Abstract
Is the presence of a multiple syllable word in a pupil's listening vocabulary a prerequisite condition for the effective utilization of syllabication rules or phonogram patterns to decode the word? Pretest and posttest decoding scores of 105 pupils from an earlier study were compared with their scores on a listening vocabulary test to determine if the apparent ineffectiveness of syllabication instruction and phonogram pattern recognition strategies could be explained by the absence of the stimulus words in the listening vocabularies of the pupils tested. The data indicated that although the pupils defined over half of the thirty stimulus words, they decoded less than twenty percent of those words. Differences among the treatment conditions were negligible, suggesting that knowledge of word meaning was not sufficient to permit successful application of syllabication rules or identification of phonogram patterns to decode multiple syllable words.