Effect of intensive training on auditory processing and reading skills

This study assessed the ability of seven children to accurately judge relative durations of auditory and visual stimuli before and after participation in a language remediation program. The goal of the intervention program is to improve the children's ability to detect and identify rapidly changing auditory stimuli, and thereby improve their language-related skills. Children showed improved accuracy on a test of auditory duration judgement following the intervention without analogous improvements in the visual domain, supporting the assertion that intensive training with modified speech improves auditory temporal discrimination. However, these improvements did not generalize to reading skills, as assessed by standard measures of phonological awareness and non-word reading.     

Effects of orthographic transparency on reading and phoneme awareness in children learning to read in Wales

The relationship between the development of reading skills and the consistency of the orthography (writing system) is investigated in a study that examines reading acquisition in children living in Wales. Performance of children learning to read Welsh (a transparent alphabetic orthography) on tests of reading and phoneme detection was compared with the performance of children learning to read English (an opaque alphabetic orthography). The children were tested during their second year of formal reading instruction at school when they were aged between 5 and 6 years, and again one year later. The children learning to read in Welsh performed significantly better at reading both real words and nonwords than children learning to read in English. The English readers made fewer phonologically based reading errors. The Welsh readers also performed better on a phoneme awareness task. These findings support the claim that children learn to read more quickly in a transparent orthography, and provide further evidence that the consistency of the orthography influences the initial adoption of different strategies for word recognition.     

Influence of oral language and phonological awareness on children's bilingual reading

The purpose of this study was to assess the roles of oral language and phonological awareness on reading performance in grade 3 bilingual students. Several hierarchical models assessed the best predictors of third grade English and Spanish word attack, word identification and reading comprehension. Predictor variables were measures of phonological awareness, expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, and syntax in both English and Spanish. The results showed that within language contributions of expressive vocabulary and syntax best predicted literacy when compared to phonological awareness measures.     

The relationship between auditory temporal processing,phonemic awareness,and reading disability

Recent research suggests an auditory temporal deficit as a possible contributing factor to poor phonemic awareness skills. This study investigated the relationship between auditory temporal processing of nonspeech sounds and phonological awareness ability in children with a reading disability, aged 8-12 years, using Tallal's tone-order judgement task. Normal performance on the tone-order task was established for 36 normal readers. Forty-two children with developmental reading disability were then subdivided by their performance on the tone-order task. Average and poor tone-order subgroups were then compared on their ability to process speech sounds and visual symbols, and on phonological awareness and reading. The presence of a tone-order deficit did not relate to performance on the order processing of speech sounds, to poorer phonological awareness or to more severe reading difficulties. In particular, there was no evidence of a group by interstimulus interval interaction, as previously described in the literature, and thus little support for a general auditory temporal processing difficulty as an underlying problem in poor readers. In this study, deficient order judgement on a nonverbal auditory temporal order task (tone task) did not underlie phonological awareness or reading difficulties.     

Paired-associate learning, phoneme awareness, and learning to read

We report two studies examining the relations among three paired-associate learning (PAL) tasks (visual-visual, verbal-verbal, and visual-verbal), phoneme deletion, and single-word and nonword reading ability. Correlations between the PAL tasks and reading were strongest for the visual-verbal task. Path analyses showed that both phoneme deletion and visual-verbal PAL were unique predictors of a composite measure of single-word reading and of irregular word reading. However, for nonword reading, phoneme deletion was the only unique predictor (and visual-verbal PAL was not a significant predictor). These results are consistent with the view that learning visual (orthography) to phonological mappings is an important skill for developing word recognition skills in reading and that individual differences in this ability can be tapped experimentally by a PAL task.     

It doesn't matter whether onset and rime predicts reading better than phoneme awareness does or vice versa

Hulme et al. argue against our hypothesis that there are two routes from onset and rime awareness to reading: an indirect route whereby onset-rime awareness feeds into the development of phoneme awareness which in turn affects children's reading, and a direct route by which onset-rime awareness makes an independent contribution to children's reading. The evidence that Hulme et al. present against this hypothesis is not convincing, partly because our hypothesis actually predicts most of their results and partly because of weaknesses in the design of Hulme et al.'s study and in the unusual procedures that they employed.     

Age and schooling effects on early literacy and phoneme awareness

Previous research on age and schooling effects is largely restricted to studies of children who begin formal schooling at 6 years of age, and the measures of phoneme awareness used have typically lacked sensitivity for beginning readers. Our study addresses these issues by testing 4 to 6 year-olds (first 2 years of formal schooling in the United Kingdom) on a sensitive dynamic measure of phoneme awareness and tests of early literacy. There were significant effects of both age and schooling on the dynamic measure of phoneme awareness, word reading, spelling, and letter name knowledge, but there were no significant Age × Time interactions. This indicates that older children within this age group generally outperform their younger classmates (although they do not make faster progress) and that this advantage is developed prior to the start of school.     

