The Nature of Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

THE NATURE OF [mh1]PHONOLOGICAL AND PHONEMIC AWARENESS

IN LITERATE ADULTS

Susan Beth Lorenson

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

2 0 0 4

(final examining committee approval form to go here)

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.

SIGNED: ______

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

DEDICATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.0Introduction

1.1Thesis...... p.

1.2Phonemic awareness: definition and issues

1.3.Phonemic awareness and adults

1.3.1Theory 1: The “no-relationship” relationship

1.3.2.Theory 2: Phonemic awareness skills play a negligible role in reading

1.3.3.Theory 3: Phonemic awareness plays a crucial role in adult reading

1.4.Thesis and motivation

1.4.1.Overview of experiments

1.4.2.Theoretical considerations

1.4.3.Pragmatic considerations

1.5.Organizational structure of the dissertation

2.0Previous Research on Phonemic Awareness

2.1Phonemic awareness research on beginning readers

2.1.1.Overview

2.1.2.Reading readiness

2.1.3.The predictive power of phonemic awareness

2.1.4.The value of phonemic awareness training

2.1.5.Levels of phonemic awareness

2.1.6. Summary & implications

2.2.Phonemic awareness research on special populations

2.2.1.Overview

2.2.2.Phonemic awareness in illiterates

2.2.3.Phonemic awareness in literates with nonalphabetic orthographies

2.2.4.Phonemic awareness in dyslexics

2.2.5.Phonemic awareness in Children with Down Syndrome

2.2.6.Summary & implications

2.3.Phonemic awareness and secondary language activities

2.4.Special considerations: the question of orthographic interference

2.4.1. The role of orthography in phonological access

2.4.2.Pilot: Delete Segment Task

2.5.Summary

3.0.The Experiments

3.1.Overview

3.2.Deletion Experiments

3.2.1.Experiment One: Delete Segment Task

3.2.2.Experiment Two: Delete Syllable Task

3.2.2.Comparison of Experiments One and Two

3.3.Substitution Experiments

3.3.1.Experiment Three: Substitute Segment Task

3.3.2.Experiment Four: Substitute Syllable Task

3.3.2.Comparison of Experiments Three and Four

3.4.Reversal Experiments

3.4.1.Experiment Five: Reverse Segment Task

3.4.2.Experiment Six: Reverse Syllable Task

3.4.3.Comparison of Experiments Five and Six

3.5.Summary of Experiments

4.0.Conclusion

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LIST OF TABLES

ABSTRACT

1.0Introduction[mh2]

1.1Thesis

This dissertation is an examination of phonemic awareness in literate adults. Phonemic awareness, the ability to identify and manipulate the sound segments in a word, has long been associated with reading ability in children. Myriad studies on children’s phonemic awareness in the last two decades have consistently shown that good readers possess a high level of phonemic awareness, whereas poor readers do not. As Mann puts it, "phoneme awareness bears both a logical and a proven relationship to early reading success. Its presence is a hallmark of good readers, its deficiency one of the more consistent characteristics of poor readers" (Mann, 1991, p. 260).

Little is known about the relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability in literate adults, however, since no studies have previously been conducted on the subject. This dissertation reports the results of a study [mh3]on phonemic awareness in adults, which was modeled on past phonemic awareness studies with children. The results of the study indicate that adults, like children, exhibit differing degrees of phonemic awareness, and that these levels of phonemic awareness are associated with reading ability. The implications of these findings, both practical and theoretical, are discussed.

An introduction to phonemic awareness is given below, followed by a section on the possible relationships between phonemic awareness and reading ability in adults, an expanded thesis statement with an outline of the experiments to be conducted and the motivations for the study, and an overview of the organizational structure of the dissertation.

1.2Phonemic awareness: definition and issues

In this section, phonemic awareness is defined, and some of the most salient issues in previous phonemic awareness research are reviewed.

Phonemic awareness (which shall alternately be referred to in this dissertation by the abbreviation “PA”) is defined by Stanovich as “the ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable[mh4]" (Stanovich, 1993, p. 283). That is, phonemic awareness is both the knowledge that the word cat consists of three distinct phonemes ([k..æ...t] and not just one inseparable syllable, [kæt]), and the ability to isolate those phonemes on command (such as stripping the first phoneme off cat and producing [æt]).

The term "phonemic awareness" has acquired quite a specific meaning in the field of reading education, referring to various levels of achievement on certain experimental tasks that are used as diagnostics of reading ability. For the last two decades, the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability has been poked, prodded and otherwise examined by researchers in the fields of Linguistics, Psychology, and Education.

In the last few years, however, phonemic awareness has become something of a hot topic, and the term “phonemic awareness” has migrated from the jargon of Linguistics and Educational Psychology into the mass media. It has even become a buzz phrase, a selling point for a number of products and services. Consider the excerpts on the following page, which illustrate the marketability of phonemic awareness:

New York Times article on the National Institute of Child Health

and Human Development at the NIH, October 27, 1996

Auditory Discrimination in Depth. We offer three to five day Lindamood A.D.D. workshops which develop phonemic awareness - the ability to judge sounds within words. This awareness underlies decoding and spelling . The techniques begin orally with how speech sounds are articulated, and extend into multi-syllable and contextual spelling and reading. Additional training is available and highly recommended: 1 day on the LAC Test; 3 day practicum workshop with students.

