Segmentation of the Spoken Word and Reading Acquisition

A paper presented as part of the Symposium on Language and Perceptual Development in the Acquisition of Reading at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Philadelphia, March 1973. That some children readily acquire the capacity to speak and listen to language, but do not learn to read it poses certain questions regarding the skills required in reading that are not required in speaking or listening, and the related possible sources of difficulty in the early stages of English reading acquisition. Four, five, and six year old preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders were divided into two experimental groups; the first was assigned to a phoneme segmentation task and the second to syllable segmentation. Both groups were required to tap the number (one to three) of segments (phonemes vs. syllables) in the spoken stimulus items. The results indicate that syllable segmentation is more readily accomplished than is phoneme segmentation for all ages; ability to perform phoneme segmentation did not appear at all until age five, and then only in 17% of the test population, while almost 50% was able to segment test items syllabically at that age. The degree to which the measured increases in phoneme segmentation with age represent maturational changes cannot be judged nor can the extent to which they may reflect effects of reading instruction. The results do suggest, however, that lack of awareness of phoneme segmentation may well be a serious obstacle to reading acquisition. Error patterns in the perception of initial vs. final consonants vs. vowels are discussed in connection with segmentation problems, and orthographic complexity factors are examined. Early teaching methods which emphasize intensive instruction of the phonemic structure of the word before the introduction of letter forms are recommended. Such instruction may prevent future reading acquisition difficulties and identify existent problems at their early stage. S. Delehanty