Phonemic Processes in Children's Listening and Reading Comprehension

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the role of phonemic activation in children's listening and reading comprehension. Phonemically confusing stories were presented in a listening comprehension task to kindergarten and second-grade children and in a reading comprehension task to second-grade children only. Rhymes induced phonemic confusion more consistently than did alliteratives in both the listening and reading tasks at both grade levels, suggesting that rhyme is inherently more confusing than alliteration, and furthermore, that phonemic information is activated in similar ways when children listen and when they read silently. Children's reading skill was also assessed to examine a possible relationship between reading skill and phonemic sensitivity, but no significant interactions between children's reading skill and their sensitivity to phonemic confusion were found in the reading task. In the listening task, all groups showed phonemic confusion in gist recall scores, but prereaders were less likely than readers to exhibit susceptibility to phonemic confusion in verbatim recall scores.