Poor Children Learning to Read Do Not Have Trouble with Auditory Discrimination But Do Have. Trouble with Phoneme Recognition. Lise Wallach, Michael A.
Journal of Educational Psychology 1977, Vol. 69, No. 1, 36-39
Poor Children Learning to Read Do Not Have Trouble with Auditory Discrimination But Do Have Trouble with Phoneme Recognition Lise Wallach, Michael A. Wallach, Mary G. Dozier, and Nancy E. Kaplan Duke University
This study confirms the hypothesis, derived from Wallach and Wallach's work on teaching disadvantaged children to read, that the troubles poor children frequently have with sounds stem not from deficiencies in auditory discrimination but from inadequate skill in phonemic analysis. Almost all of 76 disadvantaged and 70 middle-class kindergarten-age children could readily hear phoneme differences in words, as indicated by their ability to respond differentially to words that differed only in single phonemes, which were similar. On the other hand, almost all of the disadvantaged children, but almost none of the middle-class children, did very poorly on tasks involving phonemic analysis of words —for example, indicating whether given sounded phonemes occurred in various spoken words.
major kind of test requires the child to say whether similar-sounding pairs of words such as "lake" and "rake" are the same or different (Wepman, 1960). But using the concepts of "same" and "different" can be very difficult for a child (Donaldson & Wales, 1970). When, instead, Blank (1968) simply asked children to repeat the words they were told, they did much better; and when she also avoided perseveration by spacing similar-sounding words apart, little difficulty remained. Further, Shvachkin (1948/1973) and Garnica (1973) have shown that most children already can learn to make differential responses to names differing only in single, related phonemes before the age of 2, and recent studies (Doty, 1974; Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971) have indicated a high degree of sensitivity to specific features of sounds even in very early infancy. As has recently been emphasized, however (Gleitman & Rozin, 1973; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974), the ability to hear different sounds as different is in fact far from sufficient to enable a child to succeed on the tasks with sounds that reading readiness curricula ordinarily prescribe — such as identifying words starting with a given sound-and to enable a child to comprehend the notion that letters correspond to sounds in words.
The reading achievement of large numbers of children from economically disadvantaged homes is so low as to have caused widespread concern. Some experimenters (e.g., Deutsch, 1964; Oakland & Williams, 1971; Plumer, 1970) have proposed that poor children starting school may lack the ability that middle-class children possess to hear the differences between phonemes—the kinds of sound classes to which letters are related. Poor children have indeed been found to obtain low scores on a variety of tests of auditory discrimination (e.g., Clark & Richards, 1966). As Gleitman and Rozin (1973) and Venezky (Note 1) have noted, however, the kinds of tests that have been used contain various sources of difficulty having nothing to do with hearing. Some of the tests (e.g., Goldman, Fristoe, & Woodcock, 1970; Templin, 1957) ask the child to point to one of several pictures with similarsounding names. But these tests do not assure that the child knows all the names —which may frequently not be the case for disadvantaged children. The other We would like to thank Cheryl Kessler for her help. Requests for reprints should be sent to Lise or Michael Wallach, Department of Psychology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27706. 36
PHONEME RECOGNITION
Sounds occur in a stream of speech and, beyond hearing differences, the child must learn to segment that stream into components and categorize those components appropriately. For example, the words "me" and "mow" must not only be discriminated, but also must each be broken up into two segments, with the first segments categorized as instances of one sound class and the second segments as instances of two different sound classes. Studies of the physical nature of phonemes in speech attest to the complexity of what is involved here (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967). Phonemes overlap in speech —they cannot be physically isolated as, for instance, recording a syllable on tape and then cutting the tape into segments corresponding to separate phonemes. Furthermore, there seem to be no invariants in the acoustic patterns representing given phonemes. That children can find it extremely difficult to segment words into the phonemes that comprise them (Calfee, Chapman, & Venezky, 1972; Elkonin, 1971; Liberman et al., 1974; Zhurova, 1963/1973) thus should be understandable. Savin (1972) and M. A. Wallach and L. Wallach (1976) have proposed that a major cause for poor children's frequent difficulties in learning to read may be that such children tend to have serious problems with phonemic analysis. Wallach and Wallach have found that a tutorial program emphasizing training in phonemic analysis (L. Wallach & M. A. Wallach, 1976) is highly successful in helping poor children learn to read. However, so far there is no direct systematic evidence of social class differences (for whatever reason) in skills of phonemic analysis. The research to be reported here evaluates the hypothesis that children from economically deprived backgrounds have no difficulty hearing the differences between different phonemes when they start school, but, in contrast to their more advantaged peers, have serious difficulty with phonemic analysis. Method Tasks were developed for administration to disadvantaged and middle-class kindergarten-age chil-
37
dren that would assess their ability to discriminate between words differing only in single, related phonemes (Part 1) and their ability to analyze phonemes in words (Part 2).
