On teaching articulatory phonetics via an orthography

In six experiments, the ability of university students to obtain generalizable knowledge about subphonemic distinctive features through learning to read an orthography based on these features was explored. In the reference experiment, it was found that learning four grapheme-phoneme pairs did not generate “feature awareness,” as tested by generalization to new instances of the orthography. In a second experiment, it was demonstrated that this failure was not due to inherent limitations in the testing technique, and a third experiment indicated that a considerable increase in exposure to the orthography and its principles did not help. In the last three experiments, instruction in articulatory phonetics was given prior to subjects’ learning the orthography, but reliable generalization to new instances emerged only when the instruction was based directly on the phonemes used in acquisition. Also, successful generalization was found to go hand in hand with verbalizable awareness of phonetic structure. A high level of performance was achieved only when the orthography/speech isomorphism was pointed out clearly. The results indicate that usable knowledge about an implicitly known property of speech is relatively resistant to instruction via an orthography, and that direct instruction in the property is necessary. An analogy is drawn with the acquisition of reading by nonreaders, with the results of the study lending weight to the use of curricula that emphasize phonemic awareness.