software for Success
Phonemic Awareness #61105-3: Phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors of later success in reading. This one day training will enable early childhood educators to become familiar with resources and strategies to facilitate phonemic awareness in young children.
UT 1996 continuing education catalog for early childhood educators
Sesame Street, now in its 27th season, continues its literacy campaign, Let’s Read and Write! The program places additional emphasis on beginning reading skills for preschool children and delves into stories, phonemic awareness, writing sight words, and more.
May ‘96 program description for Sesame Street
How do you know if your child is learning what he must to succeed in school? Hirsch and Holdren say a good kindergarten program will......develop children’s phonemic awareness, which helps them understand that the sounds in a word can be thought of as a string of smaller, individual sounds.
Book review by Lisa Faye Kaplan of the Gannett News Service
of What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know
In order to develop an understanding of the alphabetic principle, they must become familiar with letter forms and with the idea that spoken words have identifiable sounds in them -- referred to as the concept of phonemic awareness.
Houghton Mifflin web site, promoting a
“a rich literacy environment filled with books” in the classroom
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is designed to help children build pre-reading skills, said Jan Davidson, president and founder of Davidson & Associates. It’s irresistible music, rhythms, and rhymes build phonemic awareness.
Press release from Davidson & Associates about their new CD-ROM
Web pages, CD-ROMs, software, seminars: phonemic awareness has been embraced by the mainstream educational community, clearly not just for journal articles anymore. What explains this phenomenon?
The phonemic awareness hype is due to one simple fact: phonemic awareness skills have been proven to have an incontestable, unmistakable connection to reading ability in children.
Previous research on the phonemic awareness/reading ability connection will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, but a brief overview is presented here.
The majority of work on phonemic awareness has concentrated on a number of claims:
• Children must be "phonemically aware” before they are able to read an alphabetic orthography. (Adams, 1990; Ball & Blachman, 1993). The thrust of this claim is that before children are able to decipher a writing system which is based on sound-symbol correspondences, they must be able to break a word down into its individual sounds (phonemes), so that they are able to learn the relationship between these sounds and the letters (graphemes) to which they correspond.
• Phonemic awareness tasks can be used to predict a child's later success or failure in reading. (Stanovich, 1993). This claim posits that a child’s ability to manipulate (substitute, delete, etc.) the phonemes in a word predicts his/her future reading ability. A child who knows that “ice” is “nice” without the first sound will be a better reader than a child who does not understand this relationship.
• Phonemic awareness training can prove useful in preparing a child for reading instruction. (Lundberg et. al., 1988; Cunningham, 1990; Hatcher, Hume & Ellis, 1994; Bradley & Bryant, 1983). This claim’s proponents see a causal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability, and believe that children who are trained in tasks that develop phonemic awareness skills will be better readers than children who do not receive such training.
•
• Reading facilitates phonemic awareness ability. (Tornéus, 1984). This claim is the reverse of claim (1) above, and states that phonemic awareness is not as much a prerequisite of reading or a predictor of reading ability as much as it is a fall-out from reading; those who know how to read an alphabetic orthography can perform phonemic awareness tasks because the task of reading has developed PA skill.
Needless to say, not all researchers on phonemic awareness subscribe to the same theory of the connection between PA and reading ability. Nevertheless, those who have worked on elucidating the claims above agree that there is a strong correlation between reading ability and phonemic awareness. Ball & Blachman (1991) summarize the findings well:
To read or spell phonetically regular words, a child must be aware that words can be broken into phonemes and that each phoneme corresponds to a symbol (or symbols) in our orthography (Ball and Blachman, 1991, p. 63).
That is, reading in an alphabetic system is a process that involves breaking the "alphabetic code." This decoding includes the application of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules (alternately called graphophonics rules or simply phonics rules), rules which tell the child that in the word cat, the grapheme “c” corresponds to [k], the grapheme “a” to [æ], etc.
Although reading involves the application of phonics rules and children must be phonemically aware to read, it is necessary to understand the important distinction between phonemic awareness and mere phonics knowledge. The child who is phonemically aware possesses more than an extensive battery of “x stands for y” rules. Those [phonics] rules alone are useless unless the child is able to identify and manipulate the phonemes of a word. The child who has learned his or her phonics rules knows that “‘c’ stands for [k], ‘a’ stands for [æ], and ‘t’ stands for [t].” The child who is phonemically aware knows that the isolated phonemes which these rules produce ([k], [æ], and [t]) yield a word in combination, [kæt], which was once thought of as a single, impenetrable unit. The child who is phonemically aware is able to effectively use phonics rules to create and dismantle words.
The phonemic awareness/reading connection is unquestionably strong. The body of research reviewed in the next chapter has shown that phonemic awareness is more often a characteristic of good readers than any other measure, including IQ, analytic ability, or even other linguistic ability (where “linguistic ability” is any language-based skill, including, but not limited to, phonics knowledge). This last point is particularly striking. Since phonemic awareness is more strongly associated with reading skill than mere phonics knowledge, some have suggested that phonemic awareness should be taught, instead of (or in addition to) teaching phonics. Phonemic awareness training is emerging as a way to bridge the gap between the often disparate approaches to reading of phonics instruction and whole language instruction, in which readers are encouraged to read without relying on explicitly taught rules. It is, perhaps, grounds for a treaty in what have been dubbed the “reading wars.”
Consider the table below, which illustrates the various qualities of traditional phonics instruction, 70s-era “whole language” instruction, and phonemic awareness training:
| | | | |
| |Phonics Instruction |Phonemic Awareness |Whole Language |
| | |Training |Instruction |
| | | | |
|Graphophonic rules taught explicitly |( | | |
|e.g., ‘c’ stands for [k] | | | |
| | | | |
|Graphophonic rules learned without explicit instruction | |( |( |
|e.g., students are given texts with juxtaposed rhyming words | | | |
|like “cat” and “hat” and eventually figure out that the | | | |
|‘c’/’h’ difference corresponds to the [k]/[h] difference | | | |
| | | | |
|Explicit training in identifying the components of a word |( |( | |
|(phonemes) e.g., students are taught to “sound out” and | | | |
|“break down” words | | | |
Educators in the phonics camp believe that the road to reading is paved with explicit instruction in sound/symbol correspondence rules (grapheme x stands for phoneme y). Phonics teachers worry that the whole language approach, with its lack of explicit instruction, leaves many children in the dark. They claim that though whole language instruction may work for normal children who have been exposed to books from an early age and who have already learned to make some connections between the spoken and printed word, it fails children who do have not have this background or who have another obstacle (e.g., dyslexia) to making sound/symbol connections on their own. The belief is that children will best learn to read when they are given the proper tools, that is, the set of rules which draws connections between the 26 letters of the alphabet and the sounds of English.
Whole language adherents believe that instruction in phonics is confusing, because there are so many exceptions to the explicitly taught rules (one can’t help thinking of the George Bernard Shaw observation that fish could be spelled ghoti, with the gh from laugh, the o from women, and the ti from caption). They believe that children, given enough time and exposure to language, will figure out the rules on their own in a natural way. For instance, if a child is repeatedly exposed to Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, in which the rhyming words “cat” and “hat” are juxtaposed, he or she will eventually surmise that the letters c and h are responsible for the difference in sound between the words. Sound/symbol correspondences are not taught, but through the development of “personal phonics rules...[readers] come to understand the alphabetic system and will invent ways of relating their own speech to print" (Goodman, p. 108). This “exposure to print” method of learning allows for the learning of more complicated words. So, when a reader sees the words face and fake juxtaposed, he or she will use context to figure out the difference between the two words, and will subsequently create a rule to account for the difference (k always stands for [k], but c only sometimes does). In theory, the phonics student would either have to learn a sophisticated rule to tackle face (c stands for [s] between two vowels), or would be completely thrown off by the c=[k] rule.
Phonemic awareness training shares features with both phonics and whole language approaches: it is a method of explicit, linguistic instruction, and yet it is not based on the teaching of inconsistent phonics rules. In phonemic awareness training, children are taught to play games that foster their phonemic awareness skills. For example, a child might be given a block for every phoneme in a word (e.g., three blocks for wake, four blocks for cart). When the first block in a linear series is removed, the child would be expected to pronounce the remaining word without the first phoneme (ache or art), if the last block is removed, without the final phoneme (way or car). Note that the manipulations in this exercise do not rely upon graphophonic rules, and in fact may “violate” them (wake has four graphemes but three phonemes). Because PA training is not dependent upon phonics rules, training exercises may also be performed with preliterate children who have not yet been exposed to phonics rules.
Thus, phonemic awareness training, phonics teaching and whole language instruction are all quite different approaches to the teaching of reading. With phonemic awareness training as a novel middle ground, it’s no wonder that educators, parents and software publishers have begun to jump on the bandwagon.
Despite the extensive research on and recent interest in phonemic awareness, experiments on the subject have been limited with regard to subject pool. Experiments aimed at understanding the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability have been conducted primarily with children (as in the studies cited above) and special populations, such as illiterates (Morais et. al.., 1986; Morais et. al., 1991; Koopmans, 1987), literates with non-alphabetic orthographies (Read, 1986; Mann, 1986; Mann, 1991; Tzeng and Chang [in press]), dyslexics (Savin, 1972; Lecocq, 1986; Fox and Routh, 1983; Morais, 1983), and children with Down Syndrome (Cossu & Marshall, 1993). There is little, if any, research on literate adults.[1]
1.3. Phonemic awareness and adults
Why has no phonemic awareness research been conducted on adults, and just what is the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in adults? Three theories explaining the dearth of research in this area are explored in this section.
1.3.1. Theory 1: The “no-relationship” relationship
One explanation for the lack of phonemic awareness research in adults is the following:
(1) Adults, after they have attained a certain level of reading competency, turn into whole word readers. They view all words as single, impervious units and thus no longer use nor require their phonemic awareness skills in reading.
This theory has the advantage of intuitive appeal. Certainly, someone who “sounds out” words when reading comes across as an immature, unskilled reader. Whole word reading seems quicker and more efficient than the alternative. However, despite the controversy in the field of phonemic awareness research (much of it lies in dispute over causal connections, i.e. is phonemic awareness a prerequisite for alphabetic literacy, or does reading an alphabet foster phonemic awareness?), whether or not adults are phonemically aware is not up for debate. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool whole language advocate, who denies the benefits of phonemic awareness training as part of reading instruction, would concede that all alphabetic literates are phonemically aware, and must remain phonemically aware.
Moreover, competent, literate adult readers constantly encounter situations that require the novel implementation of phonemic awareness skills. Consider the following situations:
• Unknown words. Example: A newscaster, seeing the name Boutros Boutros-Ghali for the first time, has no choice but to “sound out” the name, this implementing phonemic awareness skills and the alphabetic code.
• Known words unfamiliar in print form. Example: A reader comes across the word imbecile for the first time in print, and realizes upon sounding it out that it is the word he recognizes in spoken form ([imbesel].
• Partial words. Example: A crossword puzzle afficionado does the New York Times crossword every week. In doing so, she often has to strip phonemes off words, to see if they meet certain criteria. For example, if the answer is _e_ert and the clue is something meaningless to her, she will only be successful in solving the puzzle if she can think of words that fit that schema (desert, revert, etc.)
The readers in each of these situations are competent readers, and yet their day-to-day reading experiences must at times invoke phonemic awareness skills.
Goodman (1993), a strong whole language advocate, states that readers have "three systems of information to bring to any text - graphophonic, syntactic and semantic - and that each one supports the other two. In the course of making sense of print, we use all three systems" (Goodman, p. 53). While whole language theorists believe that readers keep their primary attention focused on comprehension when making sense of a text, they concede that they “shift their focus to the detail of the text and the cue systems they are using... when comprehension begins to break down" (p. 83). According to this view, semantic information provides the most important clues used in reading and drives the reading process, but the specifics of a particular situation (difficulty, strangeness, vocabulary, familiarity, nervousness, etc.) may affect which information is used, and may require the reader to rely on his or her phonemic awareness skills.
Thus, even those most committed to the view of reading as whole-word processing fit phonemic awareness into the schema, though it plays second fiddle to other processing mechanisms. This leads us to the whole language view of adult phonemic awareness, and the second explanation for the dearth of adult phonemic awareness research on adults.
In this section, the theory that adults have no need for phonemic awareness skills was discussed and quickly refuted. An alternate theory, and one with many adherents, follows.
1.3.2. Theory 2: Phonemic awareness skills play a minimal, negligible role in adult reading
Another theory to be considered is this:
(2) Though literate adults are phonemically aware, this awareness plays a minimal role in their reading ability, because it only comes into play when whole word reading and comprehension break down.
This theory holds that competent (adult) readers read differently than beginning readers, paying less attention to the details involved in reading (like the correspondence between letters and sounds) and more attention to meaning. Whole language advocates support this view, and aim to narrow the gap between beginning and experienced readers by teaching novices that reading is a "psycholinguistic guessing game" (Goodman, 1993) in which context clues (to a greater degree than graphophonic rules) are used when reading unfamiliar words. Readers only resort to graphophonic rules as a last-ditch effort; only when all other avenues (whole word recognition and context clues) have failed do such rules come into play. Thus, phonemic awareness is not an important part of reading. Once adults have acquired a baseline (minimal) level of phonemic awareness that can get them out of sticky reading situations, they turn their attention to comprehension-based whole word reading.
Possible problems with this theory of reading are discussed in the next section, along with the third theory of the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability in adults.
1.3.3. Theory 3: Phonemic awareness skills play a crucial role in adult reading
There is an alternative to theories (1) and (2) regarding the relationship between phonemic awareness and adult reading:
(3) Adult reading is an interactive process, in which the ability to apply grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules is crucial, since it may have to take over at any time when other clues fail (losing your place on a page, etc.). Phonemic awareness skills must remain sharp since they may be called upon at any time, not only as a last resort.
This theory was first advanced by Stanovich (1983). As O'Brien (1988) defines the difference between whole language (comprehension) theory (2) above and this interactive (comprehension & phonics) theory, "the [former] holds that readers rely less on graphic and graphophonic information and more on context as they become more adept at reading [whereas] interactive positions of reading [postulate] that multiple information sources are used in creating meaning from texts and that the sources used at any given time may be controlled by a process that compensates for processing weaknesses" (O'Brien, p. 380).
Now, if the context position holds, adults need not hone their phonemic awareness skills, since they are essentially whole word readers, and the connection between reading and PA is minimal, and not likely to vary from adult to adult. On the other hand, if the interactive position holds, readers often turn to graphophonic rules, and, as such, must be actively phonemically aware. In this case, the level of phonemic awareness of literate adults remains an interesting, previously unexplored question.
O’Brien tested the competing comprehension-driven reading vs. interactive reading theories in a study based on the analysis of reading miscues, and found support for the interactive theory. Miscues are the mistakes that people make in reading aloud. Not all mistakes are created equal, though. Some mistakes indicate attention to meaning (saying “She dunked a doughnut” when the text says, “She dunked a muffin”), whereas others indicate attention to graphophonic information (“She dunked a muffler”). One of the assumptions of miscue analysis is that the type of miscue a reader makes indicates the level of his or her comprehension: "readers who make semantically and syntactically acceptable miscues that do not result in meaning loss are assumed to be comprehending a text" (O'Brien, p. 381). In other words, good readers use the semantic and syntactic clues in a text to make educated guesses about what’s coming up, so miscues that are semantically connected to the target word should indicate good reading comprehension.
O'Brien conducted an experiment on seventh graders designed to test the relationship between miscues and comprehension. Subjects were asked to read four passages of varying difficulty aloud, their miscues were recorded and analyzed, and then those miscues were compared with the results of post hoc comprehension tests. The results indicate that the strong context/psycholinguistic position does not hold water. This position would predict a positive correlation between "good" (context-consistent) miscues and comprehension, which was found in only one of the four passages used (the most difficult passage). Moreover, the context position would predict that the best readers attend to meaning, but O’Brien found that the very best reader did not correct semantically anomalous miscues as frequently as the worst reader.
O’Brien’s results indicate that readers pay the least attention to context when reading "easy" passages, which is clearly contra the context position. The whole language theory/context theory would predict that when reading an easy-to-comprehend passage, good readers rely heavily on syntactic and semantic information to figure out words. However, O’Brien found just the opposite. As he puts it, his results indicate that "the broadest interpretation of such conflicting results across passage content is that oral reading miscue analysis presents an oversimplification of what readers do to adapt processing to a variety of texts" (O'Brien, p. 397). The interactive theory, by which readers - even good readers - often rely on graphophonic converstion (and, by extension, phonemic awareness) is better able to explain O’Brien’s results.
There are several survey articles and studies on the predictability of text from semantic and syntactic clues that provide supporting evidence for O’Brien’s conclusions that reading is an interactive process, and not based predominantly on semantic and syntactic cuing. For instance:
1. Across a number of studies, the probability of a reader predicting the next word in a passage from semantic and syntactic information was between .20 and .35, hardly a safe bet as a main strategy in reading comprehension (Stanovich & Stanovich, 1995),
2. The words which readers are most able to correctly predict are function words[2], not words bearing semantic content (Gough, 1983), a finding which is difficult to reconcile with the comprehension-driven theory of reading, and
3. Eye-movement research has indicated that good readers process every letter on a page, rather than glossing over whole words (Gough, 1983).