Subjects The subjects were children attending 11 kindergartens and day-care centers in six different cities and towns ranging in size from about 1,000 to about 100,000 in North Carolina and Virginia. Kindergartens and day-care centers were selected that contained, with few exceptions, homogeneous populations of children either from low-income or middleclass families. Parents in the former group had occupations such as factory worker, construction worker, poor farmer, or waitress. Parents in the latter group had occupations such as doctor, lawyer, university or college teacher, or businessman. Of the kindergartens and centers, 6 had clienteles of low-income children; the remaining 5 had clienteles of middleclass children. Testing was done during late spring and early summer. All children at these kindergartens and centers who were expected to enter first grade the following fall were considered eligible for the experiment. Seven eligibles — 4 disadvantaged and 3 middle class — were lost from the sample due to not wanting to participate or lack of parental permission. The final sample consisted of 76 low-income children (39 boys, 37 girls-56 white, 20 black) and 70 middle-class children (36 boys, 34 girls — 68 white, 2 black).
Material and Procedure All words were consonant-vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel combinations, chosen insofar as possible to be familiar words. All phonemes at issue were consonants occurring at the start of words, chosen so as not to differ appreciably in different dialects. Part 1: Auditory discrimination. The stimuli for Part 1 consisted of 16 pairs of pictures. Each pair represented two words that are identical except for their initial phonemes —for example, whale, jail; mail, nail. An attempt was made to pick pairs in which the two initial phonemes would be highly confusable. One of each of the two words began with one of eight phonemes —/j/, /m/, /k/, /r/, /b/, IB/, It/, or /p/- and the child was asked to point to the picture representing that word (two such pictures for each of the eight phonemes). The subjects' errors were corrected. The items were arranged in an unsystematic sequence, and the correct picture was unsystematically located on the left for half the pairs and on the right for half. The child had to identify correctly each item's pictures with the names they represented before proceeding with it, which presented little difficulty. Part 2: Phonemic analysis. Part 2 was concerned with three of the eight phonemes used in Part 1. The three used were ones that are relatively easy to pronounce in isolation: /m/, /s/, and /r/. The child was asked (in Sections A and B) to choose a
38
WALLACH, WALLACH, DOZIER, AND KAPLAN
picture whose name starts with the phoneme at issue, or (in Section C) to indicate whether a word starts with the phoneme at issue. Again, errors wore corrected, and where an item involved pictures, the child had to identify them correctly with the names they represented before proceeding. Sections A, B, and C all were completed first for /m/, then for /s/, and then for Irl. For Section A, there were five items in the case of each phoneme, each item consisting of a pair of pictures. Each pair represented two words having no phonemes in common —for example, for /m/, man, house; for Is/, foot, sail; for Irl, rug, pan —one of which (unsystematically located on the left or the right) starts with the phoneme at issue and the other with a different (usually dissimilar) phoneme. In the case of /m/, for example, after the first item's pictures had been identified, the experimenter said, "Some words start with the sound mm, like Ma, or mud, or me. Which of these starts with mm, I the name of the left-hand picture! or [the name of the right-hand picture]?" Work on the other phonemes proceeded similarly. For Section B, there again were five items in the case of each phoneme, this time each item consisting of three pictures. One picture was on top and its name started with the phoneme at issue. Two pictures were underneath, the name of one (unsystematically located on the left or the right) starting with the phoneme at issue and the name of the other with a different (usually dissimilar) phoneme. The three names had no phonemes in common except for the initial phoneme in the top picture's name and the name of one of the two bottom pictures. Some attempt was made to avoid differential similarity, apart from this initial phoneme identity, between the names of the top picture and each of the two bottom pictures. Examples, with the top picture given first, are: for /m/, mouse —bell, mat; for /s/, suit —soap, lock; for /r/, ring —shell, rose. After a given item's pictures had been identified, the experimenter said, " | the name of the top picture] starts with [its initial sound]. Which of these starts with (that sound], [the name of the left-hand picture] or [the name of the right-hand picture!?" For Section C, there were 12 items in the case of each phoneme. The first 2 items were sounds —first the phoneme at issue and then a quite different consonant sound (e.g., for /m/, mm, shh). The third item was a consonant-vowel word that starts with the phoneme at issue (e.g., me), and the fourth was a consonant-vowel word that starts with the second item's sound and ends with the same vowel as the third item (e.g., she). The rest of the items for Section C were additional words, of which one in each successive pair (in an unsystematic order) starts with the phoneme at issue and the other with a different (usually dissimilar) phoneme (e.g., kite, mad). The experimenter said, for /m/, "Listen. See if you can hear mm. Can you hear mm when I say mm?" After correction if necessary, the experimenter then said, "Can you hear mm when I say shh?" Then similarly, "Can you hear mm when I say me?" and so on. If the child could not hear a phoneme in a
word that begins with it, the experimenter repeated the word, emphasizing and elongating that phoneme, in the correction. In all sections of Part 2, the two members of any pair of words where one does and the other does not start with the phoneme at issue were either both consonant-vowel-consonant or both consonant-vowel combinations and (except for the first pair of words for each sot in Section C) had no phonemes in common. Parts 1 and 2 were kept as comparable as possible in regard to word familiarity, use of consonant-vowel in contrast to consonanl-vowel-consonant combinations, and use of words with short in contrast to long vowels. An attempt was also made to avoid any systematic differences between positive and negative instances in regard not only to spatial position and successive order, but also frequency of use of particular words.
