A phoneme deletion task with no verbal production component

Abstract

The abilities of good and poor readers were investigated in a phoneme awareness task in which the first phoneme of a word was deleted. Instead of having to produce the answer, like traditional phoneme awareness experiments, the participants had to recognize the correct target of phoneme deletion by comparing word pairs. For example, participants had to determine that the word pair 'Blake-bake', which was presented aurally, was an incorrect answer, because the second phoneme had been removed from the second word of the word pair. The results show that there was a significant effect of group, with poor readers' performance being intermediate between that of younger and older groups of good readers. An effect of condition was also found, with all groups having difficulty distinguishing between word pairs in which the first sound has been removed ('Blake-lake') and word pairs in which the whole cluster had been removed ('Blake-ache'). Other results suggest that phoneme awareness develops incrementally. In conclusion, even with the production component removed, this modified phoneme awareness task is still a reliable measure of reading ability, since it distinguishes between good and poor readers.