Journal of Educational Psychology1998, Vol. 90, No. 3, 461 -475

Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.0022-0663/98/S3.00

Gaining Alphabetic Insight: Is Phoneme Manipulation Skillor Identity Knowledge Causal?

Bruce A. MurrayAuburn University

The type of phoneme awareness that supports reading acquisition has been unclear. Phonemeawareness is usually operational zed as skill in manipulating phonemes in blending andsegmentation tasks. However, B. Byrne and R. Fielding-Barnsley (1990) argued that phonemeawareness is knowledge of phoneme identities (i.e., recognition of individual phonemes inspoken word contexts). In a double-blind teaching experiment, 48 kindergartners wererandomly assigned to identity, manipulation, or language experience programs. Children in themanipulation program made significantly greater gains on tests of blending and segmentation.However, children in the identity program made significantly greater gains on a test ofphonetic cue reading, a measure of rudimentary decoding ability. Teaching recognition ofparticular phonemes in word contexts may help beginners gain insight into the alphabeticprinciple and apply their insights in early word identification.

Phonemes are the basic vocal gestures from which thespoken words of a language are constructed (I. Y. Liberman& Liberman, 1992). Awareness of phonemes is necessary inlearning to read alphabetic orthographies because symbolsin these orthographies map the phoneme sequences inpronunciations. For example, the spelling sight directs thereader to construct a pronunciation that begins with /s/ asrepresented by s, merges into the vowel /ai/ represented byigh, and finishes with the stop consonant IKJ represented byr.1 Learning to interpret such spelling maps requires asurprisingly elusive alphabetic insight in shifting from asearch for the direct representation of meaning to recogniz-ing the sequential representation of a pronunciation (Byrne,1992).

For many children, alphabetic insight poses a formidabledifficulty (Wallach & Wallach, 1979). Without awareness ofthe phonemic structure of words, spellings remain oddshapes or arbitrary symbol strings and are extraordinarilydifficult to remember (Ehri, 1991). Children with littlephoneme awareness usually struggle in learning to read andspell words, developing a wide achievement gulf betweenthemselves and peers who are phonemically aware (Juel,1988). Explicit instruction in phoneme awareness may helpthese children avoid reading delay by gaining an earlyinsight into the workings of their alphabetic writing system(Stanovich, 1986).

However, the specific instructional goal for such training—phoneme manipulation skill or phoneme identity knowl-edge—remains unclear. Phoneme awareness programs typi-cally focus on the manipulations of segmentation (i.e.,breaking down spoken words into discrete phonemes) andblending (i.e., smoothly assembling an ordered phonemesequence to identify a spoken word; Ball & Blachman, 1991;

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toBruce A. Murray, Department of Curriculum and Teaching, 5040Haley Center, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama 36849. Elec-tronic mail may be sent to murraba@mail.auburn.edu.

Davidson & Jenkins, 1994; Fox & Routh, 1984; Helfgott,1976; Hohn & Ehri, 1983; Lundberg, Frost, & Petersen,1988; O'Connor, Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993;O'Connor, Jenkins, & Slocum, 1994; Olofsson & Lundberg,1983; Slocum, O'Connor, & Jenkins, 1993; Torgesen, Morgan,& Davis, 1992; Torneus, 1984; Williams, 1980; Wright &Beach, 1994). Lewkowicz (1980) pointed to the primacy ofsegmentation ability in making sense of alphabetic spellings.However, training in segmentation and blending does notalways lead children to phoneme awareness (e.g., Smith,Christensen, Goodale, Ingebrand, & Steele, 1993; Torneus,1984), and even successful programs (e.g., Lundberg et al.,1988) may be costly in instructional time and produce fairlysmall gains in later reading achievement.

Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley (1990) presented evidencethat familiarity with the identities of particular phonemesmay be initially more useful than phoneme manipulationskill in gaining alphabetic insight. In other words, acquain-tance with the basic vocal gestures of spoken language,sufficient to recognize these phonemes in words, is whatallows children to crack the alphabetic code. Byrne andFielding-Barnsley suggested that the primary hurdle ingaining alphabetic insight is recognition knowledge ofparticular phoneme identities rather than blending andsegmentation skill. However, the evidence supporting thisview remains somewhat tenuous.