Lindamood-Bell web page

Windows to Reading is a series of programs for students and teachers which will focus on early reading and writing instruction for grades K-3. Orientation Telecast on September 30, 1996. [Programs include:]

· Phonemic Awareness

· Spelling and Phonics Skill Development....

Windows to Reading promotion on the Web

Reading Who? Reading You! can help children achieve these important reading objectives:

· Learn letter-sound correspondence

· Develop phonemic awareness...

Phonemic Awareness #61105-3: Phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors of later success in reading. This one day training will enable early childhood educators to become familiar with resources and strategies to facilitate phonemic awareness in young children.

UT 1996 continuing education catalog for early childhood educators

Sesame Street, now in its 27th season, continues its literacy campaign, Let’s Read and Write! The program places additional emphasis on beginning reading skills for preschool children and delves into stories, phonemic awareness, writing sight words, and more.

May ‘96 program description for Sesame Street

How do you know if your child is learning what he must to succeed in school? Hirsch and Holdren say a good kindergarten program will...... develop children’s phonemic awareness, which helps them understand that the sounds in a word can be thought of as a string of smaller, individual sounds.

Book review by Lisa Faye Kaplan of the Gannett News Service

of What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know

In order to develop an understanding of the alphabetic principle, they must become familiar with letter forms and with the idea that spoken words have identifiable sounds in them -- referred to as the concept of phonemic awareness.

Houghton Mifflin web site, promoting a

“a rich literacy environment filled with books” in the classroom

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is designed to help children build pre-reading skills, said Jan Davidson, president and founder of Davidson & Associates. It’s irresistible music, rhythms, and rhymes build phonemic awareness.

Press release from Davidson & Associates about their new CD-ROM

Web pages, CD-ROMs, software, seminars: phonemic awareness has been embraced by the mainstream educational community, clearly not just for journal articles anymore. What explains this phenomenon?

The phonemic awareness hype is due to one simple fact: phonemic awareness skills have been proven to have an incontestable, unmistakable connection to reading ability in children.

Previous research on the phonemic awareness/reading ability connection will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, but a brief overview is presented here.

The majority of work on phonemic awareness has concentrated on a number of claims:

Children must be "phonemically aware” before they are able to read an alphabetic orthography. (Adams, 1990; Ball & Blachman, 1993). The thrust of this claim is that before children are able to decipher a writing system which is based on sound-symbol correspondences, they must be able to break a word down into its individual sounds (phonemes), so that they are able to learn the relationship between these sounds and the letters (graphemes) to which they correspond.

Phonemic awareness tasks can be used to predict a child's later success or failure in reading. (Stanovich, 1993). This claim posits that a child’s ability to manipulate (substitute, delete, etc.) the phonemes in a word predicts his/her future reading ability. A child who knows that “ice” is “nice” without the first sound will be a better reader than a child who does not understand this relationship.

Phonemic awareness training can prove useful in preparing a child for reading instruction. (Lundberg et. al., 1988; Cunningham, 1990; Hatcher, Hume & Ellis, 1994; Bradley & Bryant, 1983). This claim’s proponents see a causal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability, and believe that children who are trained in tasks that develop phonemic awareness skills will be better readers than children who do not receive such training.

Reading facilitates phonemic awareness ability. (Tornéus, 1984). This claim is the reverse of claim (1) above, and states that phonemic awareness is not as much a prerequisite of reading or a predictor of reading ability as much as it is a fall-out from reading; those who know how to read an alphabetic orthography can perform phonemic awareness tasks because the task of reading has developed PA skill.

Needless to say, not all researchers on phonemic awareness subscribe to the same theory of the connection between PA and reading ability. Nevertheless, those who have worked on elucidating the claims above agree that there is a strongcorrelation between reading ability and phonemic awareness. Ball & Blachman (1991) summarize the findings well:

To read or spell phonetically regular words, a child must be aware that words can be broken into phonemes and that each phoneme corresponds to a symbol (or symbols) in our orthography (Ball and Blachman, 1991, p. 63).

That is, reading in an alphabetic system is a process that involves breaking the "alphabetic code." This decoding includes the application of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules (alternately called graphophonics rules or simply phonics rules), rules which tell the child that in the word cat, the grapheme “c” corresponds to [k], the grapheme “a” to [æ], etc.

Although reading involves the application of phonics rules and children must be phonemically aware to read, it is necessary to understand the important distinction between phonemic awareness and mere phonics knowledge. The child who is phonemically aware possesses more than an extensive battery of “x stands for y” rules. Those [phonics] rules alone are useless unless the child is able to identify and manipulate the phonemes of a word. The child who has learned his or her phonics rules knows that “‘c’ stands for [k], ‘a’ stands for [æ], and ‘t’ stands for [t].” The child who is phonemically aware knows that the isolated phonemes which these rules produce ([k], [æ], and [t]) yield a word in combination, [kæt], which was once thought of as a single, impenetrable unit. The child who is phonemically aware is able to effectively use phonics rules to create and dismantle words.

