Segmentation of the Spoken Word and Reading Acquisition.
| Number | 609 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1973 |
| Drawer | 11 |
| Entry Date | 11/17/1999 |
| Authors | Liberman, I. Y. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Bulletin of the Orton Society, XXIII, 65-77. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0609.pdf |
| Abstract | [Introduction] There are many possible points of departure for investigators who are interested in reading. My colleagues and I at the University of Connecticut have begun with the fact that there are children who readily acquire the capacity to speak and listen to language, but who do not learn to read it. What is required in reading a language that is not required in speaking or listening to it? The first answer that comes to mind, of course, is that reading requires visual identification of optical shapes. Since our concern here is with reading an alphabetic script, we may well ask whether the rapid identification of letters poses a major obstacle for children learning to read. The answer is that for most children, perception of letter shapes does not appear to be a serious problem. There is considerable agreement among investigators that by the end of the first year of school, even those children who make little further progress in learning to read generally show no significant difficulty in the visual identification of letters (Doehring 1968; Kolers 1972; Liberman, Shankweiler, Orlando, Harris and Berti 1971; Shankweiler 1964; Vernon 1960). Beyond identification of letters, learning to read requires mastery of a system which maps the letters to units of speech. There is no evidence, however, that children have special difficulty in grasping the principle that letters stand for sounds. Indeed, children can generally make appropriate sounds in response to single letters, but are often unable to proceed when they encounter the same letters in the context of words (Vernon 1960). A third possible source of difficulty is that the relation in English between spelling and language is often complex and irregular. But even when the items to be read are carefully chosen so as to include only those words which map the sound in a simple, consistent way and are part of the child’s active vocabulary, many children continue to have difficulties (Savin 1972). What then are the real difficulties faced by the child in the early stages of reading acquisition? In this paper, I will explore one possible source of difficulty that has been recently proposed by us (Liberman 1971; Shankweiler and Liberman 1972) and other investigators (Elkonian 1973; Klima 1972; Mattingly 1972). It is reading requires of the child an awareness of the structure of his language, an awareness that must be more explicit than is ever demanded in the ordinary course of listening and responding to speech. Since an alphabet is a cipher on the phonemes of a language, we should think that learning to decipher and alphabetically written word (as opposed to memorizing its visual configuration as may be done learning so-called “sight” words) would require and ability to be quite explicit about the phonemic structure of the spoken word. For example, if the child is to map the printed word “bat”, which obviously has three letters, onto the spoken word which he already has in his lexicon, he must know that the spoken word also has three segments |
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