O’Brien concludes that the results of his miscue study conflict with the whole language view of reading, and can be better explained by an interactive view of reading, whereby readers use different information sources at different times to fill in processing "gaps." One such information source is graphophonic information. O’Brien’s study then provides preliminary evidence that a connection between phonemic awareness and reading may be found in adults, just as it has been with children.
In this section, several possible connections between phonemic awareness and reading in literate adults have been considered. What has emerged is that this relationship is by no means dismissable. It is not the case that adults are entirely whole word readers; they will come across unfamiliar words in their reading, and, according to Goodman, “work around different possibilities to see if anything might sound right" (p. 50). It is also not the case that adults rely on their phonemic awareness skills only when comprehension fails. Though adults are surely better than children at using "context clues" in the deciphering of unfamiliar words, O’Brien showed that context-appropriate mistakes did not necessarily indicate better reading ability.
It is the case that proficient readers still employ their phonemic awareness skills, the skills that were so important in learning to read, every day. Adults have a need for keeping the connections between graphemes and phonemes well-oiled, and yet scant research has been done on phonemic awareness in adults. Even adults have to deal with the sticky "details" of reading at times. In this case, those details are graphophonemic rules, contingent upon phonemic awareness.
1.4. Thesis and motivation
The question explored in this thesis is whether we find the same correlation between phonemic awareness and reading ability in adults as in children. Goodman suggests that adults have phonemic awareness skills, but what has not been shown is whether, in adults, phonemic awareness skill is correlated with reading ability. It has not been shown that adults, like children, benefit from sharply tuned phonemic awareness skills and that these skills make them strong and effective readers.
The hypothesis of this study is two-fold:
(1) Although all literate adults are phonemically aware to some degree, they, like children, demonstrate different levels of phonemic awareness (by virtue of talent, inherent linguistic skill, and/or experience).
(2) In adults, as in children, this phonemic awareness is associated with reading ability.
This section is divided into three parts: (1) an overview of the experiments that will test the above hypothesis, (2) a discussion of the theoretical motivations for these experiments, and (3) a discussion of the pragmatic motivations for these experiments.
1.4.1. Overview of Experiments
The connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability in adults will be explored in a series of six experiments. These experiments will be based on previous experiments conducted with children and special populations, which will be discussed more fully in Chapter Two. Without delving into great detail in this overview, it is helpful for the reader to know that previous phonemic awareness experiments have followed a relatively simple model: gauge a target population’s performance on some measure of phonemic awareness and on some measure of reading ability, and look for correlations between the two. For instance, Mann (1986) tested subjects (children) on a Phoneme Segmentation Test (PST) of phonemic awareness (using the "odd man out" methodology, in which subjects are asked to identify which word in a series does not share the same initial, final, or medial phoneme as the others) and on the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test. She found that scores on the two tests were positively correlated. It is this basic structure (measuring phonemic awareness and reading ability and looking for correlations) that is used in the experiments in this study.
A certain challenge lies in constructing experiments that determine the phonemic awareness of adults, however, because all literate adults, by virtue of their reading experience, are to a certain degree phonemically aware. Although it is relatively easy to draw a phonemic awareness line-in-the-sand with children (i.e., Child A says that cat has three sounds, whereas Child B says cat has one sound; therefore, Child A is phonemically aware, whereas Child B is not), it is more difficult to distinguish levels of phonemic awareness in adults.
Adams (1990) identifies five levels of phonemic awareness that can be used to classify the experimental tasks that have been used in past experiments with children. She points out that in evaluating the role of phonemic awareness in reading ability,
it is neither the ability to hear the difference between two phonemes nor the ability to distinctly produce them that is significant. What is important is the awareness that they exist as abstractable and manipulable components of the language (Adams, 1990, p.65).
Adams’ levels of phonemic awareness are listed below in increasing order of sophistication. This order also indicates how well their mastery correlates with subsequent reading acquisition; the tests described in the next chapter have shown that mastery of the highest levels of phonemic awareness is most likely to be connected to reading ability.
Each level is listed with an example of a phonological awareness task that might be used to assess it:
1. “The most primitive level....involves nothing more than an ear for the sounds of words.” (Adams, p. 80).
Ex. Nursery rhymes: children (ranging in age from 3 months to 4 years) were tested on their knowledge of five popular nursery rhymes, and it was found that their ability to recite these rhymes “was strongly and specifically related to development of more abstract phonological skills and of emergent reading abilities” (p. 80)
2. The next level "requires not just sensitivity to similarities and differences in the overall sounds of words, but the ability to focus attention on the components of their sounds that make them similar or different" (p.80)
Ex. Oddity tasks, in which children are given a list of words with a phonemic contrast in the beginning, middle or end of the word (e.g. pig, hill, pin) and asked "Which of these doesn't belong?"
3. The third level requires that "the child have a comfortable familiarity with the notion that words can be subdivided into those small, meaningless sounds corresponding to phonemes, and second, that she or he be comfortably familiar with the way phonemes sound when produced 'in isolation'" (p. 80).
Ex. Blending tasks, in which the experimenter gives the child segments in isolation ("/m/.../a/.../p/") and the child is asked to put them together ("map"), and syllable splitting tasks, in which children are asked to split the rime of a syllable from its onset (producing "eel" and "ice" when the experimenter says "feel" and "mice").
4. The fourth level requires that "the child have a thorough understanding that words can be completely analyzed into a series of phonemes....[and can] so analyze them, completely and on demand" (p. 80).
Ex. Phonemic segmentation tasks, in which children were given a word and asked to "tap out" how many sounds (phonemes) it contained (so, "map" should get three taps).
5. The fifth and final level, the most sophisticated level of phonemic awareness, requires that "the child...be able to add, delete, or move any designated phoneme and regenerate a word (or a nonword) from the result" (p. 80).
Ex. Phoneme manipulation tasks, in which children are asked to leave out an initial, medial, or final phoneme in the pronunciation of a word (e.g. "Say 'hill' without the /h/"; "Say 'monkey' without the /k/," etc.).
Because adults have had years of experience with language, tasks falling into the lowest levels of Adams' classification will be too compressed; all literate adults are able to contrast, blend and count the phonemes in a simple word with relative ease. Therefore, the tasks most useful in the differentiating of adults will be phoneme manipulation tasks (which fall under the highest level of phonemic awareness).
The subjects, literate university students, will be tested on a variety of phonemic awareness tasks, and then the results will be compared to their performance on two GRE tests: (1) a reading comprehension test and vocabulary test, and (2) a test of analytic ability. The first will be used to determine the subjects’ reading ability (and the correlation between phonemic awareness and reading ability), whereas the second is a control measure, to ensure that any correlations between phonemic awareness and reading ability are not the result of mere cognitive ability, but rather some reading-specific skill.
The structure of the phonemic awareness portion of the experiment is as follows. Subjects will be asked to perform three different tasks (a deletion task, a substitution task, and a reversal task) that require them to manipulate two different types of linguistic units (syllables and segments), for a total of six tasks in all. This design is illustrated in the table below:
| | | |
| |Segment-based tasks |Syllable-based tasks |
| | | |
|Deletion |Delete Segment Task (1) |Delete Syllable Task (2) |
| | | |
|Substitution |Substitute Segment Task (3) |Substitute Syllable Task (4) |
| | | |
|Permutation |Reverse Segment Task (5) |Reverse Syllable Task (6) |
Examples of each of these tasks are given below, using the word frantic and some possible responses (other response possibilities will be discussed in Chapter Three).
Experiment One: Delete Segment Task
Instructions: What would the word ‘frantic’ sound like if the first sound were taken off?
Response: [ræntik]
Experiment Two: Delete Syllable Task
Instructions: What would the word ‘frantic’ sound like if the first syllable were taken off?
Response: [tik]
Experiment Three: Substitute Segment Task
Instructions: What would the word ‘frantic’ sound like if the first sound were replaced by the first sound in ‘blasted’?
Response: [bræntik]
Experiment Four: Substitute Syllable Task
Instructions: What would the word ‘frantic’ sound like if the first syllable were replaced by the first syllable in ‘blasted’?
Response: [blæstik]
Experiment Five: Reverse Segment Task
Instructions: What would the word ‘frantic’ sound like if the first sounds in the two syllables were reversed?
Response: [trænfik]
Experiment Six: Reverse Syllable Task
Instructions: What would the word ‘frantic’ sound like if the two syllables were reversed?
Response: [tikfræn]
Previous studies on phonemic awareness have shown that tasks which require syllable manipulation are the easiest for subjects to complete, whereas tasks which require segment manipulation are the most difficult to complete. Syllabic awareness tasks require only a low level of phonological skill (probably falling into Adams levels one through three) found in preliterate children and illiterates. Segmentation tasks like those above (falling into Adams level five), require a sophisticated level of phonemic awareness that seems to require alphabetic experience. Therefore, it is predicted that within each task type, subjects will perform best (on the basis of error rate) on syllable tasks and worst on segmentation tasks.
The predicted correlation with reading ability should be clear: those subjects who perform best on the segment manipulation tasks, thus showing the most sophisticated phonemic awareness, should also be those who perform best on reading tests. Syllable tasks will serve as a control, since all literate adults should possess the ability to manipulate syllables.
In section 1.3. above, the issue explored was why we might believe there is a connection between reading ability and phonemic awareness in literate adults. A related issue is the importance of such a connection. Why should the Linguistic and Educational communities care about a correlation between reading and phonemic awareness in literate adults?
There are both theoretical and pragmatic reasons for exploring the nature of phonemic awareness in literate adults. Let us explore each of these in turn.
1.4.2. Theoretical considerations
The experiments conducted for this study require literate adults to participate in phonological experiments. In the experiments, described in further detail below and presented fully in Chapter Three, subjects are asked to perform a variety of phonological tasks, including the deletion, reversal, and substitution of syllables and phonemes in words. The results of these experiments can also contribute to theories of phonological processing. The following three theories, listed in order of increasing specificity, are supported by the results of experiments in this dissertation:
10 The syllable, rather than the phoneme, is the basic unit of phonological processing;
20 Ambisyllabicity exists in English syllables; and
30 [s] is extrametrical in English syllables in certain positions.
Although the phonemic awareness studies in this thesis are not specifically designed to test any of the above theories, because the experiments conducted require adults to process and manipulate various phonological units, the results are informative as to the structure of those units.
First, the experiments support the idea that the syllable is the basic unit of processing, by showing that adults perform significantly better on tasks in which they are asked to identify and manipulate syllables than those in which they are asked to identify and manipulate phonemes. Arguments that the syllable is the basic unit of processing are grounded in the work of Mehler, Dommergues, and Frauenfelder (1981). In this work, French subjects were asked to listen to various words, monitoring for a target syllable (for example, [pa]). Upon hearing the target syllable in an input word, they were to press a button, indicating whether a match had been detected. The experimenters considered two alternate theories of processing: either the subjects were processing input words phoneme-by-phoneme or syllable-by-syllable. If the subjects were using the phoneme as their basic unit of processing, there would be no difference in the time it took subjects to detect the target in words beginning with identical phoneme sequences. Consider the example below:
target sound: p...a... p...a...
↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
input: p...a...l...a...s p...a...l...m...i...e...r
result: match match
In both cases, the match occurs two phonemes into the target word, so detection of [pa] in pa.las should be no faster or slower than detection of [pa] in pal.mier. This is not what Mehler et. al. found, however. Subjects were significantly slower in detecting the [pa] in pal.mier (that is, detecting a CV target in an input word beginning with a CVC syllable). These results are quite understandable if the syllable is viewed as the basic unit of processing:
target sound: pa pa
↑ ↑
input: pa...las pal...mier
result: match mismatch
Since the target [pa] matches the first syllable in pa.las, but not in pal.mier, the match in the first is detected significantly faster. Mehler et. al. conclude that the only logical solution is that subjects process words in terms of syllables and not phonemes.
All previous research on phonemic awareness in children and special populations suggests that syllabic awareness is an innate ability and phonemic awareness is learned. If the syllable is the basic unit of processing, we would expect that its detection and manipulation are basic, innate abilities, and the experiments in this study provide support for that theory. The experiments require subjects to delete, reverse and substitute the syllables and phonemes in various words. It will be shown that in all the experiments in this study, subjects performed significantly better on experiments requiring syllable manipulation than those requiring phoneme manipulation. Using the word frantic as an example, subjects found it significantly easier to:
5. delete the first syllable in the word (yielding [tik]) than the first phoneme in the word (yielding [ræntik]),
6. substitute the first syllable in the word (yielding [blæstik]) than the first phoneme in the word (yielding [bræntik]), and
7. reverse the syllables in the word (yielding [tikfræn]) than the phonemes in the word (yielding [trænfik]).
8. These findings show that for adults, like children, syllabic awareness tasks are easier than phonemic awareness tasks across-the-board; the specific nature of the task is irrelevant. This bolsters the theory that syllabic awareness is innate and, in turn, that syllables are the basic units of processing.
Interestingly, when Cutler, Mehler, Norris, and Segui (1986) attempted to replicate the Mehler et. al. task cited above in English, they ran up against a brick wall, failing to find evidence for the syllable as the primary unit of speech processing. The data in this study are consistent both with the theory of the syllable as the basic unit of processing, and with the Cutler et. al. findings. This is because follow-up studies to the Cutler et. al. study have suggested that their failure to replicate the original study stems from the fact that phonemes in certain syllables exhibit ambisyllabicity (membership in more than one syllable). This is a theory supported by the experiments in this study. This brings us to the second contribution these experiments have to make to phonological theory: the experiments conducted provide support for the ambisyllabicity of certain phonemes in English syllables.
Let us first review some background work on ambisyllabicity in English. Classic theories of syllabification produce conflicting interpretations of English syllables. The Maximal Onset Principle (MOP) (Pulgram, 1970) says that when the consonants in a word can be syllabified in more than one way, the preferred syllabification is that which places as many consonants as possible in the onset. Following the MOP, then, the syllabification of the word fresco is fre.sco. The Sonority Dispersion Principle (SDP) (Clements, 1988), however, has a different story to tell. It says that the correct syllabification of a word results from maximizing sonority dispersion in the onset and minimizing it in the coda. According to this theory, then, the correct syllabification of fresco is fres.co. Kahn (1976) was among the first to propose that the syllabification of a word like fresco might not be as black-and-white as either the MOP or SDP would indicate. Kahn’s theory contends that in fresco, in which the first syllable is stressed, the [s] sound is ambisyllabic - a resident of both syllables.
In recent years, a great deal of research has been conducted on the ambisyllabicity of both medial consonant clusters and single consonants in English. Treiman and Zukowski (1990) conducted a series of experiments to determine what effect phonotactics, stress, vowel length, the MOP and sonority have on the syllabification of medial clusters. Legality was by far the most important factor; subjects syllabified words like atlases and confetti (in which the medial consonant cluster would be illegal both at the beginning and the end of a word) between the two consonants (at.lases and con.fetti) between 99% and 100% of the time.
Other factors affecting syllabification were not nearly so definitive. Treiman and Zukowski found that in cases in which both consonants of a medial consonant cluster could legally belong to the first syllable, and in which that first syllable was stressed, the MOP was violated (for the second syllable) and both consonants were placed in the first syllable between 3% (in a written syllabification task) and 6% (in an oral syllabification task) of the time. For example, pontiff was sometimes syllabified as pont.iff in a written syllabification task, and pont.tiff in an oral syllabification task. So, a stressed first syllable followed by an unstressed syllable attracts consonants.
A final set of experiments considered the role that stress and vowel length play in syllabification. In words like master and metric (first syllable stressed and containing a short vowel) the first medial consonant was placed in the first syllable between 78-86% of the time (in a written task) or ambisyllabic between 43-49% of the time (in an oral task). This is in apparent violation of the MOP. However, in words like cloister and apron (first syllable stressed and containing a long vowel) it was more likely that both consonants would be placed in the second syllable (61-72% of the time, in an oral task). So, a syllable with a short vowel attracts consonants.
Finally, Treiman and Zukowski considered the effect of second syllable (primary) stress on syllabification. They found that in words like madrid and estate, the clusters were placed in the second syllable 41-80% of the time (less in s-clusters than in other clusters). Again, this is an example of a stressed syllable attracting consonants.
