Phonological awareness and early reading: A meta-analysis of experimental training studies.

In a quantitative meta-analysis, the effects of phonological awareness training on reading were shown. In a homogeneous set of U.S. studies with a randomized or matched design, the combined effect sizes for phonological awareness and reading were d?=?0.73 (r?=?.34, N?=?739) and d?=?0.70 (r?=?.33, N?=?745), respectively. Thus, experimentally manipulated phonological awareness explains about 12% of the variance in word-identification skills. The combined effect size for long-term studies of the influence of phonological awareness training on reading was much smaller, d?=?0.16 (r?=?.08, N?=?1,180). Programs combining a phonological and a letter training were more effective than a purely phonological training. Furthermore, training effects were stronger with posttests assessing simple decoding skills than with real-word-identification tests. In sum, phonological awareness is an important but not a sufficient condition for early reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological awareness and reading: A chicken and egg problem?

Investigated the causal relationship between metaphonological skills (sound blending and segmentation) and reading/spelling in 2 experiments. In Exp I, data on 46 dyslexic and 44 control Ss in Grades 1–6 were drawn from a longitudinal study in Sweden of 723 Ss so that a number of causal models could be tested by LISREL. Results show that early spelling ability is primarily dependent on metaphonological abilities and only indirectly affected by linguistic and cognitive development. The causal model for reading obtaining empirical support was similar with the exception that it also included a direct causal path from cognitive development to reading. In Exp II, 38 1st graders were assigned to metaphonological training for 8 sessions or to general language activities (control). Ss were pre- and posttested on reading, spelling, sound blending, and segmentation. Results show that training had significant effects on metaphonological skills. Among Ss with the lowest metaphonological pretest performance, specific metaphonological training improved spelling performance more than did general language activities. Findings show that metaphonological abilities have a causal effect on reading and spelling, but no support was found for the reverse causal influence. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological recoding in reading for meaning by adults and children.

Phonological recoding in reading has been studied by requiring adults or children to judge whether printed sentences are correct or not. When some sentences are orthographically unacceptable but phonologically acceptable (e.g., The girl through the ball), both children and adults make abnormally many false positives with such sentences. It is unclear whether the phonological recoding that produces this effect is attributable to assembled (nonlexical) or addressed (lexical) phonology. Two types of phonologically acceptable but orthographically unacceptable sentences were devised: Those in which the crucial item ("through" in the above example) was an irregular word (so that its phonology could only be obtained lexically), and those in which the crucial item was a homophonic nonword (so that its phonology could only be obtained by assembled phonology). Both types of sentence produced significantly high false-positive rates for adult readers and children, indicating the use of assembled and addressed phonology during sentence reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological recoding and reading.

Examines contradictory research that attempted to determine whether the process of lexical access in silent reading is mediated by an internal phonological representation or only by visual representations. More recent evidence is discussed that suggests that factors such as difficulty of material, frequency of occurrence of items, Ss' fluency, and task demands—which are seldom manipulated in typical studies of word recognition—play important roles in determining the type of mediation used. It is noted that interest has shifted to a family of dual access models in which both phonological mediation and visual mediation are ordinarily used in parallel. Thus, data point to a dual access model in which high-frequency words enjoy high-speed access via a visually based representation, whereas low-frequency words are accessed using a slower, phonological recoding process. (113 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological codes and eye movements in reading.

A number of recent studies using eye movement data have yielded evidence suggesting that phonological codes are activated early in an eye fixation. However, experiments reported by M. Daneman and E. Reingold (1993; M. Daneman, E. M. Reingold, & M. Davidson, 1995) yielded data that led them to argue that phonological codes are primarily activated after lexical access has occurred. In this study, 3 experiments were carried out that were conceptually similar to those of M. Daneman and E. Reingold, and the resulting data supported the position that phonological codes are activated very early in an eye fixation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relation of phonological awareness to reading disability in children and adults.

Research has shown that for young children, success at learning to read is related to the extent to which they are aware of the phonological structure of spoken language. We determined that this relation is also evident in older children (third graders) and in adults who have had considerable reading instruction. Differences in phonological awareness, measured on three tasks, accounted for much of the variance between good readers and poor readers at both age levels. In contrast, no correspondence was found between reading ability and performance on a nonspeech task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Racial awareness and preference of White and Indian Canadian children.

