Beginning Readers' Analysis of Words and Sentences

Abstract

The awareness of phonemes, syllables and sentences was studied with 72 children in three groups of 24 each selected from grade one, two and three classes. Syllable segmentation was easier than phoneme segmentation across grades. The overall poorer performance of the children in phoneme segmentation was accentuated with the addition of a task tapping auditory concepts of the number and order of speech patterns. Children in all grades found high complexity sentences more difficult to repeat accurately than low complexity sentences. For the total sample of 72 children canonical correlation between the linear combination of the set of reading scores and the segmentation tasks and sentence repetition tasks showed the auditory conceptualization task contributing most of the weight. This was followed by high complexity sentences, syllable segmentation, phoneme segmentation then sentences of low complexity. The findings are discussed in relation to temporal order of sounds in words and word order in sentences. Children's reflection on sounds in words, on the grammatical structures of sentences is seen to facilitate their learning to read.

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