The simplest way to sum up these complicated interactions is that syllables with both short and stressed vowels try to “grab” as many consonants as they can without violating phonotactic rules.[3] The same factors seem to be at play in the syllabification of single intervocalic consonants. Treiman & Danis (1988), paying particular attention to the sonority of the medial consonant, found in an oral task that in words with short and/or stressed first syllable vowels, medial sonorants were placed in the first syllable about half the time (between 40-50%) and obstruents were placed in the second syllable about half the time (49-58%). Since this means that the other half of the time the subjects either judged the medial consonant ambisyllabic or placed it in the other syllable, these findings are not very conclusive. Meador and Ohala (1993) found slightly more robust findings in a written task. They found that medial consonants in a stressed-stressless environment were judged ambisyllabic 67.9% of the time (as opposed to 32.1% of the time when the first syllable was stressless). This trend was even more apparent when the vowel in the first syllable was lax (i.e. palace). In these cases, the medial consonant was judged ambisyllabic 75.8% of the time. In the syllabification of single consonants, as with consonant clusters, stress and vowel length play an important role; consonant type is less important.
To sum up the findings on the syllabification of medial consonants in bisyllabic words, then
1. Syllabication must produce legal syllables (virtually unviolable),
2. Syllables with stressed vowels attract consonants (to both their onset and coda), and
3. Syllables with lax vowels attract consonants to their codas.
The relevance of these findings to the experiments in Chapter Three is as follows: since the experiments require subjects to undertake syllable manipulation tasks, whether or not a medial consonant is ambisyllabic determines whether a subject’s response should be deemed correct. Consider the case of the Delete Syllable Task, in which subjects are asked to strip off the first syllable of a word. The theory of syllabification adopted greatly affects whether a given response should be judged as correct or incorrect, as illustrated in the following chart:
| | | | |
|TEST ITEM |Maximize Onset |Sonority Dispersion |Ambisyllabicity |
| | | | |
|fresco |fre.sko |fres.ko |fres.ko or fresk.ko or fres.sko |
| | | | |
|baby |be.bi |be.bi |be.bi or beb.bi |
If ambisyllabicity exists in English syllables, it is difficult to justify one correct syllabification for fresco and baby. In fresco, the first syllable is stressed and contains a lax vowel that would seem to suggest the fres.co syllabification. Still, Treiman and Zukowski found that fresc.co and fres.sco syllabifications were possible (9% and 43% of the time, respectively). In the case of baby, the first vowel is tense, suggesting the syllabification ba.by. However, Meador and Ohala found that these cases were syllabified bab.by over 20% of the time.
add page or two on specifics of theories, giving definitions
Depending on which theory of syllabification is adopted, the correct response to the Delete Syllable Task for the item fresco is either [sko] (by the MOP), [ko] (by the SDP), or either of these (by Trieman & Zukowski). It will be shown in Chapter Three that if there is not ambisyllabicity in English syllables, and an early explain theory of syllabificaion is adopted, the experimental results for the experiments in this dissertation fly in the face of everything we know and expect about adult phonemic awareness. If we are forced to adopt either the Maximize Onset Principle or the Sonority Dispersion Principle as the correct theory of syllabification in coding subjects’ responses, rather than allowing ambisyllabicity, adult subjects perform quite poorly on a very simple task: the deletion of the final syllable in a word. Since school-age children are able to perform this task with remarkable accuracy, these findings are simply nonsensical.[4] On the other hand, if correct responses are coded taking into consideration ambisyllabicity, adults perform with the expected competence on the Delete Syllable Task.
The final, and quite specific, contribution of these experiments to linguistic theory is that the experiments support the characterization of [s] as an extrametrical element in some environments. The issue surrounding word-initial s-clusters is this: s-clusters violate the sonority hierarchy ([s] is more sonorous than [t], and yet is further removed from the syllable nucleus in sticky) and so [s] has been classified by some as extrasyllabic (Clements and Keyser; 1983). Selkirk (1982) proposed a different explanation for the anomalous behavior of s-clusters, positing that s-clusters at the beginnings of words were actually complex onsets. segments? In deleting the first phoneme, subjects may be deleting the first licensed (non-extrasyllabic) element, or deleting a complex segment, which can’t be broken down any further. Either way, the status of [s]-consonant sequences affects the coding of subject responses in Chapter Three. Consider the following chart: predictions not clear; part of onset vs. extrasyllabic vs. part of complex single segment
| | | |
|TEST ITEM |Response to Delete Segment Task, |Response to Delete Segment Task, |
| |if [s] is part of cluster |if [s] is extrasyllabic |
| | | |
|sticky |tiki |iki |
| | | |
|species |pisiz |isiz |
In the first two experiments described in Chapter Three, subjects are asked to delete the initial phonemes and initial syllables of a word. It is predicted that subjects will fare better on the syllable deletion task (because syllable knowledge is innate and taps into a lower level of phonological awareness) and that subjects’ performance on the delete phoneme task will be related to their reading ability. If correct responses are coded assuming that [s], in an initial cluster, behaves like any other initial phoneme (such that the correct response in the Delete Initial Phoneme task for the item sticky is [tiki]), the results of the experiments here are unexpected and extremely difficult to explain. foreshadowing hard to follow If, on the other hand, [s] in initial clusters is treated as an extrametrical element and responses are coded accordingly (such that the correct response in the Delete Initial Phoneme task for the item sticky is [iki]), the results, though still unexpected, can be explained in the confines of a theory of adult phonological awarenesss. This enigmatic statement will be discussed fully in Chapter Three.
To sum up, the experiments in this dissertation are not designed to directly test any particular theory of syllable structure or syllable access. However, in coding and interpreting subjects responses, certain theories about the syllable must be assumed. The results in this study can best be explained by a theory of the syllable that assumes that the syllable is the primary unit of processing, that ambisyllabicity exists in English syllables, and that [s] is extrametrical in certain environments in English syllables. be more explicit about theory of syllabification assumed
1.4.3. Pragmatic considerations
In the previous subsection, the theoretical motivations for the experiments in this dissertation were discussed. There are also pragmatic motivations for fleshing out the exact nature of phonemic awareness and its connection to reading ability in adults.
If the correlation between reading ability and phonemic awareness in adults is shown to be as strong as in children, there would be great consequences for adult reading programs. At least three types of programs would benefit from the knowledge that there is correlation between reading ability and phonemic awareness in adults:
(1) Adult literacy programs,
(2) English-as-a-second-language programs (or any such programs in which the L2 employs an alphabetic orthography), and
(3) Reading enrichment programs.
First, let us consider the case of adult literacy programs, in which illiterate adults wish to learn to read and write an alphabetic orthography. Research with children indicates that phonemic awareness and reading ability are highly correlated, and all effective readers are phonemically aware. Adams (1991) claims, "toward the goal of efficient and effective reading instruction, explicit training of phonemic awareness is invaluable" (p. 331). Perhaps, then, phonemic awareness training, rather than mere phonics training, should be an essential element of adult literacy programs. Ball & Blachman (1991) conducted a study in which they compared the reading performance of three groups of children who received various kinds of training. One group was given traditional phonics (sound-symbol) instruction, a second group received phonics and phonemic awareness instruction (by being taught phoneme deletion and manipulation "games"), and a third (control) group received no instruction. They found that although the group which received both phonics and phonemic awareness instruction outperformed the other groups, "instruction in letter names and letter sounds alone did not significantly improve the segmentation skills, the early reading skills, or the spelling skills of the kindergarten children who participated in the language activities group, as compared with the control group" (B&B, p. 49).
Are we missing the boat in adult literacy programs? Should we do away with Hooked on Phonics and teach adults how to play language games? Bagemihl (1988) points out that segment-reversing language games only appear in languages with alphabetic orthographies, and concludes that "an alphabetic writing system may be a prerequisite for a segment reversal ludling [language game] to appear in a language...It seems that the presence of an alphabetic writing system is necessary for the establishment of some metalinguistic awareness of the notion of 'segment'; beyond this, however, the phonological system takes over as the primary basis for reversal" (p. 485). Perhaps, rather than waiting for segment-based language games to fall out of languages with alphabetic orthographies, we should use them on the road to teaching such orthographies. An early theory that there is a critical period for phonemic awareness (Morais, 1986) has come under fire (Morais, 1991), so there may be nothing preventing adults at any age from honing their phonemic awareness skills and, in turn, their reading skills. in the wrong place?
If there is a phonemic awareness/reading connection in adults, this training would also prove useful for adults learning a language with an alphabetic orthography as a second language. If the adult’s first language has a non-alphabetic writing system, the benefits of phonemic awareness training in adults are clear: phonemic awareness in an essential part of effective reading. However, even if the adult reads and writes an alphabet (and is thus phonemically aware), phonemic awareness training may be useful. As O’Brien’s study (discussed earlier in this chapter) showed, effective adult readers read interactively, relying heavily on graphophonic information. Since the second language is sure to contain phoneme-grapheme correspondences which are new to the adult learner and thus more a conscious part of reading, a phonemic awareness “refresher” (that is, training in the honing or development of phonemic awareness skills) could help in the acquisition of the second [written] language.
Finally, if phonemic awareness is correlated with reading ability in adults, the development of phonemic awareness skills could prove a successful part of a reading enrichment program. Perhaps alongside Ways to Enrich Your Word Power or an Evelyn Wood-style speed-reading course could sit a phonemic awareness training program, designed to improve adult reading ability by fostering greater phonemic awareness skills.
1.5. Organizational structure of the dissertation
This chapter began with a definition of phonemic awareness and a brief overview of the issues raised in phonemic awareness/reading research with children. The motivation for examining the PA/reading relationship in adults was explored. Finally, an outline of the experimental design was laid out, followed by a discussion of the theoretical and practical issues to be raised in the course of this study.
The organization of the remainder of the dissertation is as follows. The next chapter is a review of previous research relevant to the issue of phonemic awareness in literate adults. It begins with a review of past phonemic awareness literature on children and special populations, summarizing previous research in the field, followed by a brief review of research on orthographic interference in phonological tasks, including an experiment designed to determine the nature of that interference.
Chapter Three describes the six phonemic awareness experiments outlined above, and the final chapter is a conclusion, tying together the results of the experiments with previous research on phonemic awareness, and exploring the theoretical and pragmatic implications of the findings in this study.
2.0 Previous Research on Phonemic Awareness
This chapter deals with previous research that is relevant to the issue of phonemic awareness in literate adults. Among the questions that will be explored in this chapter are:
1. What is the exact nature of the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability? Is one a prerequisite for the other, or do the two develop simultaneously?
2. Are there levels of phonemic awareness, or is it a developmental on/off switch, in that it is either present or absent?
3. Is phonemic awareness teachable?
4. Why do some people develop phonemic awareness, and others not?
5. Other than explicit instruction in an alphabetic orthography, what types of activities foster phonemic awareness?
6. How might knowledge of a specific orthography affect a subject’s ability to perform a test of phonemic awareness?
This chapter is divided into four sections. The first two sections explore previous research on phonemic awareness and reading, and the last two sections discuss previous research on metalinguistic abilities in adults.
Section One is a review of what is by far the most thorough area of research on phonemic awareness: the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in beginning readers. In this section, questions (1)-(3) are discussed. The second section is also a discussion of phonemic awareness research, focusing on special populations (illiterates, dyslexics, etc.) who struggle with phonemic awareness. Section Two pays particular attention to question (4), in the context of question (1). In the third section question (5) is addressed directly, in a discussion of activities that foster phonemic awareness. Finally, in Section Four, the question of orthographic interference in phonological processing tasks is discussed (question (6) above).
The chapter concludes with a summary of past findings in phonemic awareness research, and implications for the experiments in Chapter Three.
2.1 Phonemic awareness research on beginning readers
2.1.1. Overview
In this section, past research on phonemic awareness in children will be reviewed, so as to frame the six experiments in Chapter Three in their proper context. Though this dissertation is an examination of phonemic awareness in literate adults, and though phonemic awareness studies have been conducted on illiterate adults, dyslexics, and other special populations (see next section), all research on phonemic awareness has grown out of the original body of research on phonemic awareness and reading ability in children.
The vast majority of past research on phonemic awareness conducted with newly literate or preliterate children has centered on the following four interrelated claims:
1. Children must be "phonemically aware"[5] before they are able to read an alphabetic orthography.
2. PA tasks can be used to predict a child's later success or failure in reading.
3. PA training can prove useful in preparing a child for reading instruction.
4. There are different levels of phonemic awareness.
These are very strong claims with some very strong implications. Researchers have suggested a number of ways that phonemic awareness tasks might be integrated into the grade school curriculum: (1) as a screening tool to identify those children most likely to encounter difficulties in reading, (2) as an accompaniment to traditional phonics instruction for all students, and (3) as an alternative to traditional phonics instruction (Mann, 1993).
The degree of consensus on each of these claims is discussed in more detail in the subsections immediately below. The subsequent sections examine "outside" findings on PA, touching upon illiterates, literates with non-alphabetic orthographies, dyslexics, children with Down syndrome, and secondary language activities.
Let us begin with a review of each of the seminal phonemic awareness claims above, in turn:
2.1.2. Reading readiness
1. Children must be "phonemically aware" before they are able to read an alphabetic orthography.
Ball & Blachman (1991) make a claim which is made by many others, based on the following intuitively appealing assumption about learning to read:
To read and spell, the beginning reader must make use of the alphabetic code. Thus, the student must come to realize that words can be broken into syllables and phonemes, and that the phoneme is that unit in the speech stream represented by the symbols in an alphabetic script. To a person with well-developed phoneme awareness, our alphabetic system appears to be a reasonable way to represent our language. To those with little or no phoneme awareness, the system probably appears arbitrary. (Ball & Blachman, 1991, p. 51)
They later say that "to read or spell phonetically regular words, a child must be aware that words can be broken into phonemes and that each phoneme corresponds to a symbol (or symbols) in our orthography" (Ball & Blachman, 1991, p. 63). Below is a simple illustration of the stages in a child’s phonemic awareness development:
1. [s(n] Ρ Ρ SUN
2. [s(n]
↑
↑ SUN
3. [s... (...n]
↑
Ρ
↑
S...U...N
4. [s... (...n]
↑ ↑ ↑
S...U...N
In stage (1) the child may recognize the aural stimulus [sun] as referring to the big ball of light, and may recognize the printed word “SUN” as referring to the same object, but he or she has not necessarily made any direct (phonological) connection between the oral and written word. In stage (2), the child recognizes that [sun] and SUN are connected, but is not able to abstract that knowledge - it is a fixed, limited piece of information. In stage (3), the child has developed phonemic awareness, and can “hear” the word sun as consisting of three distinct phonemes (and, similarly, has learned the alphabet and sees “SUN” as three distinct letters). Finally, in stage (4), the child has learned the connection between the distinct phonemes of [sun] and the distinct graphemes of “SUN.” This knowledge is abstractable, because it can be applied to other correspondences of [s] and “S,” for instance.
This oversimplified schema demonstrates how reading is the application of appropriate grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules (the "alphabetic code"), which require that the child is able to identify and manipulate the phonemes in a word.
Breaking the alphabetic code thus requires phonemes to be "dug out of their normal, subattentional status" (Adams, 1990, p. 294). Children can only figure out the system of the alphabet when they learn that a word like sun, which they perhaps previously viewed as a single unit, can be broken down into smaller units (phonemes), and that these smaller phonological units correspond to letters (graphemes). To Adams and other phonemic awareness researchers, this requires a step beyond from the normal (innate) way of perceiving language, which is syllable-based. Children need to be taught that syllables can indeed be broken down further, and that the resultant units (phonemes) correspond in a regular fashion to letters.
Whole language advocates view things differently. They do not agree that phoneme-grapheme rules (which comprise the alphabetic code) need to be taught, nor do they agree that phonics knowledge is a prerequisite for reading. Goodman (1993) argues that this alphabetic coding is an "unnatural process" and that "we can liberate children from letter-by-letter processing of text" by teaching them to view words as whole units and encouraging them to use semantic clues to figure out visually unfamiliar words. However, whole language advocates do concede that phonemic awareness is important in reading; they simply feel that children can figure it out for themselves once they start reading, rather than being taught a set of rules which are plagued by exceptions. The phonics teacher tells Johnny that cat begins with [k] and that is spelled with a “c,” and the whole language teacher gives Johnny a book with many cat/hat rhymes, until he figures out for himself that the sound and letter similarity between the words isn’t mere coincidence (and that the sound differences correspond to the “c”/”h” difference). Either way, he learns that cat can be broken down into three distinct units, and this is the beginning of phonemic awareness.