Results and Discussion Part 1: Auditory Discrimination On Part 1, only 1 of the 76 low-income children and 2 of the 70 middle-class children made more than one error on the 16 items. These results indicate that hearing phoneme differences is not difficult for these children, whatever their social class background. Part 2: Phonemic Analysis Table 1 presents the results for the three kinds of tasks — Sections A, B, and C of Part 2 —that were designed to assess the child's skill at phonemic analysis. There is little overlap between the distributions of the two social classes. On each kind of task, most of the middle-class children scored at or near the maximum possible, while most of the disadvantaged children earned low scores. Mann-Whitney tests indicate that the difference between the social classes is highly significant (p < .001) in each case (z values of 9.48, 9.06, and 8.64 for Sections A, B, and C, respectively). There were no sex or race differences within social class. These results indicate that disadvantaged children have serious problems with phonemic analysis. It seems likely that lack of phonemic analysis skills plays a significant role in poor children's frequent difficulties in learning to read. Since it has been demonstrated that these skills can be successfully taught, doing so for children who lack
PHONEME RECOGNITION
39
Table 1 Phonemic Analysis Results for Low-Income (n = 76) Versus Middle-Class (n = 70) Children Section A No. correct out of 15 15 14 12-13 10-11 8-9
7 or less
Section B
Section C
Low income
Middle class
No. correct out of 15
Low income
Middle class
3 2 4 21 29 17
53 2 10 3 1 1
15 14 12-13 10-11 8-9 7 or less
5 0 5
51 8 4 4 2 1
them when starting school seems indicated. Reference Note 1. Venezky, R. L. Language and cognition in reading (Tech. Rep. No. 188). Madison: Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning, 1972.
References Blank, M. Cognitive processes in auditory discrimination in normal and retarded readers. Child Development, 1968, 39, 1091-1101. Calfee, R., Chapman, R., & Venezky, R. How a child needs to think to learn to read. In L. W. Gregg (Ed.), Cognition in learning and memory. New York: Wiley, 1972. Clark, A. D., & Richards, C. J. Auditory discrimination among economically disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged preschool children. Exceptional Children, 1966, 33, 259-262. Deutsch, C. P. Auditory discrimination and learning: Social factors. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 1964,10, 277-296. Donaldson, M., & Wales, R. J. On the acquisition of some relational terms. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley, 1970. Doty, D. Infant speech perception. Human Development, 1974,77, 74-80. Eimas, P. D., Siqueland, E. R., Jusczyk, P., & Vigorito, J. Speech perception in infants. Science, 1971,777, 303-306. Elkonin, D. B. Development of speech. In A. V. Zaporozhets & D. B. Elkonin (Eds.), The psychology of preschool children. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. Garnica, O. K. The development of phonemic speech perception. In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press, 1973. Gleitman, L. R., & Rozin, P. Teaching reading by use of a syllabary. Reading Research Quarterly,
16 26 24
No. correct out of 36 36 35 30-34 25-29 20-24
19 or less
Low income
0 1 3 5 31 36
Middle class 17 14 18 13 2 6
1973, 8, 447-483. Goldman, R., Fristoe, M., & Woodcock, R. W. Test of Auditory Discrimination. Circle Pines, Minn.: American Guidance Service, 1970. Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P., & Studdert-Kennedy, M. Perception of the speech code. Psychological Review, 1967, 74, 431-461. Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F. W., & Carter, B. Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1974, 18, 201-212. Oakland, T., & Williams, F. C. Auditory perception: Diagnosis and development for language and reading abilities. Seattle: Special Child Publications, 1971. Plumer, D. A summary of environmentalist views and some educational implications. In F. Williams (Ed.), Language and poverty: Perspectives on a theme. Chicago: Markham, 1970. Savin, H. B. What the child knows about speech when he starts to learn to read. In J. F. Kavanagh & I. G. Mattingly (Eds.), Language by ear and fey eye: The relationships between speech and reading. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972. Shvachkin, N. K. The development of phonemic speech perception in early childhood. In C. A. Ferguson & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. (Originally published, 1948.) Templin, M. C. Certain language skills in children: Their development and interrelationships. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957. Wallach, L., & Wallach, M. A. The Teaching All Children to Read kit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Wallach, M. A., & Wallach, L. Teaching all children to read. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Wepman, J. M. Auditory discrimination, speech, and reading. Elementary School Journal, 1960, 60, 325-333. Zhurova, L. Y. The development of analysis of words into their sounds by preschool children. In C. A. Ferguson & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. (Originally published 1963.) Received May 24, 1976 •
