Phonological Processes in Literacy

A Tribute to Isabelle Y. Liberman

Susan A. Brady, Donald P. Shankweiler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135435899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This impressive volume contains the edited proceedings of a symposium held in honor of Isabelle Y. Liberman, whose teaching and writings laid the foundation for contemporary views of reading disability. Her work has influenced ways of thinking about the nature of the problem and ways of working with children and adults who experience unusual difficulty in learning to read. The symposium covered four themes that were central to Dr. Liberman's research on reading acquisition and disability: the development of phonological awareness, the relationship between phonological awareness and success in learning to read and write, the investigation of other phonological processes associated with reading and writing performance, and the implications of current research on these matters for reading instruction. The text includes a paper on each topic, followed by commentaries which introduce additional research findings and theoretical considerations -- all by leading researchers in the field.

I INTRODUCTION

Isabelle Liberman proposed in the early 1970s that in order to achieve reading mastery in an alphabetic writing system, a would-be reader must become aware that words are segmentable into sequences of phonemes. She noted that the ability to analyze the internal structure of the word into its phonemic constituents is an intellectual achievement that is distinct from the universal human ability to learn and use the spoken language—an ability that, unlike reading, develops in every normal child. Convinced that phonemic awareness does not come about as an automatic consequence of language acquisition, Liberman and her colleagues proposed that the lack of one-to-one correspondence between phoneme segments and acoustic structure makes it difficult for a young child to become aware of the phoneme and thus difficult to grasp the alphabetic principle.

Through the efforts of researchers throughout the world, the central role of phonological awareness in learning to read and write in an alphabetic system is becoming widely recognized. Though a consensus has developed about the importance of phonological awareness, there have been differences in interpreting its role in the reading process. Some have seen it chiefly as a precursor to reading and others have seen it primarily as a concomitant. Accordingly, it has become vitally important to discover the developmental course of phonological awareness and to determine how conscious representations of phonemes can best be promoted to advance the acquisition of literacy. The common goal of the contributors to this section is identification of the critical experiences that are needed to bring phoneme segments to consciousness.

In the lead chapter of this section, Morais scrutinizes the evidence and argues for the position with which his name has long been associated: Full awareness of phoneme segmentation does not generally develop in the absence of explicit instruction in an alphabetic code. Due in large part to the work of Morais and the Brussels group, our knowledge of the conditions for conscious representation of phonemes has been refined and extended. For example, it is clear from their work that adults with normal language skills, or even exceptional language skills, do not ordinarily develop the ability to segment speech phonemically through maturation alone. Thus, it has been found that illiterate adults generally lack this ability, even illiterate poets who display keen sensitivity to such phonological properties as rhyme and alliteration. Moreover, those readers of the nonalphabetic Chinese orthography who lack experience with alphabetic writing are ordinarily unable to demonstrate phonemic segmentation. These observations lend support to the claim that phonemic awareness ordinarily develops as a consequence of literacy instruction in an alphabetic writing system.

Although it is true that awareness of phonemic segments most commonly emerges in conjunction with reading instruction, an important question that remains is the relation between other levels of phonological awareness, known to develop earlier, and later success in reading. Several studies have documented that preschool children typically acquire some awareness of the internal structure of words before they receive instruction in reading. For example, Liberman and her colleagues demonstrated that syllable segmentation is easier for the young child and appears earlier than phoneme segmentation. Likewise, Bradley and Bryant, among others, have shown that sensitivity to rhyme may be displayed by preschool children who cannot reliably segment words by phoneme.

Morais acknowledges these findings but remains skeptical that sensitivity to sublexical phonological structure that stops short of full awareness of phonemic segmentation is directly relevant to reading. He points to the existence of studies that report failures to demonstrate significant correlations between rhyme-based abilities and later reading. Bradley and Bryant maintain that the failures were with older children, and they suggest that the rhyme tasks used were insufficiently difficult and therefore lacked the necessary sensitivity to detect differences between successful and unsuccessful readers. Further, Bradley and Bryant present new data in support of the hypothesis that the preliterate development of awareness of rhyme has a direct role to play in acquisition of reading and spelling. They contend that ability to respond to rhyme is not only a developmental precursor of awareness of phonemes, but that it actually makes an independent contribution to literacy skills that is measureable some years later.

