The effects of digraphs and pseudowords on phonemic segmentation in young children

ABSTRACT This research was designed to examine the possibility that beginning readers who lack phonemic segmentation ability but read words by sight resort to a “grapheme” strategy in a phoneme tapping task, tapping once for each letter in a word. While this strategy would result in correct responses to words containing as many letters as phonemes, it would lead to “overshoot” errors on words containing digraphs. However, this difference in performance should only occur with real words, since, by definition, pseudowords have not been seen before. Consistent with the hypothesis, a three-way interaction between word type, digraph type, and grade (kindergarten vs. first grade) was obtained. Further analysis revealed that some beginning readers employed a spelling strategy in performing the task.

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