Poor Children Learning to Read Do Not Have Trouble with Auditory Discrimination But Do Have Trouble with Phoneme Recognition

Duke University This study confirms the hypothesis, derived from Wallach and Wallach's work on teaching disadvantaged children to read, that the troubles poor children frequently have with sounds stem not from deficiencies in auditory discrimination but from inadequate skill in phonemic analysis. Almost all of 76 disadvantaged and 70 middle-class kindergarten-age children could readily hear phoneme differences in words, as indicated by their ability to respond differentially to words that differed only in single phonemes, which were similar. On the other hand, almost all of the disadvantaged children, but almost none of the middle-class children, did very poorly on tasks involving phonemic analysis of words —for example, indicating whether given sounded phonemes occurred in various spoken words.

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