Virginia A. Mann

Phonological Awareness and Verbal Short-Term Memory

Many studies have established an association between early reading problems and deficiencies in certain spoken language skills, such as the ability to become aware of the syllabic structure of spoken words, and the ability to retain a string of words in verbal short-term memory. A longitudinal study now shows that inferior performance in kindergarten tests of these same skills may presage future reading problems in the first grade. Based on these findings, procedures are suggested for kindergarten screening and for some ways of aiding children who, by virtue of inferior performance on these tests, might be considered at risk for reading failure.

The relation between reading ability and morphological skills: Evidence from derivational suffixes

The English orthography represents both phonemes and morphemes, implying that sensitivity to each of these units could play a role in the acquisition of decoding skills. This study offers some new evidence about sensitivity to morphemes and the decoding skills of American children in grades three to six. It focuses on knowledge of derivational suffixes, which is examined with sentence completion and sentence acceptability tasks that manipulate the suffixes in real words (e.g., electric, electricity) and nonsense derived forms (e.g., froodly, froodness). Both written and spoken materials are considered over the course of two experiments in which the children also received various reading tests, as well as tests of phonological awareness, vocabulary and intelligence. The results indicate that knowledge of derivational suffixes increases with grade level, along with decoding ability and phoneme awareness. Path analyses further reveal that, although there is a consistent correlation between performance on the derivational suffix materials and phoneme awareness and decoding ability, performance on the derivational suffix materials makes an independent and increasing contribution to decoding ability throughout the higher elementary grades.

Reading Ability and Sensitivity to Morphological Relations.

The morpho-phonological nature of English orthography is examined in this study of the relation between morphological sensitivity and decoding ability in the latter elementary grades. Children in grades three to six were required to distinguish derivationally-related word pairs (e.g., nature-natural) from foil pairs that are related in spelling but not in morphology (e.g., ear-earth). The materials included both transparently-related (i.e., the second word incorporated the pronunciation of the first, as in person-personal) and complexly-related word pairs (i.e., the second word involved some change in pronunciation, as in atom-atomic). Across two experiments, these items were presented in either oral or written form along with various tests of reading ability, intelligence and phonological awareness. The results indicate that childrens recognition of derivational relationships improved with grade-level. As anticipated, there was also a significant association between sensitivity to derivational relatedness and decoding ability which remains significant even when the word pairs were orally presented and even when phonological awareness in taken into account. Both phonological awareness and sensitivity to morphological structure emerge as important factors in decoding skill in the later elementary grades.

Phonological awareness: the role of reading experience.

Abstract A cross-cultural study of Japanese and American children has examined the development of awareness about syllables and phonemes. Using counting tests and deletion tests, Experiments I and III reveal that in contrast to first graders in America, most of whom tend to be aware of both syllables and phonemes, almost all first graders in Japan are aware of mora (phonological units roughly equivalent to syllables) but relatively few are aware of phonemes. This difference in phonological awareness may be attributed to the fact that Japanese first graders learn to read a syllabary whereas American first graders learn to read an alphabet. For most children at this age, awareness of phonemes may require experience with alphabetic transcription, whereas awareness of syllables may be facilitated by experience with a syllabary, but less dependent upon it. To further clarify the role of knowledge of an alphabet in childrens awareness of phonemes, Experiments II and IV administered the same counting and deletion tests to Japanese children in the later elementary grades. Here the data reveal that many Japanese children become aware of phonemes by age whether or not they have received instruction in alphabetic transcription. Discussion of these results focuses on some of the other factors that may promote phonological awareness.

Children’s memory for sentences and word strings in relation to reading ability

A previous study of recall of letter strings by good and poor beginning readers IShankweiler, Liberman, Mark, Fowler, & Fischer, 1979 revealed that the performance of good readers was more severely penalized than that of poor readers when the letter names rhymed. To determine whether the differences in susceptibility to phonetic interference extend to materials that more closely resemble actual text, we designed an experiment to test recall of phonetically controlled sentences and word strings. As in the case of letter recall, we found that, although good readers made fewer errors than poor readers when sentences or word strings contained no rhyming words, they did not excel when the materials contained many rhyming words. In contrast to manipulations of phonetic content, systematic manipulations of meaningfulness and variations in syntactic structure did not differentially affect the two reading groups. We conclude that the poor readers’ inferior recall of phonetically nonconfusable sentences, word strings, and letter strings reflects failure to make full use of phonetic coding in working memory.

