Auditory Analysis Training with Prereaders.

THE CLOSE relationship be tween children's primary grade reading achievement and their audi tory perceptual skills continues to be recognized and documented (Wepman, 1964; Bateman, 1968; Zigmond, 1969; Rosner and Simon, 1971; Robinson, 1972). For example, I (1973) recently reported correla tions between first graders' begin ning-of-year auditory analysis skills and their end-of-year reading achievement subtest scores (Stanford Achievement Test, 1964) that range from .50 to .65, depending upon specific subtest. In addition to these correlational studies, there is one report in which I showed that the in clusion of auditory analysis training in a first grade reading program resulted in significantly better reading achievement for those children who received the training and whose entering auditory analysis skills had been substandard (1971). The term "auditory analysis," as used here, refers to the resolution of spoken words into their phonemic elements. Hence, the goal of auditory analysis training is to teach the child a process for identifying the acous tical elements of the reading-spelling code as heard in the context of spoken language. As the goal is achieved, two basic concepts become accessible to the child: 1) certain phonemes differ when they are heard as isolated sounds in contrast to when they are heard in a spoken word?for example, the /b/ sound in isolation is not the same as the /b/ sound in the word "bat"; 2) the phonemic elements in a word have a specific temporal organization?that