Effect of phonetics training on lingual awareness

This investigation assessed the effect of phonetics training on lingual awareness in normal adult speakers of English. The study also compared Trained subjects' scores from a study in 2000 by Lohman and Fucci to subjects' posttraining scores in this investigation. Subjects were 36 students (M age=19.7, SD=.7) enrolled in an undergraduate phonetics class. All passed a speech and hearing screening. A pretest-posttest design was used. Subjects received approximately 40 hours of phonetics training over a 10-wk. period. The lingual awareness test required subjects imitate seven syllables and respond to four multiple-choice questions about each syllable. Subjects were aided by a line drawing of the oral cavity. A significant improvement in lingual awareness was found following training. However, scores for only two phonemes (sh and k) improved significantly. No significant difference was found between posttest scores and scores from Lohman and Fucci's Trained group.     

Auditory awareness negativity is an electrophysiological correlate of awareness in an auditory threshold task

One theory of visual awareness proposes that electrophysiological activity related to awareness occurs in primary visual areas approximately 200 ms after stimulus onset (visual awareness negativity: VAN) and in fronto-parietal areas about 300 ms after stimulus onset (late positivity: LP). Although similar processes might be involved in auditory awareness, only sparse evidence exists for this idea. In the present study, we recorded electrophysiological activity while subjects listened to tones that were presented at their own awareness threshold. The difference in electrophysiological activity elicited by tones that subjects reported being aware of versus unaware of showed an early negativity about 200 ms and a late positivity about 300 ms after stimulus onset. These results closely match those found in vision and provide convincing evidence for an early negativity (auditory awareness negativity: AAN), as well as an LP. These findings suggest that theories of visual awareness are also applicable to auditory awareness.     

Dialogic reading and morphology training in Chinese children: effects on language and literacy

This study investigates the effects of parent-child shared book reading and metalinguistic training on the language and literacy skills of 148 kindergartners in Hong Kong. Children were pretested on Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, morphological awareness, and reading interest and then assigned randomly to 1 of 4 conditions: the dialogic reading with morphology training (DR + MT), dialogic reading (DR), typical reading, or control condition. After a 12-week intervention period, the DR intervention yielded greater gains in vocabulary, and the DR + MT intervention yielded greater improvement in character recognition and morphological awareness. Both interventions enhanced children's reading interest. Results confirm that different home literacy approaches influence children's oral and written language skills differently: Shared book reading promotes language development, whereas parents' explicit metalinguistic training within a shared book reading context better prepares children for learning to read.     

Reflections on onset-rime and phoneme sensitivity as predictors of beginning word reading

Rival claims have been made concerning the importance of rime sensitivity as a predictor of early word reading skill. Hulme et al. (2002) suggested that phoneme sensitivity is more strongly predictive of word reading ability than is onset-rime sensitivity. An examination of two independent data sets suggests that, although onset-rime sensitivity typically predicts school entrants' later word reading skill, phoneme sensitivity does predict more variation. However, multiple regression analyses do not reveal the level of phonological sensitivity that children need in order to understand alphabetic reading instruction. This issue is crucial to the detection of children at risk for reading failure and for the design of intervention programs for these children. A different analytic strategy is described for addressing this issue.     

Quality of phonological representations, verbal learning, and phoneme awareness in dyslexic and normal readers

This study of dyslexia was concerned with the quality of phonological representations of lexical items. It extended the studies of verbal learning in dyslexia from learning new vocabulary items (pseudo-names) to the learning of more well-specified variants of known words. The participants were 19 dyslexic adolescents in grades 4 to 6 and 19 younger normal readers in grade 2 matched on single word decoding. The dyslexics were significantly outperformed by the reading-age controls in non-word reading and in phoneme awareness. The dyslexics also took longer time to learn to associate a set of pseudo-names with pictures of persons although the dyslexics learned to associate familiar names with pictures as quickly as the controls did. The acquisition of new phonological representations of words was studied in an imitation task with maximally distinct pronunciations of long, familiar words. The dyslexics gained less than the controls in this task. They also gained less on one measure taken from a phoneme substitution task with the same words as in the distinctness task. The results are interpreted in the light of the hypothesis that poorly specified phonological representations may be an underlying problem in dyslexia.     

Body-cathexis and self-cathexis in an interactional, awareness training class.

This study examined the effects of a psychology of adjustment class on body-acceptance and self-acceptance. An introductory psychology class served as a control group. Subjects were pre- and posttested with the Body-cathexis and Self-cathexis scales. Two by two analyses of covariance indicated that the adjustment group showed a larger gain on both scales than the control. Sex interacted with group significantly on the Body-cathexis scale only. Means indicated that the main effect of groups on the Body-cathexis scale may be attributed to the larger gains by females in the adjustment class.     

