Jesus Alegria

Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously

It was found that illiterate adults could neither delete nor add a phone at the beginning of a non-word; but these tasks were rather easily performed by people with similar environment and childhood experiences, who learned to read rudimentarily as adults. Awareness of speech as a sequence of phones is thus not attained spontaneously in the course of general cognitive growth, but demands some specific training, which, for most persons, is probably provided by learning to read in the alphabetic system.

Literacy training and speech segmentation

Abstract New groups of illiterate and ex-illiterate adults, comparable to those of Morais et. al (1979), were given a battery of tasks designed to assess the specificity of the effect of literacy training on speech segmentation. As in the previous study, a strong difference was observed between the two groups on the task of deleting the initial consonant of an utterance. The illeterates displayed the same incapacity to deal with phonetic segments in a detection task and in a progressive free segmentation task. Their performance was better, although still inferior to that of ex-illiterates, on both deletion and detection when the critical unit was a syllable rather than a consonant, as well as in a task of rhyme detection. No significant difference was observed in a task of melody segmentation, on which both groups performed poorly. The high specificity of the differences in performance level implies that they cannot result to an important extent from differences in general ability or motivation between the two groups of subjects. They rather mean 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. Finally, in a picture memory task, the illiterates showed a phonological similarity effect, which is consistent with other results suggesting that the use of phonological codes for short-term retention does not require explicit phonetic analysis.

Phonetic analysis of speech and memory codes in beginning readers

Two experimental tasks, a speech segmentation and a short-term memory task, were presented to children who began to learn to read following either the “phonic” or the “wholeword” method. The segmentation task required the child to reverse two segments (either two phones or two syllables) in an utterance. The phonic group performed significantly better than the whole-word group in the “phonic reversal” task, but no difference appeared in the “syllable reversal” task. This indicated (1) that most children by the age of 6 years are ready to discover that speech consists of a sequence of phones and (2) that the moment at which they do it is influenced by the way they are taught to read. In the memory task, the children recalled series of visually presented items whose names either rhymed or did not. The difference in performance for the rhyming and nonrhyming series was significant in both groups. It was no greater for the phonic than for the whole-word group and was uncorrelated with the “phonic reversal” task. These results are discussed in connection with the distinction between ways of lexical access and ways of representing verbal information in short-term memory.

SEGMENTATION ABILITIES OF DYSLEXICS AND NORMAL READERS

Dyslexia (15 boys, 12 girls, 6 to 9 yr.) were not poorer than normal readers (13 boys, 11 girls, 6 to 9 yr.) in segmenting tone sequences but much poorer in segmenting speech.

Metaphonological Abilities of Spanish Illiterate Adults

Abstract The metaphonological abilities of illiterate Spanish-speaking people were evaluated. A group of rudimentary readers who have had deficient schooling was taken as control. The subjects were asked to discriminate between pairs of syllables that are minimally different in terms of phonetic features, to evaluate rhyme relations, to judge whether or not a particular phoneme or syllable was present in an utterance, and to delete and reverse phonemes and syllables. The results show that illiterates are quite good at phonetic discrimination. Almost half of them demonstrated an unequivocal ability to appreciate rhyme. However, their performance on the syllable tasks, and especially on the phoneme tasks, was very poor. There was almost no overlap between the scores of illiterates and rudimentary readers in the phonemic tasks. The present study confirms previous indications that phonemic awareness does not develop as a mere consequence of cognitive or linguistic maturation. It extends this claim to language...

Spelling development in deaf and hearing children: Evidence for use of morpho-phonological regularities in French

This study investigated the processes that deaf school children use for spelling. Hearing and deaf spellers of two age groups spelled three types of words differing in orthographic transparency (Regular, Morphological and Opaque words). In all groups, words that could be spelled on the basis of phoneme-grapheme knowledge (Regular words) were easier than words that could be spelled only on the basis of lexical orthographic information (Opaque words). Words in which spelling can be derived from morphological information were easier than Opaque words for older deaf and hearing subjects but not for younger subjects. In deaf children, use of phoneme-grapheme knowledge seems to develop with age, but only in those individuals who had intelligible speech. The presence of systematic misspellings indicates that the hearing-impaired youngsters rely upon inaccurate speech representations they derived mainly form lip-reading. The findings thus suggest that deaf subjectss spelling is based on an exploitation of the linguistic regularities represented in the French alphabetic orthography, but that this exploitation is limited by the vagueness of their representations of oral language. These findings are discussed in the light of current developmental models of spelling acquisition.

