The Role of Psycholinguistic Skills in Reading Acquisition: A Look at Early Readers.

THE PURPOSE of this study was to investigate the role of speech-sound segmentation, blending, and discrimination in reading acquisition. These psycholinguistic skills were examined in children who learned to read prior to formal instruction in school, in comparison with an age-matched group of nonreaders, and a group of older children reading at the same level. None of the skills assessed appeared to be true prerequisites to beginning reading. However, early readers were advanced in their ability to perform a complex task involving manipulation of sounds within a temporal sequence, and performance on this task was predictive of nonsense word decoding and spelling skills. Issues related to the interpretation of these skills as consequent, facilitative, or independent factors in reading acquisition are addressed.

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