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Abstract

An analysis of children's responses in phoneme counting tasks provides a way of accessing their conception of the smallest phonological unit. Thus, in order to understand the development of phonological awareness, the types of errors children make in these tasks were analysed. A group of 5to 6-year-olds (preliterate), a group of 6to 7-year-olds (grade 1), a group of 7to 8-year-olds (grade 2), and a group of 6to 7-year-olds who, after 4 months of learning to read, were unable to decode new words were presented a task that involved counting phonemes in words and nonwords. In addition to description of the emergence of the ability to focus on phonemic segments, our interest was in analysing the incorrect responses, including the possible types of segmentation as a function of the pronunciation of the items. Nonliterate subjects (preliterate children or nonreaders from grade 1) counted syllables; the beginning readers (grade 1) often failed to analyse the onset or the rime of the syllables into phonemes. Therefore, they appeared to be using an analysis that was intermediate between onset-rime segments and phonemes. The older children (grade 2) tended to count letters as opposed to phonemes, producing more than one tap for a digraph.

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What do Children Do when they Fail to Count Phonemes?

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