Utilized the doll choices technique of K. B. Clark and M. K. Clark (1947) to study attitudes toward self and others and racial awareness and identification among 63 Canadian Indian students and 108 White children. The samples consisted of 64 younger (5- and 6-yr-old) and 107 older (7–9 yr old) Ss. Results show (a) that Indian Ss consistently drew figures smaller than did the corresponding White Ss, and (b) there was a significant main effect for Age in the analysis of mother's height. Younger Ss drew their mothers a mean of 3.26 inches taller than did older Ss. (French summary) (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological and semantic activation in reading kanji characters.

In a large proportion of the complex kanji characters resulting from the combination of two radicals, the left radical gives information about the meaning of the whole character, and the right one gives cues to pronunciation. In this study, this feature was exploited to investigate the relative contribution of semantic and phonological information in the process of recognizing a word written in kanji. In 2 experiments, a technique was used in which part of the target character (i.e.. the left radical, carrying the semantic information; the right, phonetic radical, or a fragment) was presented shortly (60 or 180 ms stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]) before the exposure of the whole character, which had to be named as fast as possible. Earlier exposure of the phonetic radical produced facilitation of the naming response, which was stronger at the 180-ms SOA than at the 60-ms SOA, whereas preexposure of the semantic radical had a weak facilitatory effect at the 60-ms SOA and some inhibition at the 180-ms SOA. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological acquisition of Turkish children: implications for phonological disorders

The study reported describes the phonological rules typical of normal development of Turkish-speaking children. The processes identified include: reduplication, syllable deletion, consonant deletion, assimilation, cluster reduction, liquid deviation, stopping, fronting, affrication, and backing. From a crosslinguistic perspective, the phonological process patterns exhibited coincide broadly with universal tendencies, although some language specific patterns were also evident. In contrast, a case study of a phonologically disordered child indicated that her system was characterised by the use of idiosyncratic phonological rules as well as delayed acquisition of some aspects of the system. This atypical pattern reflects reports of phonologically disordered children learning other languages. The findings indicate that the deficit underlying this type of phonological disorder leads to similar phonological behavior irrespective of the language being acquired.     

Phonological computation and missing vowels: Mapping lexical involvement in reading.

The role of assembled versus addressed phonology in reading was investigated by examining the size of the minimal phonological unit that is recovered in the reading process. Readers named words in unpointed Hebrew that had many or few missing vowels in their printed forms. Naming latencies were monotonically related to the number of missing vowels. Missing vowels had no effects on lexical decision latencies. These results support a strong phonological model of naming and suggest that even in deep orthographies, phonology is not retrieved from the mental lexicon as a holistic lexical unit but is initially computed by applying letter-to-phoneme computation rules. The partial phonological representation is shaped and completed through top–down activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological typicality does not influence fixation durations in normal reading.

Using a word-by-word self-paced reading paradigm, T. A. Farmer, M. H. Christiansen, and P. Monaghan (2006) reported faster reading times for words that are phonologically typical for their syntactic category (i.e., noun or verb) than for words that are phonologically atypical. This result has been taken to suggest that language users are sensitive to subtle relationships between sound and syntactic function and that they make rapid use of this information in comprehension. The present article reports attempts to replicate this result using both eyetracking during normal reading (Experiment 1) and word-by-word self-paced reading (Experiment 2). No hint of a phonological typicality effect emerged on any reading-time measure in Experiment 1, nor did Experiment 2 replicate Farmer et al.’s finding from self-paced reading. Indeed, the differences between condition means were not consistently in the predicted direction, as phonologically atypical verbs were read more quickly than phonologically typical verbs, on most measures. Implications for research on visual word recognition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A comment on "Phonological recoding and reading."

Discusses 2 points raised in an article by L. X. McCusker et al (see record 1981-11846-001) on the role of phonological recoding in reading: (1) McCusker et al equated phonological mediation with the application of spelling–sound correspondence rules. The present study argues that such an assumption is not valid. (2) McCusker et al concluded that phonologically mediated semantic access decreases with reading skill. The present study argues that current data do not support this view. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessing students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies.