Influence of vocalic context on perception of the [∫]-[s] distinction

When synthetic fricative noises from a [∫]-[s] continuum are followed by [a] or [u] (with appropriate formant transitions), listeners perceive more instances of [s] in the context of [u] than in the context of [a]. Presumably, this reflects a perceptual adjustment for the coarticulatory effect of rounded vowels on preceding fricatives. In Experiment 1, we found that varying the duration of the fricative noise leaves the perceptual context effect unchanged, whereas insertion of a silent interval following the noise reduces the effect substantially. Experiment 2 suggested that it is temporal separation rather than the perception of an intervening stop consonant that is responsible for this reduction, in agreement with recent, analogous observations on anticipatory coarticulation. In Experiment 3, we showed that the vowel context effect disappears when the periodic stimulus portion is synthesized so as to contain no formant transitions. To dissociate the contribution of formant transitions from contextual effects due to vowel quality per se, Experiment 4 employed synthetic fricative noises followed by periodic portions excerpted from naturally produced [∫a], [sa], [∫u], and [su]. The results showed strong and largely independent effects of formant transitions and vowel quality on fricative perception. In addition, we found a strong speaker (male vs. female) normalization effect. All three influences on fricative perception were reduced by temporal separation of noise and periodic stimulus portions. Although no single hypothesis can explain all of our results, they are generally supportive of the view that some knowledge of the dynamics of speech production has a role in speech perception.

Phoneme awareness and pathways into literacy: A comparison of German and American children

Where American kindergartners are taughtletters and letter sounds, Germankindergartners are not; where American firstand second graders receive an eclectic blend ofwhole language, whole word and phonics-basedapproaches, their German counterparts aretaught by an intensive synthetic phonicsapproach. As a probe to the consequences ofthese pedagogical differences on the emergenceof phoneme awareness, this study administeredtwo tests of phoneme awareness tokindergarten-, first- and second-grade childrenin Germany and America, along with readingtests, the digit span test and a test of RANcolor naming ability. The American kindergartenchildren excelled on a phoneme identityjudgement and a phoneme deletion task that theGerman kindergartners found difficult. Theiradvantage held equally whether the manipulatedsound was a syllable onset or the initial partof a consonant cluster. The first and secondgraders surpassed the kindergartners in bothcountries; however, the German first and secondgraders equaled their American peers on bothtasks and both types of units. In addition,the German children were more accurate decodersof pseudowords by the end of second grade, andthe association between phoneme awareness andGerman decoding ability was weaker. Anincreased emphasis on phonics and the greatertransparency of the German alphabet arediscussed as possible factors in the decodingexcellence of the German second graders and itsdecreased association with phoneme awareness.The contrast between the American and Germankindergartners and the equivalence of the firstand second graders in the two countries areconsistent with a view that phoneme awarenessdevelops primarily as a product of literacyexposure.

Phoneme Awareness and Future Reading Ability

This study investigates two group-administered tests of phoneme awareness, a phoneme segmentation test and an invented spelling test. Each was given to 100 kindergarten children (48 female, 52 male), along with two tests of visual-motor ability. One year later the same children received standardized reading tests and portions of an IQ test. Scores on each test of phoneme awareness predicted between 30% and 40% of variance in first-grade reading ability. In contrast, scores on the tests of visual-motor ability bore a less systematic, less substantial relation to future reading ability.

Influence of preceding liquid on stop-consonant perception.

Certain attributes of a syllable-final liquid can influence the perceived place of articulation of a following stop consonant. To demonstrate this perceptual context effect, the CV portions of natural tokens of [al-da], [al-ga], [ar-da], [ar-ga] were excised and replaced with closely matched synthetic stimuli drawn from a [da]-[ga] continuum. The resulting hybrid disyllables were then presented to listeners who labeled both liquids and stops. The natural CV portions had two different effects on perception of the synthetic CVs. First, there was an effect of liquid category: Listeners perceived “g” more often in the context of [al] than in that of [ar]. Second, there was an effect due to tokens of [al] and [ar] having been produced before [da] or [ga]: More “g” percepts occurred when stops followed liquids that had been produced before [g]. A hypothesis that each of these perceptual effects finds a parallel in speech production is supported by spectrograms of the original utterances. Here, it seems, is another instance in which findings in speech perception reflect compensation for coarticulation during speech production.

Longitudinal prediction and prevention of early reading difficulty

The results of many studies suggest that early reading problems are associated with deficiencies in certain spoken language skills. Children who encounter reading difficulty tend to be deficient in the perception of spoken words, the ability to retain linguistic material in temporary memory, and the ability to comprehend certain spoken sentences, as well as in their awareness about the phonological structure of spoken words. This paper summarizes these findings and provides an explanation in terms of the requirements of skilled reading. It further reviews the results of two longitudinal studies which show that inferior performance in kindergarten tests of language skills may presage future reading problems in the first grade. Based on these studies, procedures are suggested for kindergarten screening and for some ways of aiding children who, by virtue of inferior performance on the screening tests, might be considered at risk for early reading difficulties.