2.1.3. The predictive power of phonemic awareness
The second claim about phonemic awareness is:
2. PA tasks can be used to predict a child's later success or failure in reading.
This is far and away the most studied claim about phonemic awareness. Adams (1991) says that "the familiarity of the letters of the alphabet and awareness of the speech sounds, or phonemes, to which they correspond, are strong predictors of the ease or difficulty with which a child learns to read." Stanovich (1993) echoes this sentiment, pointing out that the phonemic awareness/reading connection is independent of general intelligence: “[phonemic awareness tasks are] the best predictors of the ease of early reading acquisition - better than anything else that we know of, including IQ" (p. 331). An even stronger statement comes from Mann (1993), who argues that either the presence or absence of strong phonemic awareness skills is significant: "Phoneme awareness bears both a logical and a proven relationship to early reading success. Its presence is a hallmark of good readers, its deficiency one of the more consistent characteristics of poor readers" (p. 260)
Mann's study is outlined in the previous chapter; she found that children who demonstrated the highest levels of phonemic awareness on the basis of their invented spellings and segmentation ability turned out to be the best readers. The same connections have been found with many other researchers (Bradley & Bryant, 1983, 1985; Fox and Routh, 1975, 1980; Stanovich, Cunningham & Cramer, 1984; Lundberg, Olofsson & Wall, 1980; Mann & Liberman, 1984, among others). In each of these studies, preliterate children were tested on a variety of phonemic awareness tasks, including, but not limited to, the following:
| | | |
|Task Type |Sample instructions |Answer |
| | | |
|Phoneme blending |Put /m/.../a/.../p/ together and what do you get? |[mæp] |
| | | |
|Phoneme segmentation |What sounds do you hear in the word hot? |[h]...[a]...[t] |
| | | |
|Phoneme counting |Tap out the sounds in map. |3 taps |
| | | |
|Phoneme matching |Do pipe and pen begin with the same letter? |yes |
| | | |
|Deleted phoneme |What sound do you hear in meat that is missing in eat? |[m] |
| | | |
|Phoneme oddity |Which of these doesn’t belong? pig, hill, pin |hill |
| | | |
|Phoneme deletion |What would is left if you take off the first sound in nice? |[ays] |
| | | |
|Phoneme substitution |What would feel sound like if it started with [m]? |[mil] |
These task descriptions are all drawn from Adams (1990) and Stanovich (1983).
In these studies, children’s performance on phonemic awareness tasks was recorded, often along with their performance on (1) other phonological tasks, (2) other cognitive tests, and (3) reading and spelling tests. The other phonological tasks test less sophisticated levels of children’s linguistic abilities, and may include the tasks above conducted with syllables as the unit of manipulation (i.e., syllable counting, in which children are asked to tap out the syllables in a word), or even lower-level tasks (i.e., the ability to recite nursery rhymes). The other cognitive tests are usually IQ tests, and the reading tests are standard school measures of reading ability, such as the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test.[6]
Each of these classic phonemic awareness studies came to the same conclusion: preliterate children who perform best on phonemic awareness tests turn out to be the best readers. Moreover, syllable-based tasks and other tasks tapping into low-level phonological awareness do not correlate strongly with reading ability. As Adams (1990) states:
It is neither the ability to hear the difference between two phonemes nor the ability to distinctly produce them that is significant. What is important is the awareness that they exist as abstractable and manipulable components of the language (p.65).
So, in the table above, children who perform well on segment deletion tasks are more likely to be good readers than those who only do well on counting tasks, as the latter require a lower level of phonemic awareness.
The view of phonemic awareness as a predictor of future reading ability has been criticized on the grounds that it may be tapping into past reading experience, rather than future reading ability. Children who score well on PA tests are those who have watched Sesame Street, been read to by their parents, been encouraged to write at home, etc. Thus, it is likely that some children who fail to perform well on PA tests do so because of missed early reading experiences. Does performance on phonemic awareness tasks reflect potential for future success in reading, or merely gage past reading experience? While both Adams and Stanovich believe that children who do well on phonemic awareness tasks will be successful in reading, both also acknowledge that the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability is a murky one. Adams says that the situation is a bit of a "catch 22...[because] children who have...acquired a solid level of phonemic awareness before entering school have also begun to read before entering school" (Adams, p. 8). In other words, it may not be that phonemic awareness per se is a good predictor of later reading ability, but that early reading experience makes for better readers. Using her own five-year-old son as an example, Adams notes that between being read to and watching educational television, John had had 2000+ hours of indirect reading instruction before even entering a classroom.
No studies have seperated the two? Stanovich (1993) is quick to acknowledge the correlation between phonological awareness and prior exposure to reading, but does not think that this renders the results of phonemic awareness tasks in any way invalid. He says, "phonological awareness...is a good predictor [of success in reading] not just because it is an incidental correlate of something else, but because phonological awareness is a foundational ability underlying the learning of spelling-sound correspondences" (p. 284). Mann also agrees that the arguments about whether phonemic awareness gauge past reading experience are difficult to sort out, and ultimately immaterial: "from a practical standpoint, surely it is an important first step to learn that a child is deficient in phoneme awareness, whatever the basis of the deficiency" (Mann, p. 268). And how can such a child be helped? This brings us to the next claim:
2.1.4. The value of phonemic awareness training
3. PA training can prove useful in preparing a child for reading instruction.
Adams (1991) claims that "toward the goal of efficient and effective reading instruction, explicit training of phonemic awareness is invaluable" (p. 331). What follows are summaries of studies conducted on the value of phonemic awareness training, in conjunction with other methods of reading instruction:
Phonemic awareness training vs. no training. Tornéus (1984) conducted two early experiments on phonemic awareness and reading. In the first, she examined the correlation of performance on four PA tasks (segmentation, blending, positional analysis and deletion) with reading and spelling ability. She found (as expected from research cited in the last section) a significant correlation. In her second study, she examined the role of phonemic awareness training on reading ability by comparing the reading performance of three differently trained groups: a control, a lower level task, right? not difference between the last two groups? "sound properties" group (which was trained on attention to rhyme), and a group which was specifically trained on segmentation ability. She found that the last two groups outperformed the control, and so concludes "metaphonological abilities have a causal influence on reading and spelling" (p. 1357).
Phonemic awareness training & phonics instruction vs. phonics instruction alone vs. no training. One problem with the Tornéus study is that it does not pit phonemic awareness instruction against traditional reading instruction; it only examines the benefits of phonemic awareness instruction versus no instruction at all. Ball & Blachman (1991) conducted a study in which they compared the reading performance of three groups which received various kinds of training. One group was given traditional phonics (sound-symbol) instruction, a second group received phonics and phonemic awareness instruction (by being taught phoneme deletion and manipulation "games" along with the sound-symbol correspondences), and a third (control) group received no instruction. They found that although the group which received both phonics and phonemic awareness instruction outperformed the other groups, "instruction in letter names and letter sounds alone did not significantly improve the segmentation skills, the early reading skills, or the spelling skills of the kindergarten children who participated in the language activities group, as compared with the control group" (B&B, p. 49). That is, phonics instruction alone did not lead to an improvement in reading skills; it had to be combined with phonemic awareness instruction to have a significant effect.
Phonemic awareness training vs. no training (again). In contrast to the Tornéus study, Lundberg et. al. (1988) found that first graders given phonemic awareness training did not outperform a control group of first graders (given no instruction) on reading tasks. Second graders in the same study did outperform their counterparts who were not given phonemic awareness instruction. The authors hypothesize that with the earliest of readers, phonemic awareness training alone may not be effective in facilitating reading skills and may have to be combined with traditional reading instruction (as was done in the Ball & Blachman study). By second grade, most participants in the study would have already learned sound-symbol correspondences, thus explaining the difference in results between the two age groups.
So, given the Lundberg et al. and Ball and Blachman findings (that neither reading instruction alone nor PA awareness alone is the best training approach), what's a reading teacher to do?
Phonemic awareness training & phonics instruction vs. phonics instruction alone vs. phonemic awareness training alone. Hatcher, Hulme, and Ellis covered all the bases in their 1994 study. They tested 7-year-old poor readers given a variety of training: reading (phonics) with phonemic awareness training, phonics alone, phonemic awareness training alone, and a control group which received no training. Even though all groups were given the same amount of training, they found that the phonics with phonemic awareness training group showed the most progress in reading (though the phonemic awareness group showed improvement in phonological tasks). Bradley and Bryant (1983), in a similar study, had found the same results. awk why not this one first? Hatcher et. al. conclude that "the difference between the group trained in sound categorization alone and the group who also received training in letter-sound correspondences is notable... A natural implication of this result is that the integration of training in phonological skills with letter-sound training (or more broadly with phonemically based reading instruction) may be particularly effective" (p. 42). They form the conclusion that "training in phonological skills in isolation from reading and spelling skills may be much less effective than training that forms explicit links between children's underlying phonological skills and their experiences in learning to read." (p. 42) This is called the "phonological linkage hypothesis."
In an attempt to test the weight of the phonological linkage hypothesis, Cunningham (1990) examined the difference between implicit and explicit phonological training on reading ability. In a 10 week training session, she gave one group of first graders "skill and drill" (implicit) PA training, in which subjects were trained in how to segment the phonemes in a word, or blend phonemes together to make a word. The students were trained with the usual phonemic awareness training methods: phoneme deletion, phoneme oddity, and phoneme discrimination tests (taken from the Williams program "The ABDs of Reading"). Another group was given "metalevel" (explicit) PA training in addition to the implicit training. This training was similar to the implicit phonemic awareness training, but also emphasized the connection between phonemic awareness skills (i.e., segmentation and blending), sound-symbol correspondences, and the development of reading skills. The metalevel group was essentially taught the phonological linkage hypothesis. Cunningham found that the children in the metalevel training group performed better on reading tests (though not in phonemic awareness tasks) why so than those who just received phonemic awareness training: "the children who reflected upon and discussed the value, application, and utility of phonemic awareness for the activity of reading at an explicit level performed significantly better on a transfer measure of reading achievement than the skill and drill experimental group" (p. 429). Cataldo & Ellis (1988) also found that explicit phonemic awareness was more highly correlated with reading than implicit phonemic awareness.
Thus, the “phonological linkage hypothesis” is consistent with each of the studies cited above: phonemic awareness training, when combined with traditional phonics training, improves children’s reading skills more than no training, or training in phonics alone. Whereas phonemic awareness training alone is effective is controversial, explicit phonemic awareness training may be even more valuable.
A final note about phonemic awareness training: in addition to direct phonemic awareness training programs, Adams also notes that learning to spell can be considered a form of phonemic awareness training for children. She says,
The process of inventing spelling is essentially a process of phonics. Not surprisingly, then, the phonetic appropriateness of prereaders' invented spellings is found to be predicted by their level of phonemic awareness and to predict their later success in learning to read words....Evidence that invented spelling activity simultaneously develops phonemic awareness and promotes understanding of the alphabetic principle is extremely promising. (Adams, p. 387)
Read (1986) and Treiman (1993) have both done extensive work with children's invented spellings. Treiman sees the process of learning to spell as reflective of the development of phonemic competence, as demonstrated in the following chart
(from Treiman, 1993)
When children receive training in phonemic awareness, they will succeed in learning to read (or so the argument goes). Mann (1993) found a correlation between the sophistication of children’s invented spellings and their reading ability. This correlation could be because the best invented spellers have, in a sense, received a dose of phonemic awareness training.
A final conclusion drawn from phonemic awareness studies in children is discussed in the next section.
2.1.5. Levels of phonemic awareness
4. There are different levels of phonemic awareness.
This is a claim that has already been discussed above, since it is impossible to separate from other phonemic awareness issues. Children may innately possess a certain level of phonological (syllabic) awareness, and they eventually work their way up to a level of phonemic awareness that enables them to decipher the alphabetic code and become literate. Adams (1990) identifies five levels of phonemic awareness as tested by phonemic awareness tasks (these were outlined in the introduction) and Treiman (1983) identifies levels of phonemic awareness which are revealed in children’s spelling errors The models are related; children at the most primitive level show sensitivity to the sounds of words, and children at the most sophisticated level are able to manipulate phonemes in addition, deletion, and movement tasks. The best future readers show the most sophisticated phonemic awareness.
2.1.6. Summary & implications
Though there is overwhelming agreement that phonemic awareness and reading ability are connected, the exact nature of the connection is more controversial. One criticism of the phonemic awareness/reading ability connection is that it is tautological (since "children who have...acquired a solid level of phonemic awareness before entering school have also begun to read before entering school" (Adams, p. 8)). Another criticism is that researchers in the field of phonemic awareness are too committed to a cause-effect relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability, and have failed to consider that some third factor may be affecting these skills (that is, the researchers have a pedagogical ax to grind in the promotion of phonemic awareness curricula).
The phonological linkage hypothesis merits attention, but it also draws attention to the fact that PA awareness research done on children attempts to draw conclusions about the connection between PA and reading ability by examining children's reading ability, thus muddling itself in a chicken-and-egg argument about the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading skill. For this reason, nontraditional research on phonemic awareness (research examining the nature of phonemic awareness in populations other than preliterate children) also needs to be examined to gain a richer understanding of the issues involved.
2.2. Phonemic awareness research on special populations
2.2.1. Overview
The claims about phonemic awareness and reading drawn from studies with children may be questioned on a number of grounds. Is phonemic awareness really a prerequisite for reading? Is there a causal connection between phonemic awareness and reading? Is phonemic awareness training valid and/or useful? Are there other, as yet unexplored, implications of these claims?
Work on phonemic awareness has not been limited to American children in phonics programs. Moreover, some of the outside work on PA can shed light - or at least raise questions - about the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability. We shall look at work done on PA in illiterates, literates of nonalphabetic orthographies, dyslexics, and children with Down Syndrome.
2.2.2. Phonemic awareness in illiterates
Morais et. al. (1986) conducted a study on Portuguese illiterates and ex-illiterates (who learned to read and write as adults). The study compared the two groups with respect to their performance on a phoneme manipulation (PA) task, a syllable manipulation task, and a melody segmentation task. The findings were that "the illiterates vs. ex-illiterates difference was greatest in tasks designed to tap phonemic analysis, irrespective of the particular operation to be performed, was present but smaller in tasks involving syllables and absent in a non-linguistic segmentation task (melody segmentation)" (Bertelson et.al.., p. 114).
The only significant difference was in the phonemic segmentation abilities of the illiterates (who could not do PA tasks) and the ex-illiterates (who could do PA tasks). From this finding, the researchers conclude that "while sensitivity to rhyme and analysis into syllables can develop up to some point in the absence of the experience normally provided by reading instruction, analysis into phonetic segments requires that experience" (Morais et. al., 1986, p. 45). So, phonemic awareness is not a maturational development, but rather a fallout from reading instruction. If this is true, it would seem to violate the claim that children need to be phonemically aware to begin reading; rather, it appears that they would become phonemically aware because of reading experience.
Morais (1991) appeals to the idea of "levels" of awareness, but he is talking about phonological vs. phonemic awareness: "phonological awareness subsumes at least the following: awareness of phonological strings (a global, nonanalytical level of awareness); awareness of syllables; awareness of phonemes (also called segmental awareness); and awareness of phonetic features...it is widely accepted that literacy instruction is not necessary to elicit all these forms of phonological awareness" (Morais, 1991, p. 6). Since illiterates can manipulate syllables but not phonemes, they do have a certain level of phonological awareness, an awareness which develops (or more correctly, is present) without knowledge of an alphabetic orthography. Morais concludes from the Portuguese study that though phonological awareness may develop in the absence of reading instruction, phonemic awareness requires that experience.
The Morais studies raise the question, is experience with an alphabet necessary for the development of phonemic awareness? The study was criticized by Koopmans (1987), who argues that the "difference between literates and illiterates on the phonetic segmentation task may be attributable to the lack of formal schooling as such in the latter group" (Koopmans, P. 110). It is not so clear, according to Koopmans, that illiterates perform poorly on segmentation tasks simply because they lack phonemic awareness. Rather, "unschooled subjects, it appears, do not do well on such tasks, not only because the task contents are often unfamiliar, but even more so because the activity of working with abstract material is in itself unfamiliar to them" (Koopmans, p. 100). Morais et. al. disregard this criticism, citing the fact that illiterates did not have impaired performance on a melody segmentation task, which presumably taps into the same abstract and formal skills as speech segmentation.
So, the main finding of PA studies with illiterates is that PA follows from (and requires) experience with an alphabet, rather than developing on its own. What does Morais make of findings in later studies that illiterates showed significant improvement in segmentation skills after 20 or 30 training trials? Could Koopmans be right that they did not understand the task? Morais claims "no," and that there is "no clear indication that these improvements reflect phonemic awareness...the improvements were due to a nonsegmental strategy" (Morais, 1991, p, 15). He attributes the improved performance to the specific training in a task-driven strategy, rather than the speedy acquisition of true phonemic awareness.
2.2.3. Phonemic awareness in literates with nonalphabetic orthographies
The Morais et. al. study suggests that phonemic awareness absolutely requires alphabetic experience and will not develop in its absence. On the surface, studies by Read et. al (1986) and Mann (1986) support this. The study by Read et. al. compared the performance of two groups of Chinese adults. The first group knew only the traditional logographic (character) writing system, whereas the second was also familiar with the pinyin alphabet. Only the latter group (that had received explicit training in the alphabetic system) performed well on phoneme awareness tasks. Mann's study compared the performance of American children and Japanese children on syllable and phoneme manipulation tasks. Though both groups of children performed well on the syllable manipulation task, only the American children, familiar with an alphabetic writing system, performed well on a phoneme manipulation task. Japanese children, who knew only a syllabary, performed poorly on these tasks.
Thus, the Read and Mann studies at first appear to support the idea that PA develops only in the face of direct alphabetic instruction.
