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Learning correspondences between letters and phonemes without explicit instruction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

G. Brian Thompson ,
Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn  and
David S. Cottrell
G. Brian Thompson*
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington
Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
David S. Cottrell
Affiliation:
James Cook University
*
G. Brian Thompson, School of Education, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: brian.thompson@vuw.ac.nz
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Abstract

Three studies examined the sources of learning by which children, very early in learning to read, formed correspondences between letters and phonemes when these were not explicitly taught in the whole language instruction they received. There were three classes of predicted knowledge sources: (a) induced sublexical relations (i.e., induction of orthographic–phonological relations from the experience of print words), (b) acrophones from letter names, and (c) transfer from spelling experience. The results of Study 1 indicated that children used both sources (a) and (b). Study 2 results showed that source (a) dominated when the letters were initial components of pseudowords rather than isolated items. The transfer from phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences of the children's spelling was examined in Study 3. The results were not consistent with the use of source (c). The findings of these studies have implications for the question of how early in learning to read children are able to use knowledge from their experience of print words as a source for phonological recoding.

Type
Research Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 21 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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