This article describes the development and validation of a new self-report instrument, the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory, which is designed to assess adolescent and adult readers' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading academic or school-related materials. There were 3 strategy subscales or factors: Global Reading Strategies, Problem-Solving Strategies, and Support Reading Strategies. The reliability and factorial validity of the scale were demonstrated. After a brief review of the literature, the development and validation of the instrument are described, and its psychometric properties are discussed. In addition, directions for administering and scoring the instrument are provided, and suggestions for interpreting the results obtained are offered. Finally, the scales' implications for reading research and instruction are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological working memory in very young children.

This study was designed to establish whether phonological working memory skills could be assessed in children below 4 yrs of age. A group of 2- and 3-yr-old children were tested on 3 phonological memory measures (digit span, nonword repetition, and word repetition) and were also given tasks that tapped other cognitive skills. Scores on the 3 phonological memory tasks were closely related. In addition, repetition performance was linked with both vocabulary knowledge and articulation rate. Results indicate that phonological memory skills can be reliably assessed in very young children by using conventional serial span and repetition procedures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological short-term memory and new word learning in children.

Sixty-five 5-year old children participated in 4 experimental tasks of word learning that varied systematically in the amounts of phonological and nonphonological learning required. Measures of the children's performances on 2 measures of phonological memory (digit span and nonword repetition), vocabulary knowledge, and nonverbal ability were also obtained. Learning of the sound structures of new words was significantly, and to some degree independently, associated with aspects of both phonological memory skill and vocabulary knowledge. Learning of pairs of familiar words was linked with current vocabulary knowledge, although not with phonological memory scores. The findings suggest that both existing lexical knowledge and phonological short-term memory play significant roles in the long-term learning of the sounds of new words. The study also provides evidence of both shared and distinct processes contributing to nonword repetition and digit span tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Defining phonological awareness and its relationship to early reading.

Phonological awareness (PA) has been operationally defined by many different tasks, and task comparisons have been confounded by differing levels of linguistic complexity among items. A sample of 113 kindergartners and first graders completed PA tasks designed to separate task difficulty from linguistic complexity. These measures were, in turn, compared with measures of early literacy. Results indicated that the measures loaded on a single factor and that PA measured by differences in linguistic complexity, rather than by task differences, seemed to be more closely related to the factor. A logical analysis suggested that alphabet knowledge is necessary for children to separate onsets from rimes and that awareness of onsets and rimes is necessary both for word reading and for more complex levels of phonemic analysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological codes are used in integrating information across saccades in word identification and reading.

A major issue in reading is the extent to which phonological information is used in visual word perception. The present experiments demonstrated that phonological information acquired on 1 fixation from a word in the parafovea is used to help identify that word when it is later fixated. A homophone of a target word, when presented as a preview in the parafovea, facilitated processing in the target word seen on the next fixation more than a preview of a word matched with the homophone in visual similarity to the target word. This facilitation was observed both in the time to name an isolated target word and in the fixation time on the target word while silently reading a sentence; the preview was virtually never consciously identified in either task. Because the visual similarity of the preview to the target also plays a part in the facilitative effect on the preview, however, codes other than phonological codes are preserved across saccades. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonetic awareness: Knowledge of orthography–phonology relationships in the character acquisition of Chinese children.

This study investigated the development of phonetic awareness, meaning insight into the structure and function of the component of Chinese characters that gives a clue to pronunciation. Participants were 113 Chinese 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders enrolled in a working-class Beijing, China elementary school. The children's task was to represent the pronunciation of 60 semantic phonetic compound characters. As anticipated, both character familiarity and character regularity strongly influenced performance. Children as young as 2nd graders are better able to represent the pronunciation of regular characters than irregular characters or characters with bound phonetics. Phonetic awareness continues to develop over the elementary school years, as is shown by the increasing influence of phonetic regularity on the performance of children in higher grades and the increasing percentage of phonetic-related errors among older children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)