However, the data on non-alphabet readers is not so simple. Mann (1991) cites an unpublished study of Chinese literates (by Tzeng and Chang) that concludes that there can be phonemic awareness in the absence of knowledge of pinyin. Mann states that, “readers of the logography found phoneme deletion an "easy" task, despite being illiterate in pinyin. Those who were totally illiterate performed less well" (Mann, 1991, p. 59). So, the literate adults could be easily trained to perform well on a PA task despite lack of alphabetic experience.
In a similar finding, Mann (1986) found that Japanese fourth graders, despite lacking an alphabet, performed well on PA tasks (Japanese sixth graders, having learned romanjii, or the roman alphabet, perform well on these tasks, too, as expected). This suggests that "with increasing age and educational experience Japanese children may become more and more capable of manipulating phonemes whether or not they are alphabet-literate" (Mann, 1986, p. 87).
These results conflict with Morais et. al.'s findings on Portuguese illiterates. Since Tzeng & Chang’s Taiwanese logographic readers and Mann’s Japanese fourth graders have had no alphabetic training, why were both groups able to perform well on phonemic awareness tasks? There are two possible explanations. The first, suggested by Mann, is akin to a "critical period" for the acquisition of orthography: "perhaps the ability to manipulate phonemes tends to atrophy unless maintained by appropriate reading experience" (Mann, 1986, p. 89). "Appropriate reading experience" need not be alphabetic literacy, but must be some form of literacy. Taiwanese literates can do PA tasks as long as they receive an adequate training session that enables them to understand the task at hand. Japanese fourth graders have had enough reading experience to perform analytical tasks that their first grade counterparts cannot ("it would seem that the age of the child has an impact on the degree of phoneme awareness" (Mann, 1991, p. 58)). The Portuguese illiterates, on the other hand, have had no such reading experience, which explains their inability to perform phonemic awareness tasks at any age.
However, this “critical period” theory would not explain why the older Chinese and Japanese literates in the Read and Mann studies performed poorly on the phonemic awareness tasks, as they had clearly had “appropriate reading experience,” in the sense that they learned to read at a normal age, an age during which phonemic awareness could have developed.
A second explanation is that subjects who perform well on phonemic awareness tasks have received a form of alphabetic instruction, though it may be indirect. Morais suggests that the PA abilities of Japanese fourth graders who had no exposure to an alphabet
can be understood by taking into account the way kana is taught. Japanese children learn kana by means of a matrix in which all the characters in a row share the same vowel and all the characters in a column share the same consonant, except the first column to the right that consist of isolated vowels. It is possible to obtain a good performance in the deletion task by referring to the matrix (Morais, 1991, p. 17).
He concludes, contra Mann, that PA does not develop with any reading experience, but requires attention to segments. However, the segmentation instruction does not have to be as explicit as learning an alphabetic writing system. This explains Mann's results with Japanese children and may also explain the Tzeng and Chang with Chinese readers illiterate in pinyin, if some aspect of language pedagogy includes, however subtle, attention to the initial segments of a word. Fangquie! This could also explain why phonemic awareness skills were found with younger readers of nonalphabetic writing systems, but not their older counterparts (if the older subjects were taught kana and characters through a different method of instruction - or at home - or if the older subjects were far enough removed from their school-days instruction that their phonemic awareness skills had atrophied).
However, the “subtle” phonemic awareness instruction idea still fails to account for good performance on PA tasks by Portuguese illiterates (after an adequate training session). Commenting on the improved performance of illiterates on a PA task (from 24% correct responses on the first block of items to 69% on the last block), Morais says that "the capacity necessary to analyze speech at the segmental level does not seem to atrophy with age in the absence of reading instruction. There seems to be no critical period for acquiring segmental awareness" (Morais, 1987, p. 135)
The seeming phonemic awareness of groups who have not had exposure to an alphabet might also be attributed to secondary language activities (more in the next section).
2.2.4. Phonemic awareness in dyslexics
Dyslexics are an interesting case to examine with regard to the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading, since they have had the same exposure to print as normal readers, yet fail to perform well on PA tasks. Though the studies cited in the previous section seem to suggest a causal relationship between alphabetic experience and ability to perform PA tasks, "dyslexics have had much experience with alphabetic material, therefore, experience cannot be the critical factor" (Morais, 1987, p. 135).
Morais (1987) cites a number of studies that demonstrate the relative inability of dyslexics to carry out PA tasks. In his own 1984 study, Morais found that dyslexics had only a 14% correct response rate on a consonant deletion task, versus 71-95% correct for younger normal readers. Savin (1972) observed that young dyslexics can't play Pig Latin, a game which requires phoneme manipulation. Lecocq (1986), studying groups of dyslexic and normal 8-9, 10-11, and 12-13 year-olds, found performance on consonant deletion tasks was significantly worse for dyslexics, who scored between 51% - 78% correct (vs. 80-100% correct for normal readers). In other words, dyslexics seem to lack any consistent phonemic awareness.
Somewhat encouraging is the work of Fox and Routh (1983), which showed that after much training 11-13 year old dyslexics were able to perform a PA task with 96% accuracy. This is unlike the case of Chinese literates or Portuguese illiterates, in that "training" here was not merely task repetition after a short and repetitive training session, but rather years of instruction on phonemic awareness skills. Thus, while the Chinese and Portuguese cases could be interpreted as evidence that PA develops without explicit alphabetic instruction, the evidence from dyslexics shows that even with direct alphabetic instruction, phonemic awareness may fail to develop.
2.2.5. Phonemic awareness in Children with Down Syndrome
Data from children with Down Syndrome are relevant to the discussion of the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading because "if in some abnormal group reading is acquired in the absence of ability to perform explicit segmental analysis tasks, that would seem prima facie evidence that no necessary causal connection holds between the two skills" (Cossu et. al., p. 130). Cossu looked at the PA skills of Children with Down Syndrome (mean age 11.4) matched for reading ability with normal children (mean age 7.3). On four PA tasks (phoneme segmentation (counting), phoneme deletion, oral spelling, and phonemic synthesis (blending)) the normal children far outperformed the children with Down Syndrome. Thus, two groups of children with the same level of reading ability showed different levels of phonemic awareness.
Some might argue that the Down Syndrome subjects performed badly on the PA tasks merely because they didn't understand what they were supposed to attend to in their responses. To this, Cossu says that "it would... be tautological to argue that the children with Down Syndrome merely failed to understand the task demands for the phonological awareness test: with respect to conscious skills, failure to understand the nature of the task is failure to be able to perform the task" (Cossu et. al., pp. 134). Since phonemic awareness is conscious attention to the segmentation of words, the failure to understand what is meant by "leaving off the first sound of a word" is the failure to be phonemically aware. O’Connor (1992), et.al., citing their own research with children with Down Syndrome, conclude that the poor phonemic awareness performance on the part of their subjects is partially related to their inability to generalize from trained practice items to test items.
Since children with Down Syndrome perform so much worse on PA tasks than children they are matched on reading skills with, Cossu concludes that "it is neither the case that lack of phonological awareness has prevented learning to read, not that learning to read has developed phonological awareness" (Cossu et. al., p. 134). As with the data from dyslexics, this data begins to break down presumed strong causal connections between phonemic awareness and reading ability.
2.2.6. Summary & implications
Research on illiterates, literates with nonalphabetic orthographies, dyslexics and children with Down Syndrome has interesting implications for phonemic awareness research. Studies showing that illiterates and literates with nonalphabetic orthographies are unable to conduct phonemic awareness tasks would seem to indicate that phonemic awareness results from, and only from, alphabetic instruction. However, dyslexics are exposed to alphabetic instruction and do not acquire phonemic awareness. Though it could be argued that dyslexics are also poor readers (so the phonemic awareness/reading connection holds), Children with Down Syndrome performed worse on phonemic awareness tasks than their reading-matched counterparts.
Other studies showing that illiterates (with training) and literates with nonalphabetic orthographies (and indirect exposure to phonemic awareness concepts through method of language instruction) can perform well on phonemic awareness tasks imply that phonemic awareness does not have a critical period, nor does it need to be explicitly taught to be acquired (in keeping with whole language theorists).
This conflicting information can be reconciled with a modified version of Morais’ conclusions from his original study with Portuguese illiterates. Phonemic awareness is not a developmental milestone; it does not necessarily develop, and it is not subject to a critical period. It only develops in the context of certain phonemic exposure, though that exposure may be through direct exposure to an alphabet, indirect exposure to an alphabet through language pedagogy, or, as discussed in the next section, through secondary language activities.
2.3. Phonemic awareness and secondary language activities
The studies cited above explore how primary language activity affects phonemic awareness in special populations, be they readers of other orthographies, illiterate, or differently abled. What role do secondary language activities play? Secondary language activities are the games that people play with language as part of everyday life: poems, songs, and wordplay. They differ from primary language activities (communication-based activities) in that they involve a particular attention to the structure of language that primary language activities do not. Though a poet cannot write a haiku without counting syllables, such counting does not occur in normal discourse. Experience with secondary language activities may explain why it is that some illiterates can perform phonemic awareness tasks, or that Chinese unfamiliar with pinyin could break a word up into segments.
The most extreme view of the studies with readers of nonalphabetic orthographies (Read et. al; Mann) and illiterates (Morais et. al.) is that the development of phonemic awareness skills requires alphabetic experience. In addition to the criticisms already raised, such a statement implies that no one who has not been exposed to an alphabet can break a word into its component segments. A number of considerations lead us to conclude that this is far too strong a position.
First, "phoneme awareness can sometimes precede the ability to read an alphabet " (Mann, 1991, p. 56). Children often enter school able to perform well on PA tasks, although they have not yet learned to read. How can this be so? Mann says, "factors other than knowledge of the alphabet may contribute to the awareness of phonemes" (Mann, 1991, p. 55). So, even without being "taught" the alphabet through reading with parents or watching educational TV, a child may develop phonemic awareness. What secondary language activities contribute to phonemic awareness?
Adams cites knowledge of nursery rhymes as an indicator of the most primitive level of PA, and this is why: rhymes help children learn about spelling categories and develop phonemic awareness, by learning to break down words into units smaller than the syllable. In their own study, Bradley and Bryant (1991) found that "preschool phonological skills play an important part in reading acquisition. rhyme scores...prove to be reliable predictors of reading ability" (Bradley and Bryant, p. 40). When children learn to rhyme, they are learning that there are units of words (rimes) that are bigger than phonemes, but smaller than syllables. This is an intermediate step between syllabic awareness and phonemic awareness. The role of rhyming games in the development of phonemic awareness is furthermore a very “whole language” approach to the acquisition of phonemic awareness, in that it is not explicit. Rhyming as a route to phonemic awareness is extremely similar to the kana example cited in the previous section. A 3-year-old American child and a school-age Japanese child might not have been exposed in any direct way to an alphabet, and yet both may have acquired some phonemic awareness skills. The 3-year-old has heard a nursery rhyme which groups rhyming words in a regular fashion (hickory/dickory; dock/clock); the Japanese child has had repeated exposure to rhyming kana arranged together in a grid (po, mo, do, so...). Both may look for a way to organize the input; this is found by stripping off the first phoneme.
Secondary language activities may explain why Lundberg (1991) found that 9 out of 51 prereaders gave perfect performance on a segmentation task, even though the children had participated in similar language activities in and outside the school. Granted, far more prereaders failed than succeeded on the PA task, but in the absence of alphabetic instruction why should even 9 students perform so well? Lundberg suggests that "whereas most researchers now seem to agree that the relationship between phonological awareness and reading is reciprocal in nature, the question of which affects the other most and earliest is far from settled" (Lundberg, p. 47). If we adopt Adams' levels of phonological awareness, we can see where children's secondary language activities play a role in the development of their PA skill. Yet, at the same time, there does seem to be a maturational component which cannot be denied: some tasks or secondary language activities are simply too sophisticated for young children.
If nursery rhymes indicate the most primitive level of phonemic awareness, what comes next? A number of secondary language activities might hone phonemic awareness skill (or, rather, hone the analytical aspect of a skill which already exits). For instance, children love tongue twisters, which require a sensitivity to the fact that all words in a string begin with the same phoneme (for a child to "get" what makes "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" a tongue twister, he or she must be able to separate/identify [p]). Language games can tap into various levels of phonemic awareness. In Pig Latin, the child need only segment and transpose the first onset in a word: latin > atinlay. In "Op," the child has to be able to segment the onset of every syllable (not just the initial syllable) away from the rime: segment > sopegmopent. In the "name game," the child must be able to manipulate both the onset and the rime of the input in constructing the output: Ken > ken ken bo ben, banana fana fo fen, me my mo men, KEN! Each of these activities support the idea that "phoneme awareness is facilitated by some other secondary language experience" (Mann, 1986, p. 88).
Given that secondary language experience can facilitate phonemic awareness, the seemingly anomalous results of illiterates or non-alphabetic literates on PA tasks can be explained. Perhaps those subjects did not have explicit instruction in an alphabet, but did participate in secondary language activities which foster phonemic awareness. Mann mentions a number of language games in cultures lacking an alphabetic orthography. In Luganda (Kilbride & Kiblbride, 1974)), a game requires that each syllable be followed by "z" and the previous vowel: omusajja > omuzusazajjaza. In a Bedouin Hijaze Arabic game (McCarthy, 1981) single consonants can be metathesized: kaatab > bataak; taakab > taabak. In one Mandarin game(Yip, 1982), the syllable is split and infixed: ma > mayka. Though these games occur in languages lacking alphabetic orthographies, the game-players have certainly developed some level of phonemic awareness.
In this and the previous section, the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability has been discussed. Most of the research in this area has been conducted on populations with little or no exposure to an alphabet (preliterate children, illiterates, literates with nonalphabetic orthographies) or on populations for whom phonemic awareness tasks present a special challenge (dyslexics, Children with Down Syndrome). Before conducting phonemic awareness studies on adults who have had significant exposure to an alphabet, it is essential to explore the impact alphabetic literacy might have on such tasks.
2.4. Special considerations: the question of orthographic interference
The previous sections in this chapter contained an overview of past research on phonemic awareness. As discussed in the previous sections, most of the work in the field has been done with preliterate children, illiterates, or literates in nonalphabetic orthographies: those with little or no experience with alphabets. However, there is a wide variety of evidence that knowledge of orthography, or of a particular orthography, can affect performance on various phonological tasks. Since the subjects studied in this project were all literate adults, we must examine the role that orthographic knowledge might play in a phonemic awareness task.
The work discussed earlier in this chapter makes it clear that literacy (specifically, alphabetic literacy) affects performance on various phonological tasks. This relationship manifests itself in the ability to perform phoneme manipulation tasks, and in the encoding of grapheme-phoneme relationships. But, just what is the nature of this relationship? How might it affect subjects’ performance on phonemic awareness tasks?
One possibility is that alphabetic literacy might play a role in auditory lexical access. Since phonemic awareness tasks require a subject to process an auditory stimulus, this could be problematic.
2.4.1. The role of orthography in phonological access
In fact, there is evidence that orthography interferes in auditory tasks. Surprisingly, literacy can, in a sense, impede performance. There is a positive correlation between phonemic awareness and reading ability in studies with children, indicating that phonemic awareness helps children break the alphabetic code, and go on to become better readers. Might it be the case that the best adult readers - those most intimate with the orthography of their language - are hindered by their spelling ability in phonological tasks? Two studies which have addressed this issue are discussed below.
Tanenhaus, Flanigan & Seidenburg (1980) presented subjects with a series of auditory word pairs, and asked subjects to ascertain whether or not the pairs rhymed. Some of the rhyming pairs were orthographically similar (like TURN/BURN) and some were orthographically distinct (like TURN/LEARN). The main finding of the study was that orthographically distinct pairs of words took much longer to identify as rhymes than pairs that were spelled alike. Thus, at some point between the time when subjects are presented with auditory stimuli and when subjects depress a response key, orthography interferes.
A second study showing orthographic interference in a phonological task was Taft & Hambly's 1985 syllable matching study. Subjects were presented with pairs of auditory stimuli - a syllable and a word - and asked to determine whether the syllable was contained in the word. Subjects performed particularly poorly on pairs such as ANK/ANXIOUS ([æ(k]/[æ(k(es]). These were identified by Taft & Hambly as those pairs where orthographic interference was likely. Their argument is this: presumably, though [æ(kRes] is spelled a-n-x..., [æ(k] is "spelled"[7] a-n-k. Due to an orthographic mismatch (“x” vs. “k”), subjects would give such items a "no" response, even though, on the basis of phonology, a "yes" response was expected.
