Isabelle Y. Liberman

Explicit Syllable and Phoneme Segmentation in the Young Child.

Abstract To write a language, one must first abstract the unit to be used from the acoustic stream of speech. Writing systems based on the meaningless units, syllables and phonemes, were late developments in the history of written language. The alphabetic system, which requires abstraction of the phonemic unit of speech, was the last to appear, evolved from a syllabary and, unlike the other systems, was apparently invented only once. It might therefore be supposed that phoneme segmentation is particularly difficult and more difficult, indeed, than syllable segmentation. Speech research suggests reasons why this may be so. The present study provides direct evidence of a similar developmental ordering of syllable and phoneme segmentation abilities in the young child. By means of a task which required preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children to tap out the number of segments in spoken utterances, it was found that, though ability in both syllable and phoneme segmentation increased with grade level, analysis into phonemes was significantly harder and perfected later than analysis into syllables. The relative difficulties of the different units of segmentation are discussed in relation to reading acquisition.

Cognitive profiles of reading disability: Comparisons of discrepancy and low achievement definitions.

To examine the validity of distinguishing children with reading disabilities according to discrepancy and low-achievement definitions, we obtained four assessments of expected reading achievement and two assessments of actual reading achievement for 199 children, 7.5-9.5 years old. These assessments were used to subdivide the sample into discrepancy and low-achievement definitional groups who were compared on 9 cognitive variables related to reading proficiency. Results did not support the validity of discrepancy versus low achievement definitions. Although differences between children with impaired reading and children without impaired reading were large, differences between those children with impaired reading who met IQ-based discrepancy definitions and those who met low reading achievement definitions were small or not significant

Phonology and the Problems of Learning to Read and Write

Learning to read and write depends on abilities that are language related but that go beyond the ordinary abilities required for speaking and listening. Research has shown that the success of learners, whether they are children or adults, is related to the degree to which they are aware of the underlying phonological structure of words. Poor readers are often unable to segment words into their phonological constituents and may have other phonological deficiencies as well. Their difficulties in naming objects and in comprehending sentences, for example, may also stem from a basic problem in the phonological domain.

Spelling Proficiency and Sensitivity to Word Structure.

Abstract The connection between spelling and pronunciation in many English words is somewhat remote. To spell accurately, a writer may need to appreciate that the orthography maps regularities of more than one kind. Two experiments explored the possibility that young adults who differ in spelling ability also differ in sensitivity to morphophonemic structure and word formational principles that underlie the regularities of English spelling. In the first, an analysis of misspellings showed that poor spellers were less able than good spellers to exploit regularities at the surface phonetic level and were less able to access the underlying morphophonemic structure of words. A second experiment used pseudowords to extend these findings and to confirm that spelling competence involves apprehension of generalizations that can be applied to new instances.

Letter Confusions and Reversals of Sequence in the Begining Reader: Implications for Orton’S Theory of Developmental Dyslexia

Summary The pattern of errors of second grade pupils in reading isolated words was analyzed, particularly with respect to reversals of letter sequence and letter orientation. These occurred in significant quantity only among the poorer readers in the school class. The two types of reversals were uncorrelated and, therefore, cannot reflect a single process as Orton had implied. Sequence reversals were more closely related to other kinds of reading errors than were orientation reversals. The linguistic context as well as optical reversibility of letters is a determinant of confusions in letter orientation. Reading ability assessed by the analytic test composed of isolated words was highly correlated with reading proficiency on a conventional paragraphs test. This suggests that the problems of the beginning reader have more to do with word construction than with strategies for scanning connected text.

Phonetic recoding and reading difficulty in beginning readers.

The results of a recent study (Liberman, Shankweiler, Liberman, Fowler, & Fischer, 1977) suggest that good beginning readers are more affected than poor readers by the phonetic characteristics of visually presented items in a recall task. The good readers made significantly more recall errors on strings of letters with rhyming letter names than on nonrhyming sequences; in contrast, the poor readers made roughly equal numbers of errors on the rhyming and nonrhyming letter strings. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether the interaction between reading ability and phonetic similarity is solely determined by different rehearsal strategies of the two groups. Accordingly, good and poor readers were tested on rhyming and nonrhyming words using a recognition memory paradigm that minimized the opportunity for rehearsal. Performance of the good readers was more affected by phonetic similarity than that of the poor readers, in agreement with the earlier study. The present findings support the hypothesis that good and poor readers do differ in their ability to access a phonetic representation.

Linguistic coding by deaf children in relation to beginning reading success

The coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level of success of prelingually and profoundly deaf children (median age 8.75 years) in beginning reading. As determined by recall errors, the deaf children who were classified as good readers appeared to use both speech and fingerspelling (manual) codes in short-term retention of printed letters. In contrast, deaf children classified as poor readers did not show influence of either of these linguistically based codes in recall. Thus, the success of deaf children in beginning reading, like that of hearing children, appears to be related to the ability to establish and make use of linguistically recoded representations of the language. Neither group showed evidence of dependence on visual cues for recall.

Interrelationships between Reading Disability and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract Evidence from a number of investigations suggests a considerable overlap between reading disability (RD) and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We investigate the relationship between RD and ADHD in a cohort of 186 children 7.5–9.5 years of age, recruited explicitly to address classification and definitional issues in these disorders. Using multivariate methods, we examine the hypothesis that RD and ADHD represent separate diagnostic entities that frequently co-occur in the same individual. The results suggest that RD is characterized by deficits within the language system, in particular a subcomponent within that system, phonological processing; in contrast, such linguistic deficits are not characteristic of ADHD unless ADHD is associated with RD. When children with both RD and ADHD are examined, both the linguistic deficits associated with RD and the behavioral characteristics associated with ADHD are apparent, but these deficits are not synergistic. We conclude that RD and ADHD r...

On Interpreting the Error Pattern in Beginning Reading.

The error pattern in beginning reading was examined from two perspectives: the location of a misread consonant or vowel segment within the syllable and the phonetic relationship between a consonant or vowel and a misreading of it. The first analysis showed, as earlier work had led us to expect, that consonants in the final position in a syllable were more frequently misread than initial consonants. In contrast, the position of a vowel within the syllable had no effect on the frequency with which it was misread. With regard to the second analysis, consonant errors were found to bear a close phonetic relationship to their target sounds, while errors on vowels were essentially unrelated, phonetically, to the vowel as written. The striking differences, demonstrated by the results of both analyses, between the consonants and the vowels were attributed to the different linguistic functions of the two types of segments and to their different representations in English orthography. These findings underscore the importance of nonvisual, language-related cognitive operations in reading acquisition.

Visual and Phonological Determinants of Misreadings in a Transparent Orthography

Growth of word reading skills was examined in first and second year Italian school children by analysis of the pattern of reading errors. The study was designed to investigate the role of visual vs phonological similarities as causes of misreadings in a transparent orthography. The selection of reading material was tailored to permit a meaningful cross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speaking children. The results showed that, in Italian as in English, spatially-related errors (such as confusingb andd) constituted a minor proportion of the total errors. Errors on vowel and consonant letters that are not spatially confusable accounted for the greater proportion of the total. Moreover, the co-occurrence of spatial and phonological confusability resulted in appreciably more errors than when either occurred without the other. Vowel position in the syllable had no systematic effect on errors. In beginning readers of Italian, consonant errors outnumbered vowel errors by a wide margin; the reverse pattern was found in previous studies on English-speaking children at the same level of schooling. It is proposed that differences between Italian and English in the phonological structure of the lexicon and in the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences account in large part for the differences in quantity and distribution of the errors.