An alternative approach to the measurement of phoneme discrimination and segmentation in young children

This study investigated the use of novel discrimination and segmentation procedures for evaluating the phonemic awareness of young children. Digitally-recorded speech stimuli were presented to a sample of 40 children ranging in age from 50 to 83 months. The participant sample was divided into a younger and an older group. The results of an analysis of variance indicated that the difference between the younger and older groups of children was significant; but, the difference between the discrimination and segmentation tasks was not. Considerable variation was observed among participants, with general tendencies for the older children to perform better than the younger children and for children performing well on one task to perform well on the other and vice versa. The educational implications of the findings from this study are discussed with reference to assessment procedures designed to identify children likely to be at risk for delays in the development of early literacy skills.
Proficient reading depends upon efficient, effortless, and automatic word recognition. The foundation for word recognition and reading development in general is based on knowledge of orthographic symbols (letters of the [...]