How is the orthographic interference demonstrated in these tasks to be interpreted? As Taft and Hambly point out, "the interpretation that one favors ultimately depends on how dominant a role one wishes to ascribe to orthography in spoken word processing" (T&H, p. 331). This is best illustrated using a lexical access model, such as the simplified sketch of the Forster model of lexical access (Forster 1976;1990), given below:[8]
⇓ ⇓
orthographic access code phonological access code
⎠ ⎟
MASTER LEXICON
master lexicon entry
(orthographic information/phonological information)
According to the strictest interpretation of the Forster model, orthography plays a minimal role in spoken word processing. Given an auditory stimulus, a purely phonological code is used in lexical access. Only after access has taken place is orthographic information about that word (stored in the Master Lexicon entry) available. An alternative to the Forster model would ascribe a dominant role to orthography in spoken word processing. Contra the Forster model, such a model of lexical access would look something like this:
⎟ ⎠
orthographic access code phonological access code
⎠ ⎟
MASTER LEXICON
master lexicon entry
with both orthographic and phonological codes involved in the access of an auditory target. A third alternative lies somewhere in between these two extremes, with orthographic information neither ignored during auditory word processing nor given the same importance as phonological information.
Zecker et. al. (1986) lay out these possibilities nicely. In their work, they argue that phonological and orthographic codes are integrated in the left hemisphere of the brain (with this finding based on the results of a rhyming judgment task, where they found a significant interaction between ear of presentation and orthographic similarity of stimulus items[9]). Zecker et. al. posit three alternatives - granting various dominance to the role of orthography in auditory word recognition - to "the relationship between the access of sound-based codes in visual word recognition and spelling-based codes in auditory word recognition." We will explore these possibilities in turn, in hopes of discovering what effect literacy will have on the tasks in the next section.
Zecker et. al. point out that "one possibility is that code integration [that is, orthographic interference in tasks with auditory stimuli] results from the child learning spelling-sound mapping rules during beginning reading. Spelling effects in auditory word recognition are the result of spelling-sound mappings becoming automatized" (Zecker et. al., brackets mine). In this case, what appears on the surface to be orthographic interference during access is really the result of "automatized" comparisons of post-access activated spellings with their pronunciations. To make this more concrete, consider the two tasks discussed above. In the rhyming recognition task, the stimuli (LEARN/TURN; TURN/BURN) are accessed via a purely phonological code, but once the words are accessed, their Master Lexicon entries, orthographic representations and all, are activated. A post-access check ascertains that l-e-a-r-n and t-u-r-n are not spelled the same, even though "automatized" sound spelling rules (which would say something like, e-a-r-n sounds like [ern], u-r-n sounds like [ern]) predict a match. This contradictory information results in a longer reaction time. The same is true in the ANK/ANXIOUS case. Once ANXIOUS is accessed, its spelling is available and will thus cause interference in the form of a mismatch when compared with the speech signal ANK.
Zecker et. al. raise the "second possibility ... that there are sound-spelling rules which are similar to spelling-sound rules. These rules may be learned by the child in the course of learning to spell." So, just as a child learning to read learns a rule that the letter 's' sounds like /s/, that same child, in learning to spell, learns that "long i" (/ay/) is spelled 'i...e.' This interpretation of orthographic interference as "orthographic recoding" (application of on-line sound-to-spelling conversion rules) is analogous to the "phonological recoding" (see Taft, 1991 and others) discussed in the literature on written word recognition. It is a dual-route access model, whereby both phonological and orthographic codes are used in auditory word recognition.
However, it is not as clear why an orthographic code might be an automatic part of spoken word recognition as it is that a phonological code might be an automatic part of written word recognition. Phonological recoding is hotly debated, even though it has support in the form of intuitions (the "voice in the head" people hear when they read), development (children learn to speak before they learn to spell, making phonology the primary form of linguistic representation) and history (spoken languages existed long before writing systems were developed for them). In the absence of such support for orthographic recoding, why should the possibility even be entertained?
Dupoux & Mehler (1992), in their analysis of French phoneme detection tasks, provide arguments that "not only is an orthographic code available when listening to speech....but this code is available on-line" (p. 65). They attribute differences in performance on syllable monitoring tasks by literates and illiterates to the fact that an on-line orthographic code, which results in orthographic interference among literates, is not available to the illiterates. Although Dupoux & Mehler are not talking about on-line orthographic recoding in the sense of sound-spelling conversion rules (in fact, the conclusions they draw rely on the subjects' awareness of segments), they do not want to draw any conclusions about precisely what is contained in the orthographic code: "we do not have the data to ascertain that the relevant code is really a visual representation of the letters of the characters, instead of the relevant phonological level that the orthography captures" (Dupoux & Mehler, p.72). In the tasks that they analyze, the "relevant phonological level that the orthography captures” is the level of segment vs. syllable.[10] It could well be that the "relevant phonological level" in a different task is the level of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion rules. Again, a consideration of the previously discussed tasks serves to make this more concrete. If it is the case that orthographic recoding happens on-line, this is what happens with the rhyming task:
TURN/BURN case:
In the case where two words are pronounced alike, the sound-spelling conversion rules will yield the same spelling for both words. If the words are in fact spelled alike, this will not be a problem once the words are accessed. On the other hand, consider the case in which two words pronounced alike are spelled differently:
TURN/LEARN case:
Again, since the words are pronounced alike, orthographic recoding would spell them in the same way . The outputs of two possible spelling-sound conversion rules are listed above. No matter which rule is chosen, such recoding would cause interference (since *lurn and *tearn would not be listed in the lexicon).
Thus, on-line orthographic recoding is a second possible explanation for orthographic interference effects in tasks with auditory stimuli.
In addition to the two possible explanations for orthographic interference listed above, Zecker et. al. propose a third possibility for the role of orthography in auditory word recognition, which lies somewhere in between the dominant and minimal roles discussed thus far: "the child learns to integrate spelling and sound information as a learning heuristic." Thus, the access route for auditory words is not purely phonological (latter tapping into orthographic information), nor orthographic and phonological in parallel, but would rather involve some integrated code. This account is favored by Taft and Hambly, who conclude that "the phonological task is performed in a phonological code, though this code is influenced by orthography" (T&H). Lexical access taps into what Taft and Hambly call "orthographically influenced phonological representations." These might include something like the “spelling pronunciations” that Lorenson (1993) found: subjects have trouble classifying [izlænd] (for island) and [kolonel] (for colonel) as nonwords, apparently because these pronunciations warrant a pseudo-lexical entry (an "orthographically influenced phonological representation”) in the brain.
So, orthographic knowledge does interfere with performance on phonological tasks, be it through phonologically accessed orthographic representations, orthographic recoding, or orthographically influenced phonological representations. This must be taken into consideration in the six experiments in the next chapter, which are designed to assess the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability in literate adults. The tasks in these experiments are based on tasks used in previous phonemic awareness studies, most of which involve children. In each of the experiments with children, task performance is gauged by subject error rate on phonemic awareness tasks. Since adults have greater cognitive capabilities than children, and since moreover they have greater linguistic capabilities than children, the tasks used in experiments with children are not challenging enough to adults to yield any interesting results. For instance, all literate adults can, with nearly 100% accuracy “count” the number of sounds in a word in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between the number of phonemes and the number of graphemes; adults are helped in this task type by their orthographic knowledge. However, the orthographic knowledge that adults possess might be enough of an impediment that it can be used against them, e.g. by generating higher error rates on phonemic awareness tasks. The pilot task described below tested this assumption.
2.4.2. Pilot: Delete Segment Task
A task used in many phonemic awareness studies with children is the Delete Segment Task (see Bradley and Bryant, 1983, among others). In this task, children are asked to delete the initial phoneme in a word. A pilot experiment was conducted to determine if a segment deletion task would suggest that adults possess differing levels of phonemic awareness. The purpose of the experiment was to alter the original methodology minimally, but enough to generate errors among the adult subjects.
METHOD
Subjects
Subjects were thirteen University of Arizona undergraduates, all of whom were native speakers of English.
Tasks and Procedure
In segment deletion tests with children, the instructions often are something like, “Listen to the word task. If you take away the /t/ sound, what word is left?” (Stanovich et. al., 1984; Cunningham, 1990) and the stimuli are such that when the first sound is stripped off, a real word of English remains (for example, pink, told, man ⎝ink, old, an). The stimuli are words which begin with a consonant-vowel sequence, not a cluster. Literate adults find this task extremely easy, especially since the real-word status of the correct response serves as a “check” to their answers. It was determined that replicating the Stanovich/Cunningham segment deletion task with adults would fail to elicit enough errors to be at all illuminating.
However, it was important to remain faithful to the original methodology, since the experiments in this study attempt to draw the same kinds of conclusions about phonemic awareness and reading as experiments with children. The least drastic means of adapting the experiment to adults was to retain the original task and procedure while replacing the stimuli with much more challenging items. The instruction to subjects was, “I’m going to give you a word, and I want you to tell me what that word would sound like if the first sound were taken off.” They then heard the task modeled on ten practice items, which were followed by thirty test items. Subjects heard instructions through a set of headphones and spoke responses into a hand-held microphone.
The stimuli in the Cunningham and Stanovich experiments were monosyllabic words beginning with a CV sequence which were still words of English when the first consonant was deleted. In this experiment, the stimuli were bisyllabic words beginning with a variety of sequences (more below) which are nonwords when the first consonant is deleted.
Based on the studies on orthographic interference and phonological access cited in the previous section, it was determined that one way to make the stimuli more difficult was to include stimuli which lack a one-to-one relationship between the phonemes and graphemes of their initial segment (the segment to be deleted). Because aural stimuli would call up “orthographically influenced phonological representations,” orthography could be used as a tool to make stimuli more challenging.
Each stimulus word fell into one of the following four categories:
1. a single phoneme spelled with a single consonant, like baby [bebi] (a one-to-one correspondence of phonemes and graphemes)
2. a single phoneme spelled with a digraph, like thesis [(is(s] (a one-to-two correspondence of phonemes and graphemes)
3. a consonant cluster, spelled with a single grapheme, like music [myuz(k] (a two-to-one correspondence of phonemes and graphemes)
4. a consonant cluster, spelled with more than one grapheme, like climax [kl(ymæks] (a two-to-two correspondence of phonemes and graphemes)
It should be the easiest for subjects to delete an initial segment from a stimulus in category (1), since doing so does not require extraction of a phoneme from a cluster or involve a mismatch of phonological and orthographic representations. Conditions (2) and (3) should present subjects with some difficulty if they are using orthographic representations in their task strategy (that is, they may give [his(s] as a response to thesis in the segment deletion task, or [uz(k] as a response to music). Finally, conditions (3) and (4) should be difficult because they begin with clusters, so segment deletion requires subjects to extract the initial segment from the rest of the onset.
Results
Responses were considered correct if subjects deleted the first (and only the first) phoneme in a word. The test items and correct responses are given in the table below:
| | | |
|Stimulus |Stimulus (IPA) |Correct Response |
| | | |
|theory |(iri |Iri |
| | | |
|beauty |byu(i |Yuri |
| | | |
|scarcely |skersli |kersli |
| | | |
|pupil |pyup(l |yup(l |
| | | |
|humor |hyum(r |yum(r |
| | | |
|parish |per(( |er(( |
| | | |
|champagne |(æmpen |æmpen |
| | | |
|tiny |t(yni |(yni |
| | | |
|storage |stor(d( |tor(d( |
| | | |
|colleague |k(lig |(lig |
| |((rm(l | |
|thermal | |(rm(l |
| | | |
|frantic |frænt(k |rænt(k |
| | | |
|sentry |sentri |entri |
| | | |
|shaky |(eki |eki |
| | | |
|quarter |kw(rt(r |w(rt(r |
| | | |
|climax |kl(ymæks |l(ymæks |
| | | |
|gentile |d((nt(yl |(nt(yl |
| | | |
|fifty |f(fti |(fti |
| | | |
|puny |pyuni |yuni |
| | | |
|chimney |t((mni |(mni |
| | | |
|penny |p(ni |(ni |
| | | |
|cubic |kyub(k |yub(k |
| | | |
|captive |kæpt(v |æpt(v |
| | | |
|feudal |fyud(l |yud(l |
| | | |
|music |myuz(k |yuz(k |
| | | |
|shadow |(ædo |Ædo |
| | | |
|pony |poni |Oni |
| | | |
|thesis |(is(s |is(s |
| |t(mp(r |(mp(r |
|temper | | |
| | | |
|baby |bebi |Ebi |
Subjects made the fewest errors on words beginning with, and spelled with, a single consonant. Performance on the other three conditions was compared to that condition, as shown in the table below:
| | | | |
|Condition |Example |T-test comparison |Significance |
| | | | |
|(1) one-to-one |baby |--- |--- |
| | | | |
|(2) one-to-two |thesis |2.23 |.05 > p > .01 |
| | | | |
|(3) two-to-one |music |6.87 |p < .001 |
| | | | |
|(4) two-to-two |climax |10.94 |p < .001 |
As predicted, conditions (2)-(4) were all significantly more difficult than condition (1). However, the difference in subjects’ performance on conditions and (1) and (2) was only mildly significant, whereas the differences in performance between both (1) and (3) and (1) and (4) were strongly signifcant. Since (3) and (4) are the conditions in which subjects are asked to extract an initial segment from a cluster, it may be concluded that the cluster condition requires a more sophisticated level of phonemic awareness than extraction of an onset from its rime (as required in condition (1)). This finding is consistent with Adams’ levels of phonological awareness, in that onset/rime knowledge is at a lower level of phonological awareness than segment manipulation. Performance on condition (2) vs. (1) indicates mild orthographic interference in this phonological task. However, subjects found it harder to delete a segment that was part of a cluster (regardless of how it was spelled) than a segment which was spelled like a cluster.
There are two conclusions to be drawn from this study. First, orthography does play a part in phonological tasks (involving auditory stimuli), but orthographic interference (orthographic difficulty) takes a back seat to phonological difficulty. The second conclusion is more practical: if phonemic awareness tasks based on experiments with preliterate children are to be made more difficult for literate adults by using different stimuli, stimuli which are chosen on the basis of a difficult phonological pattern will generate more errors than stimuli chosen because of a confusing phonological/orthographic mismatch.
2.5. Summary
At the beginning of this chapter, a number of questions about the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability were raised:
• What is the exact nature of the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability? Is one a prerequisite for the other, or do the two develop simultaneously?
• Are there levels of phonemic awareness, or is it a developmental on/off switch, in that it is either present or absent?
• Is phonemic awareness teachable?
• Why do some people develop phonemic awareness, and others not?
• Other than explicit instruction in an alphabetic orthography, what types of activities foster phonemic awareness?
• How might knowledge of a specific orthography affect a subject’s ability to perform a test of phonemic awareness?
The research cited in this chapter leads us to the following view of phonemic awareness:
The relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability is strong; the two measures are highly correlated in studies with preliterate children and young readers. The question has arisen as to whether phonological awareness fosters reading ability or whether reading experience breeds phonemic awareness. Many researchers who work on emergent literacy in children have viewed the PA/reading relationship as causal in the sense that phonemic awareness tasks can “predict” later success or failure in reading; the children who are most phonemically aware become the best readers. However, this has been criticized as a "catch-22" claim, in that children who perform well on PA tasks are perhaps those who have already had some reading-related experience, however indirect it might be.
Some argue that phonological awareness is a prerequisite for learning to read an alphabet. This is difficult to reconcile with the findings that most illiterates and readers of non-alphabetic orthographies lack phonemic awareness. Research with these populations has shown that phonemic awareness is a consequence of reading (alphabetic) experience; it does not develop in a vacuum. If phonemic awareness is a prerequisite for reading an alphabet, and yet does not exist in many who lack alphabetic experience, how does it develop?
Morais (1987) argues the point that phonemic awareness develops only from alphabetic literacy:
It is important, in my view, to distinguish between the ability of segmental analysis and the cognitive capacity that underlies this ability ... the alphabetic system of writing is a cultural product, used by only a minority of the more recent humans. And alphabetic literacy is probably the only function of segmental awareness. When, then, should people be born with a specific capacity for segmental awareness that would be only waiting for a particular experience to develop? (Morais, 1987, p. 134)
Morais’ theory has support in research on populations who do not develop phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness fails to develop in certain people either because they (1) exhibit a neurological condition which prevents certain connections from being made (e.g., dyslexia) or, more commonly, because they (2) lack sufficient alphabetic experience. People falling into the latter category may be school-age children who lack a sufficiently rich reading background upon entering school (and thus have trouble catching up when reading instruction begins), illiterates (who never receive reading instruction), or literates in nonalphabetic orthographies (because they, too, lack explicit instruct instruction or experience with an alphabetic orthography).
The theory the phonemic awareness is a consequence of alphabetic reading (rather than a prerequisite) also has problems, however. Some prereaders, illiterates, and readers of syllabaries and logographies - populations who have had no direct experience with alphabetic literacy - do exhibit varying degrees of success on phonemic awareness tasks. This is because explicit instruction in an alphabetic orthography is not the only route to phonemic awareness, as other types of activities foster phonemic awareness.. Secondary language activities include language games, poetry, kana charts, etc. and explain why preliterate children exhibit different levels of phonemic awareness before they have begun phonics instruction, and why some literates in nonalphabetic orthographies are able to perform phonemic awareness tasks. Any of these experiences might develop phonemic awareness.