The idea that literacy training is necessary for the development of full phoneme awareness is challenged by the existence of exceptional cases of individuals who have achieved this level of awareness prior to reading instruction. Morais himself notes the existence of such cases. Lundberg comments that, even if only one child can achieve phoneme awareness prior to alphabetic reading, the argument that awareness is solely a product of reading instruction is ruled out. Mann and Lundberg note that in each of the special populations that has been studied, there are individuals who depart markedly from the group norm. For example, not all the illiterate adults tested by Morais failed at phoneme deletion and, similarly, not all the nonalphabetic Chinese tested by Read failed. Until such discrepancies are resolved, the possibility remains that there are other routes to attaining phoneme awareness in addition to instruction in use of an alphabet. Mann urges us to consider a variety of possible metalinguistic experiences, such as those that might derive from the use of secret languages, which could conceivably serve to promote the development of phoneme awareness. In this connection, the evidence from training studies has been compelling. Building on the work of Bradley and Bryant, Lundberg and Blachman each confirm that it is possible to train phonological awareness in children who are nonreaders, and that such training promotes success in reading and spelling. The long-term benefits of such training are evident in the follow-up work reported by Bradley and Bryant. Taken as a whole, the results of the training studies suggest reciprocal influences between phonological awareness and literacy, a position that Liberman consistently promoted.

A major concern of each of the contributors is to extract the lessons contained in the research on phonological awareness for the prevention and treatment of reading disability. The training studies make a strong case for the value of early instruction in phoneme awareness. The findings of Bradley and Bryant and Ball and Blachman indicate that this is especially valuable if training in the segmentation of spoken words is coordinated with instruction in grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Blachman emphasizes that increased knowledge of letter-sound correspondences alone is often not sufficient to inculcate the alphabetic principle. Comparing the outcome of whole word instruction with an analytic method that stresses the alphabetic principle, Morais notes that only the latter type of reading instruction was effective in bringing phonemic segments to consciousness.

In the final part of his chapter, Morais considers the genesis of phonological awareness within the broader context of language acquisition. He asks what aspects of phonological development in the preschool child might place constraints on becoming aware of phonological segments and whether there are variations in the developmental course that could shed light on the tremendous individual variation in reading-related abilities. It has been recognized for some time that those who fail to acquire phonemic segmentation skills, and who fail in learning to read, often display a wider range of deficiencies in the phonological domain (an association that forms the focus for the third group of chapters in this volume). In this connection, Morais draws our attention to the recent discovery that children with reading problems are apt also to display deficiencies in lipreading. It might be argued from such a finding that the gestural cues available in facial patterns may help the child to gain awareness of the segmental structure of speech, and, ultimately, to grasp the alphabetic principle.

1	Constraints on the Development of Phonemic Awareness

José Morais

Université Libre de Bruxelles

The study of literacy acquisition has made important advances in the last 15 years or so. Most of them could not have been obtained without the efforts of a few researchers to persuade their peers that one cannot understand literacy if one ignores what speech is. Among these researchers, Isabelle Liberman has probably battled more than any other for the necessity of founding the study of literacy acquisition on the relations between speech and the orthography.

The idea that oriented Isabelle Liberman's work, and which we in Brussels and others have borrowed from her, can be stated in a few words. The lack of invariant acoustic cues for phonemes (cf. Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967) imposes serious constraints on the acquisition of literacy in an alphabetic system. Let me review how Isabelle Liberman justified this idea in a seminal paper presented in 1973. She maintained that in order to learn to read in an alphabetic system it should not be enough to learn letter-to-sound correspondences: The child who is told that/b∂/, /æ/, /t∂/ are the sounds of B, A, T, respectively, would read “bat” as the nonsense word “buhatuh.” “Because an alphabet is a cipher on the phonemes of a language … learning to decipher an alphabetically written word … would require an ability to be quite explicit about the phonemic structure of the spoken word” (p. 158). The problem, she explained, is that “the relation between phonemes and the sound is that of a very complex code, not a simple, one-to-one substitution cipher” (p. 159). Therefore, to become aware of phonemes is difficult for the child. The crucial issue for understanding the acquisition of alphabetic literacy is thus how this awareness develops.

Isabelle Liberman was the first author to wonder whether the sharp increases in phonemic segmentation ability from kindergarten to first grade “represent maturational changes” or instead “reflect the effects of instruction in reading.” She conjectured that these increases are “probably due in large part to the intensive concentration on reading and readiness activities in the first grade” (p. 161). At the same time, she has provided evidence that the level attained in phonemic segmentation constrains later achievements in reading. Thus, contrary to some authors who, subsequently, with regard to awareness and literacy have attempted to determine which is cause and which is effect, Liberman has consistently maintained, since 1973, the hypothesis of reciprocal influence as the most probable one. A few years later, when we showed that Portuguese illiterate adults are very poor in phonemic segmentation tasks (Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979), we did nothing else than confirm this view.

