Onset and Phoneme Awareness and Its Relationship to Letter Knowledge in German-Speaking Preschool Children

Abstract

Objectives: The aim was to explore whether word-initial onset awareness is acquired before phoneme awareness and whether onset complexity influences performance on identification tasks. In addition, the relationship between onset and phoneme awareness and letter knowledge was investigated. Method: In this study, 22 monolingual German-speaking preschool children aged 5;00-5;11 were tested. Onset, phoneme identification, and letter knowledge tasks were administered. The children were presented with pictures of word pairs. Both words in each pair shared a single-consonant onset, a two-consonant onset cluster or the first consonant of a consonant cluster. The children were asked to pronounce the shared sound(s). Additionally, they were asked to name all 26 upper-case letters. Results: Onset awareness tasks were significantly easier to complete than phoneme awareness tasks. However, no influence of onset complexity on onset awareness performance was found. Moreover, letter knowledge correlated with all phonological awareness tasks. Conclusions: The results corroborate that phoneme awareness develops already at preschool age irrespective of explicit literacy tuition. Nevertheless, letter knowledge is closely related and should be linked to onset/phoneme awareness tasks. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel

Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration

“…Second, children within the same age group did not behave all in the same way but instead exhibited substantial individual variability (Figure 2), a phenomenon also previously noted (e.g., review in Sosa and Stoel-Gammon, 2012; see also Wimmer and Mayringer, 2002;Schäfer et al, 2014). In the present study, this was the case in all three age groups and for all assessments, except for tasks probing phonemic awareness in kindergarteners (onset segments, phoneme synthesis) for which we noted a floor effect.…”

“…In the past decade, a fair amount of empirical research has reported greater vocabulary and phonological awareness in school-aged children than children in kindergarten (in German: Kauschke, 2000;Wimmer and Mayringer, 2002;Schäfer et al, 2014;in English: Carroll et al, 2003;Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). However, results from the present study suggest that age-driven categorizations are not always the only suitable ways to characterize skill development or at least they may underestimate its complexity.…”

Erros ortográficos e habilidades de consciência fonológica em crianças com desenvolvimento fonológico típico e atípico

“…In learning, the child is stimulated to think about the phoneme-grapheme correspondences, the relation between written language and spoken language, and about orthographic patterns, establishing a higher phonemic awareness (8) . There are several studies in the literature (1,4,6,(8)(9)(10) involving the phonological awareness skills and children in the literacy period.…”