So, rather than measuring past reading experience or future reading ability in any concrete way, phonemic awareness tasks, at their core, measure the ability to abstract and manipulate phonemes. The only logical connection between PA and reading ability is the following: phonemic awareness and reading ability are in a symbiotic relationship, in which the two skills develop in tandem. All successful alphabetic readers exhibit a certain degree of phonemic awareness, and those children who exhibit the most sophisticated phonemic awareness will go on to be the best readers.
Phonemic awareness does appear to be teachable through phonemic awareness training, though it is most effective when combined with phonics instruction. The combination of fact-based learning (i.e., graphophonic rules about sound-symbol correspondences) combined with skill-based learning (i.e., phonemic awareness skills, such as segmentation and blending), has proved more effective than either on its own (or nothing). This is encapsulated in the phonological linkage hypothesis, which states that the most effective form of reading instruction aids children in forming explicit links between their phonemic awareness skills and their reading-based skills; explicit instruction in the symbiotic nature of the relationship.
As phonemic awareness develops (though primary or secondary language activities), people demonstrate different levels of phonemic awareness, from the most basic (knowledge of nursery rhymes) to the most sophisticated (the ability to manipulate phonemes on command, by deleting or substituting a phoneme in a word). Phonemic awareness is not a developmental on/off switch, and appears to require some type of alphabetic experience to grow and develop to its fullest extent (which explains why most illiterates and literates in nonalphabetic orthographies cannot perform phonemic awareness tasks).
Adult phonemic awareness is difficult to assess since adults, by virtue of their years of experience with an alphabetic orthography, are conflated at the highest levels of phonemic awareness. Moreover, it is clear that literate adults may experience phonological interference in performing phonemic awareness tasks, because of orthographically influenced phonological representations or orthographic recoding of phonologically processed material. Fortunately, the results of a pilot task indicate that orthographic complexity of a word is less important in processing than the phonological complexity of a word when performing phonological tasks, so adults’ phonological and phonemic awareness can be tested in isolation.
The experiments described in the next chapter did just that.
3.0. The Experiments
3.1. Overview
The experiments discussed in this chapter were designed to test the phonemic awareness skills of literate adults, and the relationship of those skills to reading ability. Six tests of phonological awareness were conducted in all. The six experiments are related, but distinct, and all have varying degrees of difficulty. Performance on each test of phonemic awareness was compared to performance on a test of reading ability.
In the experiments discussed below, the phonological awareness of subjects is assessed by having them perform three different phonological awareness tasks (deletion, substitution, and permutation of phonological units) on two different phonological units (syllables and segments), resulting in six experiments total (3x2=6). The table below illustrates this design:
| | | |
| |Segment-based tasks |Syllable-based tasks |
| | | |
|Deletion |Delete Segment Task (1) |Delete Syllable Task (2) |
| | | |
|Substitution |Substitute Segment Task (3) |Substitute Syllable Task (4) |
| | | |
|Permutation |Reverse Segment Task (5) |Reverse Syllable Task (6) |
The numbers in parentheses refer to the experiment numbers.
As the table illustrates, for each phonological manipulation (operation) that subjects were asked to perform, a pair of sister experiments was constructed: one in which syllables are the unit of manipulation, and one in which segments are the unit of manipulation. This design allows for three distinct analyses of the data:
1. An analysis of the relationship between subjects’ reading ability and their performance on the phonological awareness tasks outlined above,
2. A comparison of subjects’ performance on sister experiments, that is, the two experiments in which subjects are asked to perform the same type of operation on two different linguistic units (segments and syllables), and
3. An analysis of subjects’ performance on the three different types of manipulations of the same phonological unit
This three-part analysis will explore several aspects of phonemic awareness in literate adults. Analysis (1) above will test for a relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability, while (2) and (3) will test whether there are differing levels of phonemic and phonological awareness in literate adults. The predictions are as follows: With regard to (1), it is expected, following the vast body of research done on children’s phonemic awareness and reading ability, that there will be a correlation between subjects’ performance on reading and phonemic awareness tests. However, since all literate adults exhibit some level of phonemic awareness, and since the ability to manipulate syllables is present before the ability to manipulate phonemes and prior to reading experience (as shown in preliterate children and illiterates), it is predicted that reading ability will correlate with performance on the three phonemic awareness tests (the segment-based tasks) and not the remaining phonological awareness tests (the syllable-based tasks). This is illustrated below:
| | | |
| |Segment-based tasks |Syllable-based tasks |
| | | |
|Deletion |Delete Segment Task (1) |Delete Syllable Task (2) |
| | | |
|Substitution |Substitute Segment Task (3) |Substitute Syllable Task (4) |
| | | |
|Permutation |Reverse Segment Task (5) |Reverse Syllable Task (6) |
| | | |
| |Prediction: As (1), (3), & (5) tap into phonemic |Prediction: As (2), (4), & (6) tap into lower-level |
| |awareness, they will be correlated with reading |phonological awareness only, they will not be |
| |ability |correlated with reading ability |
Because adults have achieved a baseline level of phonological awareness, their ability to manipulate syllables is unrelated to their reading ability (since all adults are able to manipulate syllables with relative ease). This brings us to the second set of predictions.
Because syllables are accessible phonological units to illiterates and preliterates, it is assumed (Adams, 1990, and many others) that syllabic awareness is a precursor to phonemic awareness. Therefore, it is expected that when the comparisons of the sister experiments discussed in (2) above are carried out, it will be found that subjects perform significantly better on the syllabic-based tasks than the segment-based tasks for each operation. This is illustrated below:
| | |
| |Performance on Syllable-based tasks > Performance on Segment-based tasks |
| | |
|Deletion |Delete Syllable Task (2) > Delete Segment Task (1) |
| | |
|Substitution |Substitute Syllable Task (4) > Substitute Segment Task (3) |
| | |
|Permutation |Reverse Syllable Task (6) > Reverse Segment Task (5) |
Finally, it is predicted that when performances on different types of manipulations are compared, it will be shown that adults, like children, perform best on deletion tasks and worst on permutation tasks (Adams, 1990). This prediction, based upon findings with children, is an expected fall-out from the experimental design, but is not central to the thesis here. It will be touched upon the in discussion of all six experiments.
The tasks in the experiments below are all based on previous studies. A question that arises in these types of studies is the degree to which the experimental design tests true natural language ability, versus quirky task-oriented skills. After all, the results of such a study are only interesting insofar as they reveal something about a subject’s natural language ability. Why, then, have researchers in phonemic and phonological awareness assumed that the seemingly unnatural feats subjects are asked to perform in an experimental setting somehow reveal their linguistic competence? English speakers don’t reverse segments in their everyday speech, and segment reversal is not employed in English morphology. How, then, can we judge a subject’s phonemic awareness ability by performance on an arguably unnatural task? Cross-linguistic evidence shows that such tasks are not necessarily unnatural.
The tasks in phonemic awareness experiments usually take the form of invented language games (invented by linguists, educators, psychologists, and speech pathologists for training and diagnostic purposes), but naturally occurring language games (invented by speakers for no greater reason than language play) take the same forms. Anderson (1992) argues that language games may tell us more about linguistic abilities than naturally occurring morphology:
Some [morphological] rule types are unattested not because they are beyond the bounds of human linguistic capacity, but rather because there is not coherent sequence of possible historical change that would give rise...In the phenomenon of ‘secret languages’ or ‘language games’ [there are] a wide range of process types which are not found in natural languages. Since they are not constrained by the limits on historical change, they are freer to exploit the limits of human linguistic capacities. (Anderson, 1992, p.63).
Anderson’s point is that “natural” is not synonymous with “broadly occurring”; due to historical change or other factors, perfectly “natural” types of syllable and phoneme manipulations may become rare. There are certainly parallels with the phonemic inventory of a language; though [x] is a perfectly natural sound, it is not present in modern-day English. Historical change assures that a given sound or phonological process may be present in one language but absent in another.
Each of the “invented” tasks in the experimental design laid out above occurs in some form in a naturally occurring language game. A version of segment deletion occurs in that old standby, Pig Latin, in which the player has to delete (extract) the initial segment and move it to the end of the word (game: [gem] → [emge]). A similar game in Cuna, a Chíbchan language of Panama, invokes syllable deletion: the first syllable of a word is stripped off and then moved to the end of the word ([uwaya] → [wayau]) (Bagemihl, 1989). Phoneme substitution can be seen in a Luganda game, in which each syllable beginning with a consonant is reduplicated, with [z] in that consonant’s place ([omusajja] → [o-mu-zu-sa-za-jja-za]) (Kilbride & Kilbride, 1972). Syllable substitution is attested in an informal language game played by my Swarthmore College peers, in which words ending in -ter had their final syllable supplanted by [tri]: water: [wa((r] → [watri], bitter: [b(((r] →[b(tri]. Substitution games are further attested in examples of children’s spontaneous language play. Two examples that illustrate this are deanut dutter dandwich (“peanut butter sandwich”) as segment substitution (Kleeck & Bryant, 1984) and Mommy, is it an a-dult or a nuh-dult? as syllable substitution (Gleitman, Gleitman, & Shipley, 1972). Even reversal tasks, which are less likely to occur as morphological processes, make their way into language games. Bagemihl cites Zande, a Niger-Congo/Adamawa-Ubangian language of Zaire, as an example of a language with a syllable reversing language game ([tikpo] → [kpoti]), and Chasu as an example of a language with segment reversing games ([sano] → [naso]). So, the tasks in Experiments One through Six below are attested in natural language processes; the operations which subjects are asked to perform all are found in naturally occurring language games.
The fact that even the most difficult tasks in the experiments below are attested in natural language games should not be interpreted to mean that all human language speakers possess the phonemic awareness necessary to play the games. On the contrary:
It appears that an alphabetic writing system may be a prerequisite for a segment reversal ludling [language game] to appear in a language...however, this is not a sufficient criterion, since many languages with alphabetic systems have only syllable reversing ludlings. Moreover, in languages with segment reversing ludlings, the reversal is clearly not based on the orthographic representations, as the English examples...illustrate....It seems that the presence of an alphabetic writing system is necessary for the establishment of some metalinguistic awareness of the notion of 'segment'; beyond this, however, the phonological system takes over as the primary basis for reversal. (Bagemihl, 1989, p. 485)
So, citing language games to justify task naturalness in no way implies that phonemic awareness is an innate ability; it only confirms that the abilities to be tested in these experiments are within the realm of human linguistic capacity. After all, not everyone has a talent for Pig Latin!
The six experiments in this section have the advantage of clinical control; the task instructions, task familiarity, learning period, and stimulus pattern are the same in each. Because of this control, the data from different tasks can be compared with each other and to the parallel measure of reading ability without concern that the results are confounded by some task-specific factor.[11]
3.2. Deletion Experiments
3.2.1. Experiment One: Delete Segment Task
Experiment One is the Delete Segment Task. The experiment has two parts: an oral test of phonemic awareness and a written task that measures reading ability.
The purpose of the experiment is two-fold. In and of itself, it is designed to test whether adults exhibit the same connection between phonemic awareness and reading as children. In comparison with its sister test, the Delete Syllable Task, it is designed to test whether adults exhibit different capabilities in the deletion of segments versus syllables.
The predictions for the outcome of the experiment are as follows. It is expected that, in keeping with results from similar experiments performed on children, the adults who perform best on this measure of phonemic awareness are those adults who also perform best on the reading test. A secondary prediction is that though subjects will perform relatively well on this test, as deletion is a simple operation, they will fare better on the Delete Syllable Task, which asks them to perform the same operation (deletion), but with a more accessible unit of deletion (the syllable, rather than the segment).
METHOD
Subjects Forty-two University of Arizona students participated in the experiment in exchange for extra credit in a class. Nine students were excluded from the study. Of these one was not a native or near-native speaker of English[12], one did not complete the oral part of the experiment, and one failed to follow directions. Six subjects were unable to complete portions of the experiment due to a tape malfunction. Excluding these, the subject pool consisted of thirty-three subjects who were unaware of the purpose of the experiment. The subjects were arbitrarily divided into two groups, henceforth referred to as Group A and Group B. There were 18 subjects in Group A and 15 in Group B.
Tasks and Procedure: Oral Test of Phonemic Awareness
For Experiment One, the test of phonemic awareness administered was the Delete Segment Task. This is a classic phonemic awareness test which has been employed routinely in phonemic awareness tests with children (Bryant, et. al., 1990; Bradley and Bryant, 1983; Cunningham, 1990; Lundberg, et. al., 1988; Mann, 1986; Stanovich, et. al., 1984; Tornéus, 1984; among others). In these tasks, subjects are given a list of words and asked to delete the initial phoneme. The basic methodology employed here differs little from that used in children’s tasks, though there are some minor adjustments. These are detailed below.
Since the subjects in this case are adults, it was determined that the task had to be made more difficult than parallel tasks which have been performed on children, while remaining true to the original methodology. As such, the instructions, stimuli, and response time were all slightly adapted. The instructions to the subjects were similar to those given children, except that the real word/nonword status of the response was not made explicit (that is, children were told that the correct response would be a real word of English). The stimuli in the adult experiment were made considerably more difficult. First, all correct responses were nonwords (as opposed to the children’s experiments, in which all correct responses were words). Secondly, since the results of a pilot (see Chapter Two) showed that literate adults have little trouble stripping off a single consonant from a word (even when that consonant is not in a one-to-one relationship with the first grapheme of the word), all test items in this experiment began with consonant clusters.[13] Finally, the adult subjects were given a limited amount of time in which to respond to a stimulus, unlike previous studies with children. All of these changes were instituted to make the experiment more challenging to adults, with the goal of eliciting higher error rates.
Subjects were played taped instructions through headphones. Each subject gave responses into a microphone, which could be held in one’s hand or placed on a desk. Subjects heard the following instructions:
We’re going to play some games with words. In each game, you will be given a set of instructions and some examples showing how the game is played. You will have a limited amount of time to respond to each item, and there is no stopping or going back. There are six games in all.
The instructions specific to Experiment One were as follows: “I’m going to give you a word, and I want you to tell me what that word would be if the first sound were taken off. Here are some examples.” The subjects then heard five practice items, followed by the correct responses to those items. Upon completion of the practice items, subjects heard the instruction, “Now you try,” which was followed by twelve test items, presented approximately four seconds apart (as timed by an electric metronome).[14] Following these instructions, the expected response to the stimulus beauty is [yu(i].
Each subject was presented stimuli from one of two lists; Group A subjects heard List 1 stimuli and Group B subjects heard List 2 stimuli. The stimuli on the two lists were matched for frequency (using PHONDIC[15]) and phonological pattern. The stimuli shared the following characteristics:
• All test items were two syllable words in which the second syllable contained an unreduced, stressless vowel;
• All test items began with what could be characterized as a CCV sequence, which was either
• a [Cy] word (i.e., [byuri])
• a [Cw] word (i.e., [kwazi]), or
• a “straight” cluster (i.e., [fresko])
These three types of initial clusters were chosen based on the results of the Delete Segment Pilot discussed in Chapter Two.
The practice items on Lists 1 and 2 modeled the Delete Segment Task on both [CV...] words and [CCV] words, so that there would be no confusion about the unit subjects were being asked to delete. After hearing both [bebi...ebi] and [tr(byut...r(byut] modeled, subjects knew that this was a truly a delete initial segment task, and not a delete onset task.
The practice items and stimuli for Experiment One are given below:
| | |
|List 1 Stimuli |List 2 Stimuli |
| | |
|Practice Items: |Practice Items: |
| | |
|baby |moody |
| | |
|tribute |translate |
| | |
|plenty |glory |
| | |
|charcoal |checkmate |
| | |
|graphite |precinct |
| | |
|Test Items: |Test Items: |
| | |
|beauty |bureau |
| | |
|twenty |treaty |
| | |
|quarry |quasi |
| | |
|frantic |frenzy |
| | |
|sticky |stucco |
| | |
|cubic |fury |
| | |
|franchise |climax |
| | |
|scarcely |species |
| | |
|music |puny |
| | |
|clergy |proxy |
| | |
|fresco |credo |
| | |
|swallow |statue |
Tasks and Procedure: Written Test of Reading Ability
Subjects were administered a test of reading ability compiled from tests previously used in General Record Exams (GREs). The test consisted of 37 questions, 27 of which were drawn from the exam’s verbal ability section, consisting of both vocabulary and reading comprehension questions. This test was deemed appropriate for adults because of its similarity to the tests of reading ability often used in tests of the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in children. Although the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test - Revised (PPVT-R) is a popular test with very young subjects (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bowey & Francis, 1991), the Metropolitan tests are frequently used with older children (as seen in Stanovich, Cunningham & Cramer, 1984; Cunningham, 1990; Hatcher et. al., 1994; Mann, 1993). The Metropolitan Achievement Tests, Primer and Primary levels, are one such test and are used to “measure sound-symbol correspondence, word recognition, and reading comprehension” (Cunningham, 1990, p. 432). Obviously, the written test administered in this experiment does not offer a direct test of sound-symbol correspondence, but since the subjects in this experiment are literate adults rather than preliterate children, this is an expected (and ultimately irrelevant) difference.