The phonemic awareness/reading connection is unquestionably strong. The body of research reviewed in the next chapter has shown that phonemic awareness is more often a characteristic of good readers than any other measure, including IQ, analytic ability, or even other linguistic ability (where “linguistic ability” is any language-based skill, including, but not limited to, phonics knowledge). This last point is particularly striking. Since phonemic awareness is more strongly associated with reading skill than mere phonics knowledge, some have suggested that phonemic awareness should be taught, instead of (or in addition to) teaching phonics. Phonemic awareness training is emerging as a way to bridge the gap between the often disparate approaches to reading of phonics instruction and whole language instruction, in which readers are encouraged to read without relying on explicitly taught rules. It is, perhaps, grounds for a treaty in what have been dubbed the “reading wars.”

Consider the table below, which illustrates [mh5]the various qualities of traditional phonics instruction, 70s-era “whole language” instruction, and phonemic awareness training:

Phonics Instruction / Phonemic Awareness Training / Whole Language Instruction
Graphophonic rules taught explicitly
e.g., ‘c’ stands for [k] / 
Graphophonic rules learned without explicit instruction
e.g., students are given texts with juxtaposed rhyming words like “cat” and “hat” and eventually figure out that the ‘c’/’h’ difference corresponds to the [k]/[h] difference /  / 
Explicit training in identifying the components of a word (phonemes) e.g., students are taught to “sound out” and “break down” words /  / 

Educators in the phonics camp believe that the road to reading is paved with explicit instruction in sound/symbol correspondence rules (grapheme x stands for phoneme y). Phonics teachers worry that the whole language approach, with its lack of explicit instruction, leaves many children in the dark. They claim that though whole language instruction may work for normal children who have been exposed to books from an early age and who have already learned to make some connections between the spoken and printed word, it fails children who do have not have this background or who have another obstacle (e.g., dyslexia) to making sound/symbol connections on their own. The belief is that children will best learn to read when they are given the proper tools, that is, the set of rules which draws connections between the 26 letters of the alphabet and the sounds of English.

Whole language adherents believe that instruction in phonics is confusing, because there are so many exceptions to the explicitly taught rules (one can’t help thinking of the George Bernard Shaw observation that fish could be spelled ghoti, with the gh from laugh, the o from women, and the ti from caption). They believe that children, given enough time and exposure to language, will figure out the rules on their own in a natural way. For instance, if a child is repeatedly exposed to Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, in which the rhyming words “cat” and “hat” are juxtaposed, he or she will eventually surmise that the letters c and h are responsible for the difference in sound between the words. Sound/symbol correspondences are not taught, but through the development of “personal phonics rules...[readers] come to understand the alphabetic system and will invent ways of relating their own speech to print" (Goodman, p. 108). This “exposure to print” method of learning allows for the learning of more complicated words. So, when a reader sees the words face and fake juxtaposed, he or she will use context to figure out the difference between the two words, and will subsequently create a rule to account for the difference (k always stands for [k], but c only sometimes does). In theory, the phonics student would either have to learn a sophisticated rule to tackle face (c stands for [s] between two vowels), or would be completely thrown off by the c=[k] rule.

Phonemic awareness training shares features with both phonics and whole language approaches: it is a method of explicit, linguistic instruction, and yet it is not based on the teaching of inconsistent phonics rules. In phonemic awareness training, children are taught to play games that foster their phonemic awareness skills. For example, a child might be given a block for every phoneme in a word (e.g., three blocks for wake, four blocks for cart). When the first block in a linear series is removed, the child would be expected to pronounce the remaining word without the first phoneme (ache or art), if the last block is removed, without the final phoneme (way or car). Note that the manipulations in this exercise do not rely upon graphophonic rules, and in fact may “violate” them (wake has four graphemes but three phonemes). Because PA training is not dependent upon phonics rules, training exercises may also be performed with preliterate children who have not yet been exposed to phonics rules.

Thus, phonemic awareness training, phonics teaching and whole language instruction are all quite different approaches to the teaching of reading. With phonemic awareness training as a novel middle ground, it’s no wonder that educators, parents and software publishers have begun to jump on the bandwagon.

Despite the extensive research on and recent interest in phonemic awareness, experiments on the subject have been limited with regard to subject pool. Experiments aimed at understanding the connection between phonemic awareness and reading ability have been conducted primarily with children (as in the studies cited above) and special populations, such as illiterates (Morais et. al.., 1986; Morais et. al., 1991; Koopmans, 1987), literates with non-alphabetic orthographies (Read, 1986; Mann, 1986; Mann, 1991; Tzeng and Chang [in press]), dyslexics (Savin, 1972; Lecocq, 1986; Fox and Routh, 1983; Morais, 1983), and children with Down Syndrome (Cossu & Marshall, 1993). There is little, if any, research on literate adults.[1][mh6]