What do children do in the rime-analogy task? An examination of the skills and strategies used by early readers

Some indicators of (un)successful reading

In the paper we set the aim to determine whether phonological awareness and short-term verbal memory are indicators of a subsequent reading acquisition. The sample consisted of 194 first graders from two primary schools in Belgrade. The results of our research showed that the most significant indicator of the subsequent (un)successful reading was phonological awareness. The short-term verbal memory is, to a lesser extent, an indicator of the subsequent reading acquisition defined by the time needed for reading the text and by the text comprehension. Our findings offer basis for proposing that the phonological awareness assessment should be implemented into the regular procedure of assessing child's readiness for school. In this way children in need for preventive stimulation within the inclusive programme in primary schools could be identified.

Influence of consonantal context on the reading of vowels: Evidence from children

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset. We presented the nonwords used by Treiman and colleagues in their 2003 study to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school students to determine when these context influences emerge. According to some theories of reading development, early decoding is characterized by context-free links from graphemes to phonemes. However, we found that even children reading at the first-grade level (6-year-olds) were influenced to some extent by a vowel's context. The effect of context on vowel pronunciation increased in strength up to around the fifth-grade reading level (8- and 9-year-olds), and sensitivity to coda-to-vowel associations emerged no earlier than did sensitivity to onset-to-vowel associations. A connectionist model of reading reproduced this general pattern of increasing context effects as a function of training.

Syllable splitting in literate and preliterate Hebrew speakers: Onsets and rimes or bodies and codas?

This study examined consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllable splitting among literate (Grade 2) and preliterate (kindergarten) Hebrew speakers. Consideration of both the architecture of Hebrew orthography and phonology led to the prediction that a body-coda rather than an onset-rime subdivision would predominate. Structured and unstructured tasks confirmed the claim that there exists a subsyllabic, supraphonemic level of phonological awareness that is more accessible than individual phonemes. However, as predicted, the syllable body rather than the rime was found to be the more accessible biphonemic unit. Moreover, this preference did not appear to be solely the product of orthographic structure; rather it was also inherent in spoken phonology. Access to single phonemes, in contrast, shifted from an early preliteracy advantage for (monophonemic) onsets to a literacy-based preference for codas.