The remaining ten (of 37) questions on the written test were drawn from the exam’s analytical ability section, and served as a control: it was not expected that there would be any correlation at all with subjects’ performance on phonemic awareness tasks, as no correlations were found in control test with children. (Control tests which have been used in phonemic awareness experiments with children include IQ tests (Stanovich, et. al., 1984), music segmentation tests (Morais, et. al, 1986), and nonphonological linguistic tests (i.e., syntax tests) (Lundberg, 1991)). If, in fact, a correlation was found between the analytical questions and phonemic awareness ability, it would indicate that subjects’ performance on phonemic awareness tasks was based more on analytical strategy than linguistic skill.
Subjects were not informed as to the origin of the questions they received. They had 30 minutes to complete the test. All subjects were given the same test, and the test was used as the measure of reading ability in Experiments 1-6.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Results: Oral Test of Phonemic Awareness
The results for the Delete Segment Task were coded as correct or incorrect. For all six experiments in this study, any items for which all subjects in a group gave correct or incorrect responses were excluded. This exclusion serves to minimize any item effect (i.e., the ease or difficulty of a particular stimulus, rather than the ease or difficult of the task) on the correlations being tested.
The method of coding for the Delete Segment Task was rather conservative; that is to say, the only responses scored as “correct” were those in which the first consonant in a cluster (but not the second) was deleted. Acceptable correct responses for both lists are shown in the chart below:
| | | | |
|List 1 Stimuli |correct response |List 2 Stimuli |correct response |
| | | | |
|beauty |yu(i |bureau |yuro |
| | | | |
|twenty |w(nti |treaty |ri(i |
| | | | |
|quarry |w(ri |quasi |w(zi |
| | | | |
|frantic |rænt(k |frenzy |r(nzi |
| | | | |
|sticky |t(ki |stucco |t(ko |
| | | | |
|cubic |yubik |fury |yuri |
| | | | |
|franchise |rænt((yz |climax |l(ymæks |
| | | | |
|scarcely |kersli |species |pi(iz |
| | | | |
|clergy |l(rd(i |puny |yuni |
| | | | |
|music |yuz(k |proxy |r(ksi |
| | | | |
|fresco |r(sko |credo |rido |
| | | | |
|swallow |w(lo |statue |tæt(u |
The coding of most of the clusters is clear; when the second consonant is anything but [w] or [y], there is no question that it is a consonantal part of the onset. Performing the Delete Segment Task correctly requires subjects to do more than separate onset and rime. They must break the onset in two and extract the first of these consonants away from the onset.[16] Doing so exhibits a relatively sophisticated level of phonemic awareness: subjects must be able to explicitly deal with the onset of a syllable as comprised of separate units.
Maybe this should go under tasks/procedure? The [Cy] cases and [Cw] cases are a little trickier. Are the [y] and [w] in these cases really the second consonants of consonant clusters, or rather on-glides to the following vowel? Davis and Hammond (1994) argue that [w] and [y] should be thought of differently: [w] is part of the onset (that is, the second consonant of a consonant cluster in the cases cited here), but [y] is co-moraic with the following vowel, and thus part of the coda. They cite the following evidence for their claim:
4. Cw has far fewer phonotactic constraints on it: Cw occurs before all vowels but [(], [aw], and [oy], whereas [Cy] occurs only before [u] only (indicating that y+u sequences are in actuality a diphthong, /(u/)
5. In the language game Pig Latin, [CwV] is unambiguously treated as part of the onset (for example, [unswe] is always the response to “swoon”), while [CyV] sequences are subject to variation in which some respondents treat it as part of the vowel (so, “cute” might yield either [yutke] or [utke]), and
6. In the “Name Game,” the [w] is deleted in [Cw] names like “Gwen” (gw(n, gw(n, bo b(n, benæn( fæn( fo f(n...), but the [y] is sometimes retained (that is, treated like part of the vowel) in [Cy] names like “Beulah” (byul(, byul(, bo byul(,benæn( fæn( fo fyul(...).
Thus, there are many reasons for thinking that the [Cy] words in this experiment are not truly words that begin with consonant clusters, whereas the “Cw” words are. Why, then, include them at all? First of all, Davis & Hammond’s evidence from Pig Latin and the “Name Game” is not without variation; there are dialects of each game in which the [y] of [Cy] sequences is treated as part of the onset. Secondly, in the pilot experiment, subjects made many more errors on words beginning with [Cy] sequences than they did words beginning with a single consonant, indicating that the [y] in [Cy] words is not an indisputable part of the vowel. So, for the purposes of this experiment, all clusters ([Cy], [Cw], and [CC]) will be treated in the same fashion, as sequences of two consonants.[17]
There is reason to think, however, that s-clusters (included among the “straight is [(ki], not [t(ki]. S-clusters violate the sonority hierarchy ([s] is more sonorous than [t], and yet is further removed from the syllable nucleus in sticky) and so have been classified by some as extrasyllabic (Clements and Keyser; 1983). Selkirk (1982) proposed a different explanation for the anomalous behavior of s-clusters, positing that s-clusters at the beginnings of words were actually complex onsets. In deleting the first phoneme, subjects may be deleting the first licensed (non-extrasyllabic) element, or deleting a complex segment, which can’t be broken down any further. Thus, responses to s-cluster stimuli were marked correct if both the [s] and the following consonant were stripped off, yielded some interesting results. ” clusters) should be treated differently, and that a correct response to sticky in the Delete Segment Task
There were no items in the Delete Segment Task which all subjects got correct or incorrect, so all items were included in the final analysis. The results of the Delete Segment Task were as follows: Group A subjects had a mean correct response rate of 7.94 (out of 12), with a standard deviation of 3.22, and Group B subjects had a mean correct response rate of 9 (out of 12), with a standard deviation of 2.17.
Results: Written Test of Reading Ability
The written tests of reading ability and analytic ability were scored according to the answer sheet in the Graduate Record Exam instruction book.
Results: Segment Deletion and Reading
There was no significant correlation between reading ability and ability to delete an initial phoneme for either Group A or Group B subjects (Group A: r(18)= .464; Group B: r(15)= -.040). This was an unexpected result given that in similar experiments with children, the correlation between phonemic awareness and reading ability was statistically significant. This result will be discussed further in the sections below.
Analytical ability, which was used as a control, was also not correlated with performance on this task (Group A: r(18)= .149; Group B: r(15)= -.032). This was the expected result, as no past phonemic awareness studies have shown a connection between PA and intelligence, mathematical, or analytical ability.
3.2.2. Experiment Two: Delete Syllable Task
In the Delete Syllable Task, subjects are asked to strip off the initial syllable in a word. In comparison with its sister test, the Delete Segment Task, it is designed to test whether adults exhibit different capabilities in the deletion of segments versus syllables.
It is expected that performance on the Delete Syllable Task will exceed that on any of the other tasks, because (1) deletion is the simplest phonological operation of the three employed in this set of experiments, and (2) syllables are more accessible than phonemes. In fact, it is not expected that the best readers will do significantly better on this measure of phonemic awareness than the poorest readers, since syllable deletion is a task requiring a very low level of phonemic awareness, and should therefore be unrelated to reading ability.
METHOD
Subjects
There were thirty-three subjects; the same subjects as in Experiment One.
Tasks and Procedure: Oral Test of Phonological Awareness
For Experiment Two, the test of phonological awareness administered was the Delete Syllable Task. This phonemic awareness test has been used in tests with children, as it is here, as a means of explicitly gauging the effect the unit of manipulation has on a task (Lundberg, 1988). In this task, subjects are given a list of words and asked to delete the initial syllable. The methodology is exactly the same as that in Experiment One, except in this experiment subjects are told, “I’m going to give you a word, and I want you to tell me what that word would be if the first syllable were taken off.” As in Experiment One, the subjects heard five practice items (with their correct responses), followed by twelve test items.
Again, each subject was presented with stimuli from one of two lists. The stimuli were the same as those in Experiment One. Group A subjects (who received List One stimuli in Experiment One) received List Two stimuli in Experiment Two, and Group B subjects heard List One stimuli in Experiment Two. This list-balancing was incorporated into the design so that any conclusions drawn from a comparison of these sister experiments was sure to be the result of differences in phonemic awareness rather than differences in the difficulty of stimuli.
Tasks and Procedure: Written Test of Reading Ability
The test of reading ability and the control test of analytical ability were the same as in Experiment One.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Results: Oral Test of Phonological Awareness
The coding of correct and incorrect answers for the Delete Syllable Task was considerably more complicated than that for the Delete Segment Task. In one of life’s great linguistic ironies, even though the basis of phonemic awareness research is that syllabic awareness is innate and phonemic awareness is a more complicated ability only learned through exposure to an alphabet, it is much easier to determine what comprises a segment than what comprises a syllable for this task. Since phonemic awareness research on children has traditionally employed stimuli that are either monosyllabic or disyllabic and obviously bimorphemic, it is of little help in determining how the answers to this Delete Syllable Task should be coded.
It is widely accepted that the syllable is a bona fide phonological unit (Anderson, 1969; Fudge, 1969; Kahn, 1976). There are syllable-based writing systems, syllable-based language games, and phonological rules which depend on syllable boundaries. So, it is not the existence of the syllable which is in question here, it is the composition of the syllable.
The stimuli in the Delete Syllable Task are all bisyllabic words with primary stress on the first syllable a nonreduced vowel in the second syllable. Some of the stimuli contain a medial consonant cluster (i.e. fresco), while others contain a single medial consonant (i.e. baby). How should these words be syllabified? Consider the cases of fresco and baby If responses that violate phonotactic rules of English are marked as incorrect, there are still several possible responses to the question, “What does X sound like when the first syllable is removed?” For fresco, three possibilities present themselves: [sko], [ko], and [o]. For baby, there are two: [bi] and [i]. How are we to determine which response(s) should be considered appropriate?
As discussed in Chapter One, theories of syllabification confuse, rather than illuminate, the matter. The Maximal Onset Principle (Pulgram, 1970), the Sonority Dispersion Principle (Clements, 1988) and theories of ambisyllabicity (Kahn, 1976) all lead to different coding of answers in the Delete Syllable Task, as demonstrated in the chart below:
| | | | |
|TEST ITEM |Maximize Onset |Sonority Dispersion |Ambisyllabicity |
| | | | |
|fr(sco |fr(.sko |fr(s.ko |fr(sk.ko or fr(s.sko |
| | | | |
|baby |be.bi |be.bi |be.bi or beb.bi |
The Maximize Onset and Sonority Dispersion principles both force a strict interpretation of correct answers in the Delete Syllable Task. If either principle is used as the basis of coding, only one correct answer presents itself for each test item. Theories of amibsyllabiicity, on the other hand, allow for several different responses, since medial segments may belong to both syllables.
Recall that Treiman & Zukowski (1990), Treiman & Danis (1988), and Meador & Ohala (1993) all found support for ambisyllabicity in syllabification tasks. This would support a liberal coding of responses in the Delete Syllable Task, by which fr(sk.ko or fr(s.sko could be the correct syllabification of fresco, and therefore [ko] or [sko] could be the correct response.
Two other considerations support a more liberal coding of responses in the Delete Syllable Task. The first consideration is a linguistic one: it is not clear from the three studies cited above how the nonreduced vowels in the stimuli affect syllabification. Are the second syllables in fresco and baby more likely to attract consonants than the second syllables of master and palace? The second consideration is strategy-oriented. Recall that the instructions to subjects in this experiment are, “I’m going to give you a word, and I want you to tell me what that word would be if the first syllable were taken off.” In cases of ambisyllabicity, it is possible that these instructions could elicit two different responses. Let’s say two subjects hear the word baby and judge the medial consonant ambisyllabic. When prompted for a response, Subject 1 might view the task as identifying the first syllable [beb] and spitting out the remainder [i]. Treiman and Danis found that subjects tended to “force” singly spelled consonants into one syllable or another, even in the most stereotypically ambisyllabic environments. Subject 2, on the other hand, might view the task not as stripping off the first syllable, but identifying the second, and so would say [bi].
Given all these factors, responses in the Delete Syllable Task were only marked incorrect if they violated rules of English phonotactics (for example, the response [ksi] to the stimulus proxy). Acceptable responses are given in the chart below:
| | | | |
|List 1 Stimuli |Exp. 2 response |List 2 Stimuli |Exp. 2 response |
| | | | |
|Test Items: | |Test Items: | |
| | | | |
|Beauty |di, ti, i |bureau |ro, o |
| | | | |
|Twenty |ti, i |treaty |di, ti, i |
| | | | |
|Quarry |ri, i |quasi |zi, si, i |
| | | | |
|Frantic |t(k, (k |frenzy |zi, i |
| | | | |
|Sticky |ki, i |stucco |ko, o |
| | | | |
|Cubic |b(k, (k |fury |ri, i |
| | | | |
|Franchise |t((yz, (yz |climax |mæks, æks |
| | | | |
|Scarcely |li, sli |species |(iz, siz, iz |
| |d(i, i | | |
|Clergy | |puny |ni, i |
| | | | |
|Music |z(k, (k |proxy |si, i |
| | | | |
|Fresco |ko, o, sko |credo |do, o |
| | | | |
|Swallow |lo, o |statue |t(u, u |
Subjects performed extremely well on the Delete Syllable Task. When all responses (both Group A and Group B) were considered, there was a mean correct response rate of 10.15 (out of 12), with a standard deviation of 3.09.
The chart below offers support for the decision to code subjects’ responses to the delete syllable task as argued above.
| | | | |
|Delete Segment | |Delete Syllable | |
| | | | |
| |Maximize Onset |Sonority Dispersion |Ambisyllabicity |
| | | | |
|Mean for All Subjects = 8.46 |Mean = 7.26 |Mean = 7.69 |Mean = 10.15 |
If the Maximize Onset or Sonority Dispersion Principles were used to code responses, subjects would actually have performed worse on the Delete Syllable Task than the Delete Segment Task, an unexpected result that cannot be reconciled with previous phonemic awareness experiments. A coding according to a theory of English ambisyllabicity, however, is consistent with earlier findings that the syllable is easier to manipulate than the segment.
There were no items on either list that all subjects got incorrect. There were no items which all subjects in Group A got correct, however, there were seven items which all subjects in Group B got correct. The items were: quarry, franchise, scarcely, music, clergy, fresco, and swallow. There appears to be no difference in phonological pattern between the items that all subjects got correct vs. those that all subjects did not get correct (beauty, twenty, frantic, sticky, and cubic). This may be explained by the fact that subjects, on the whole, performed extremely well on the Delete Syllable Task, and made few errors. Group A subjects had a mean correct response rate of 9.33 (out of 12), with a standard deviation of 3.51, and Group B subjects had a mean correct response rate of 4.33 (out of 5), with a standard deviation of .82.
Results: Written Test of Reading Ability
The scoring of the written tests of reading ability and analytic ability was exactly the same as in Experiment One, as it was the same test.
Results: Segment Deletion and Reading
There was no significant correlation between reading ability and ability to delete an initial syllable for either Group A or Group B subjects (Group A: r(18) = .295; Group B: r(15)= -.100). This was the expected result for the syllable deletion task, particularly given the high mean correct response rate. Syllable deletion is an easy enough task that all subjects performed well on it. Since syllabic awareness is a low-level, arguably innate phonological skill, it is not at all surprising that it is unrelated to reading ability.
What is surprising is that analytical ability, the control measure, was correlated with ability to delete an initial syllable in Group B subjects: Group B: r(15) = .546, significant at the .05 level. (There was no such correlation in Group A subjects: r(18) = .379, p=.061). We have seen that syllabic awareness is not a product of reading ability, and apparently not facilitated by it. Perhaps the reason that the best analyzers were the same subjects who performed best on the Delete Syllable Task is that they took an analytical approach to the task. Viewing syllable deletion as an analytic task (a possibility since it does not require any special linguistic skill or sophisticated phonological awareness), they were able to strip the first syllable from a word easily. Another explanation may be found in a task-order effect, a consequence of the fact that subjects performed the delete syllable task immediately after the delete segment task. At least two subjects switched to a delete-segment strategy in the middle of the delete syllable task and consequently made errors on several consecutive test items, rendering a lower score on the Delete Syllable Task than expected.
3.2.2. Comparison of Experiments One and Two
It was predicted that there would be a significant difference between performance on the Delete Segment Task on the Delete Syllable Task. Results were mixed. A t-test showed that Group B subjects did perform significantly better on the Delete Syllable Task than the Delete Segment Task (t=-3.79628, p ................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.
Related searches
- the nature of science answers
- the nature of the learner
- the nature of science worksheet
- the nature of science section 1 answers
- the nature of science worksheet answer key
- 1 2 the nature of science answer key
- chapter 1 the nature of science
- the nature of truth
- discuss the nature of philosophy
- the nature of virtue aristotle
- difference between phonological and phonemic awareness
- understanding the nature of evil