Development of two letter-sound patterns in grades one through three.

Abstract

Tests for four letter-sound generalizations, c -» [k], c -» [s], a -> [se], and a-* [e], were given to 73 first-, second-and third-grade children at 6-week intervals during a single school year. Each test included five synthetic words (e.g., cipe, acim, bice, cib, ocet) for each generalization. Children responded individually to the test items by attempting to pronounce each one aloud. The long and short pronunciations of a ([e] and [SB]) and the [k] pronunciation of c were learned to a high degree of accuracy and showed no significant differences across grade levels, but did differ significantly across ability groups, which were defined by scores on a standard reading test which was administered at the end of the school year. For c -> [s], however, learning was extremely low at all grade levels and reached only 45% correct by the end of Grade 3. Initial c -» [s] was learned more slowly than medial c -» [s], indicating an interaction between letter pattern and word position. The failure to acquire the c -» [s] pattern, especially in word-initial position, appears to result primarily from the failure of most beginning reading texts to include a sufficient sampling of words that begin with c before e, i, or y.

The early stages of reading: A longitudinal study

“…); in all other positions k corresponds to /W). These complex and specific rules are acquired gradually and different rules are acquired at different stages of reading (Calfee, Venezky and Champman, 1969;Venezky and Johnson, 1973). Perhaps this ability to learn symbol-sound rules limits the development of reading.…”

“…There is certainly an association between reading ability and ability to learn sound-symbol correspondences (Birch and Belmont, 1965;Done and Miles, 1978;Venezky and Johnson, 1973), but correlational studies such as these leave causality indeterminate and it is quite likely that those progressing in reading are concomitantly picking up these associations (indeed this notion is implicit in theories of analogical pronunication-the more lexical entries, the more analogues). Training studies (Bishop, 1964;Jeffrey and Samuels, 1967) have shown that detailed training on specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences does improve ability in reading new words.…”

Children’s and adults’ use of spelling-sound information in three reading tasks

“…Several studies (e.g., Calfee, Venezky, & Chapman, 1969;Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975;Shankweiler & Liberman, 1972;Venezky, 1976;Venezky & Johnson, 1972) have investigated children's ability to pronounce pseudowords as a means of assessingchildren's knowledge of spelling-sound correspondences. In general, these studies have shown that children do abstract information relating spelling and sound in English in the course of learning to read, and that they learn the simple correspondences between letters and sounds before they learn more complex relations.…”

Reflections. teaching the secondary language functions of writing, spelling, and reading

“…To call the "silent letter e" in rice a front vowel seems awkward. In contrast, Venezky and Johnson (1973) and Cox (1984) chose to describe only the letter environment. Thus, the letter c receives an/s/pronounciation before the letters e, i, or y.…”