EFFECTS OF PHONEMIC PROCESSES ON WORD READING AND SPELLING

The purpose of this experiment was to examine the contribution of specific phonemic processes to beginning word reading and spelling. Forty kindergarten children were randomly assigned to one of four treatments: instruction either in blending spoken phonemes into words, segmenting spoken words into phonemes, both blending and segmenting processes, or a control condition that involved no instruction in phonemic manipulations. Afterward, all of the children learned to associate a small set of letters and sounds; then they were tested for phonemic generalizations and transfer to word reading and spelling analog tasks. Results on phonemic generalization tests indicated that children tended to acquire the particular generalizations that they were taught but performed poorly on uninstructed generalizations. The segmenting-only and segmenting-plus-blending groups showed significant transfer on two analog word-reading tasks and on an analog spelling task.