Time uncertainty, number of alternatives and particular signal-response pair as determinants of choice reaction time

Abstract The problem was to know if time uncertainty and number of choices affect the same or separate components of RT. In exp. 1; 2-, 4- and 8-choice RTs were measured in the same Ss under two warning conditions, constant foreperiods of either 0.5 or 5.0 sec. Two groups of Ss had different sub-sets of the 8 signal-response pairs for the 2- and 4-choice tasks. Time-uncertainty was found to interact with number of alternatives in one group not in the other. Closer inspection of the data showed that it was necessary to exert a better control on practice received on different sub-sets of signal-response pairs. This control was achieved in exp. 2 where only 2- and 8-choice tasks were used, and all combinations of two signals were used an equal number of times for the 2-choice task. The effect of time-uncertainty was then found independent of number of choices. It is shown that this result is not necessarily inconsistent with the previous finding that signal relative frequency does interact with time-uncertainty. An important incidental finding is the extent of the differences in RT between signal-response pairs in the multi-choice tasks. These differences are completely context-bound, and vanish when the pairs are considered two by two, as in exp. 2.

The role of lip-reading and cued speech in the processing of phonological information in French-educated deaf children

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS: system designed to reduce lip-reading ambiguity) either before age 2 (“early”) or later at school (“late”) were presented with words and pseudowords with or without CS. The first goal was to examine the effects of adding CS to lip-reading on phonological perception. Results showed that CS substantially improved performance suggesting that CS corrects for lip-reading ambiguities. CS effects were significantly larger in the “early” than the “late” group, particularly with pseudowords. The second goal was to establish the way in which lip-reading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts. To address this issue, two types of phonological misperception resulting from CSs structural characteristics were analysed; substitutions based on the similarity between CS units, and intrusions of a third syllable for bisyllabic pseudowords requiring three CS units. The results showed that the frequency of such misperceptions increased with CS. The integration of CS and lip-read ...

Por un enfoque psicolingüístico del aprendizaje de la lectura y sus dificultades—20 años después-

Resumen El artículo examina los primeros pasos del niño en el proceso de adquisición de la lectura a través de los trabajos realizados en el curso de los últimos 20 años. El tema central concierne al desarrollo de los procesos de identificación de palabras escritas porque estos procesos son específicos de la lectura. Se argumenta que el dispositivo de identificación de palabras se desarrolla gracias a un mecanismo de autoaprendizaje que trabaja utilizando el procedimiento de ensamblaje fonológico. La conciencia de la estructura fonológica del habla, y en particular de las unidades fonémicas, está en la base de habilidades relacionadas de manera causal con el desarrollo de los mecanismos de lectura. Los trabajos destinados a estudiar el desarrollo de la conciencia fonémica muestran que ésta no se desarrolla sin una intervención del medio educativo específicamente destinada a ello. Este es un argumento a favor de los métodos de enseñanza de la lectura de inspiración fónica. El estudio comparativo de diferentes sistemas alfabéticos sugiere que los métodos de enseñanza fónicos están especialmente indicados en sistemas transparentes como el del castellano. Finalmente los problemas de lectura y la dislexia aparecen como dificultades de naturaleza fonológica. Estas dificultades no se limitan al procesamiento de palabras escritas sino que se extienden a otros dominios de la fonología tales como la discriminación fonémica fina y el acceso a las representaciones fonológicas de las palabras tal como se manifiesta en tareas de nombramiento de imágenes y de fluidez verbal.

Methods to Establish Subtypes of Developmental Dyslexia

Do the developmental dyslexics form a homogeneous population, with a unique underlying impairment, or do they form distinct subgroups, thus opening up the possibility for different sources of impairment? In this chapter we compare different methods to subgroup dyslexic children and discuss the methodological implications.