Musical competence and phoneme perception in a foreign language

We investigated whether musical competence was associated with the perception of foreign-language phonemes. The sample comprised adult native-speakers of English who varied in music training. The measures included tests of general cognitive abilities, melody and rhythm perception, and the perception of consonantal contrasts that were phonemic in Zulu but not in English. Music training was associated positively with performance on the tests of melody and rhythm perception, but not with performance on the phoneme-perception task. In other words, we found no evidence for transfer of music training to foreign-language speech perception. Rhythm perception was not associated with the perception of Zulu clicks, but such an association was evident when the phonemes sounded more similar to English consonants. Moreover, it persisted after controlling for general cognitive abilities and music training. By contrast, there was no association between melody perception and phoneme perception. The findings are consistent with proposals that music- and speech-perception rely on similar mechanisms of auditory temporal processing, and that this overlap is independent of general cognitive functioning. They provide no support, however, for the idea that music training improves speech perception.     

Phonetic awareness and reading acquisition

Summary Three issues are dealt with: the relationship between phonetic awareness and reading acquisition, the nature of the cognitive capacities that make phonetic awareness possible, and the potential influence of phonetic awareness on language perception and comprehension. Data on the relationships between phonetic awareness and reading acquisition support an interactive view. For most people, learning to read in the alphabetic system stimulates phonetic awareness. On the other hand, phonetic awareness is a critical factor for success in reading acquisition. Indications about the nature of the cognitive capacities that underlie phonetic awareness may be obtained by inspecting its development. Two capacities at least seem to be required: the capacity to ignore meaning and focus on the sound properties of speech and the capacity of segmentation.Lack of phonetic awareness does not imply that phonetic processing does not take place during speech perception. Recent data suggest that speech perception includes a stage of extraction of phonetic features regardless of whether or not the subject is able to segment speech into phones explicitly. However, phonetic awareness may influence perceptual strategies and the relative weight of meaning expectancies in identification.Our work received support from the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche fondamentale collective (F.R.F.C.) under contracts No. 2.4505.76 and 2.4505.80 as well as from the Belgian Ministère de la Politique et de la Programmation scientifiques (Action de Recherche concertée Processus cognitifs dans la lecture)     

Testing the concurrent and predictive relations among articulation accuracy, speech perception, and phoneme awareness

The relations among articulation accuracy, speech perception, and phoneme awareness were examined in a sample of 97 typically developing children ages 48 to 66 months. Of these 97 children, 46 were assessed twice at ages 4 and 5 years. Children completed two tasks for each of the three skills, assessing these abilities for the target phoneme /r/ and the control phoneme /m/ in the word-initial position. Concurrent analyses revealed that phoneme-specific relations existed among articulation, awareness, and perception. Articulation accuracy of /r/ predicted speech perception and phoneme awareness for /r/ after controlling for age, vocabulary, letter-word knowledge, and speech perception or phoneme awareness for the control phoneme /m/. The longitudinal analyses confirmed the pattern of relations. The findings are consistent with a model whereby children's articulation accuracy affects preexisting differences in phonological representations and, consequently, affects how children perceive, discriminate, and manipulate speech sounds.     

Effects of phonological awareness and morphological awareness on blind students' reading comprehension

The exploration of blind students' reading skills is needed not only for further understanding their reading development but also for providing targeted suggestions for practical education. This study aims to examine the relations among phonological awareness (PA), homograph awareness (HA), compounding awareness (CA) and reading comprehension (RC), and explore the mediating effect of listening comprehension (LC) in Chinese blind students from elementary school. A total of 148 blind and 302 sighted elementary school students completed assessments of PA, HA, CA, LC and RC. The results found that PA, HA and CA were important variables that predicted Chinese blind and sighted students' RC not only directly but also indirectly through LC, which varied across different grades. The findings suggest that there were many similarities that exist in the influencing mechanism of RC between Chinese blind and sighted students.     

Word age-of-acquisition,reading latencies and auditory recognition

Current Psychology - This paper reports two experiments concerning the effects of word age-of-acquisition on word naming speed and auditory recognition of words presented at a low volume. The first...     

Perception and awareness in phonological processing: the case of the phoneme

The necessity of a “levels-of-processing” approach in the study of mental representations is illustrated by the work on the psychological reality of the phoneme. On the basis of both experimental studies of human behavior and functional imaging data, it is argued that there are unconscious representations of phonemes in addition to conscious ones. These two sets of mental representations are functionally distinct: the former intervene in speech perception and (presumably) production; the latter are developed in the context of learning alphabetic literacy for both reading and writing purposes. Moreover, among phonological units and properties, phonemes may be the only ones to present a neural dissociation at the macro-anatomic level. Finally, it is argued that even if the representations used in speech perception and those used in assembling and in conscious operations are distinct, they may entertain dependency relations.