Fifteen years after Liberman's seminal studies (Liberman, 1973; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974), owing to her subsequent work as well as to the work of many researchers, we certainly know more about the factors that influence the development of phonemic awareness. However, we still insufficiently understand the processes by which a child attains conscious representations of phonemes. Here I try to formulate the main questions that this development raises. In the first section, I argue for the view that phonemic awareness generally does not develop in the absence of explicit instruction on a graphic code that represents phonemic information. In the second section, I propose some speculations about the relations between phonemic awareness and the perception of speech.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS AND ALPHABETIC LITERACY

Is Phonemic Awareness a Special Case of Phonological Awareness?

The study of the relations between acquisition of literacy in an alphabetic writing system and phonemic awareness has been hampered to some extent by ambiguity surrounding use of the latter term as well as of the term phonological awareness. Phonological awareness subsumes at least the following: awareness of phonological strings (a global, nonanalytical level of awareness); awareness of syllables; awareness of phonemes (also called segmental awareness); and awareness of phonetic features (cf. the taxonomy proposed by Morais, Alegria, & Content, 1987). It is widely accepted that literacy instruction is not necessary to elicit all these forms of phonological awareness. Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter (1974) and the Oxford group (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Maclean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987) have convincingly demonstrated that awareness of syllables and awareness of phonological strings can precede literacy instruction in many children. This idea has also been supported by findings with illiterate adults (Kolinsky, Cary, & Morais, 1987; Morais, Bertelson, Cary, & Alegria, 1986). On the other hand, I propose that it is the specific relation between alphabetic literacy and phonemic awareness that makes the latter kind of awareness a special case of phonological awareness. Several questions are of interest concerning the development of phonemic awareness: Can phonemic awareness be achieved through instruction in nonsegmental forms of awareness? Can it develop through direct instruction (i.e., in the absence of literacy instruction)? Before addressing these issues, I first argue that rhyming ability, often assumed to require segmental awareness, may actually reflect a nonsegmental level of awareness.

The Case of Rhyming Ability: Does it Require Segmental Awareness?

According to Bradley and Bryant (1985), rhyming abilities depend on “breaking words and syllables into phonological segments” (p. 5), or at least into onset and rime. However, many preliterate children and illiterate adults succeed in tasks that involve either rhyme appreciation or rhyme production but fail in tasks of phoneme counting or deletion.

The Oxford group (Maclean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987) objects to this argument, contending that the latter tasks are “too difficult for children younger than 5” (p. 256). The idea is that the two groups of tasks differ in their general cognitive requirements rather than in the form of awareness they tap. However, this neglects that some studies on phonemic awareness include controls for the general cognitive demands of the task. Thus, given that Liberman et al. (1974) have shown that prereaders fail on phoneme counting but perform at a reasonable level on syllable counting, it is clear that inability to count the phonemes cannot be attributed to any general requirement of the task but rather to the specific demands of phonemic analysis. The same can be said about the inferior performance displayed by illiterates on phoneme tasks as compared to syllable tasks (Cary and Morais, 1980; Morais, Bertelson, Cary, & Alegria, 1986).

A recent study by Yopp (1988) illustrates that rhyming abilities in preliterate children do not reveal phonemic awareness. Yopp used 10 tests of phonological awareness, among which were recognition and production of rhyme and several tests of phoneme manipulation. Consistent with previous data, the author found higher scores on the former than the latter tests. More interestingly, a factor analysis indicated that the two groups of tests reflect different abilities. Yopp proposes that rhyming tasks do not tap phonemic awareness because they do not demand “that an operation be performed on the stimulus.” She suggests that “phonemic awareness can be defined as the ability to manipulate … phonemic units” (p. 173).

We argue that the evidence available strongly indicates that rhyming tasks lead to higher performance than tasks involving phoneme manipulations because they can be carried out on the basis of a form of phonological awareness in which the segments are not represented as such. One of the most crucial pieces of evidence for this is the observation of two illiterate poets, F.J.C. and A.B., by Luz Cary, Paul Bertelson, and myself. These two poets have exceptional abilities to produce rhyme that contrast strik...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• The Contribution of Isabelle Y. Liberman
• The Publications of Isabelle Y. Liberman (In Chronological Order)
• List of Contributors
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Introduction
• Part III. Introduction
• Part IV. Introduction
• Author Index
• Subject Index