Comparing Phoneme Manipulationand Phoneme Identity

Manipulation

The discussion of phoneme awareness has historicallybeen framed as questions about the manipulations of segmen-

1 Spellings within solidi represent pronunciations using approxi-mations of symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Vowelspellings used in this article include /ei/ as in fate, I'll as in meat, /ai/as in die. and Ai/ as in due.

461

462 MURRAY

tation and blending, with primary emphasis on segmentation(Elkonin, 1973; Lewkowicz, 1980; I. Y. Liberman, 1973). Ifthe problem of alphabetic insight is to recognize that aword's spelling maps its phoneme sequence, segmentationto perceive the phoneme sequence seems directly impli-cated. Learning to segment has been suggested to be the endresult of a process of making increasingly fine-graineddivisions of the phonological parts of spoken discourse,from utterance to word, from word to syllable, from syllableto onset and rime, from onset or rime to phoneme (Adams,1990).

However, the term segmentation, with its implication ofcutting or setting boundaries, may be misleading. In speech,phonemes are not acoustically discrete but overlap in theirencoding (A. M. Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967). For example, the spoken word train isheard as a single sound; if it were played in slow motion,listeners would not hear a succession of distinct phonemes/t/, /r/, /ei/, and /n/ but a continuous /chrein/. Becausephoneme segmentation cannot be explained as a mechanicaldivision of the acoustic signal, it is unclear how phonemescome to be recognized.

Measuring segmentation also presents a perplexing practi-cal problem. Segmentation tasks (Yopp, 1988) usuallyrequire the respondent to articulate all the phonemes of aword in sequence (e.g., "What are the three sounds insoup?*1). As a practical matter, this is among the mostdifficult of phoneme awareness tasks (Helfgott, 1976; Yopp,1988) and is one that often stymies children well along intoreading (Stahl & Murray, 1994). Young children trying tosegment a word into phonemes may articulate parts largerthan a phoneme, such as cluster onsets (Treiman, 1985) orconsonant-vowel segments (Skjelfjord, 1987). If childrencan read beginning word lists and texts accurately beforethey can fully segment words into phonemes, it is difficult toargue that this manipulation is a reading prerequisite.

Phoneme Identification

Rather than phoneme manipulation, the critical task forattaining alphabetic insight may be learning to identifyphonemes. Identity and identify are derived from the Latinword idem, meaning "same"; to identify a phoneme is toperceive it as the same vocal gesture repeated acrossdifferent words (i.e., a familiar and recognizable entity).Recognizing phoneme identities might be analogous tolearning letter identities. In each case, individual abstractentities become recognizable by learning to recognize andproduce component features through studying examples andnonexamples.

Phoneme identification knowledge can be measured bytasks that reveal whether, for the child, phonemes are stableand familiar entities that can be perceived as "same" acrossdifferent words. Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley (1990, 1991)and Stanovich, Cunningham, and Cramer (1984) relied onword-to-word matching, in which the respondent comparestwo or more spoken words for a common phoneme identi-fied only by location (e.g., "Does soup start like sand?").Bradley and Bryant (1978, 1983, 1985a, 1985b) used a

phonological oddity task, essentially a negative version ofword-to-word matching. Sound-to-word matching simplifiesthe comparison by isolating the target phoneme for therespondent. For example, Wallach and Wallach (1979) toldparticipants, "Some words start with the sound /m/, like maor mud or me" (p. 200), and asked them to decide whichillustrated word matched the isolated sound ("Does man orhouse start with /m/?"). Despite the apparent ease of thistask, it effectively discriminated children who were betterprepared for literacy instruction from others who were lessprepared.

Research by Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley

What is known about the relative contributions of identityknowledge and phoneme manipulation skill in early read-ing? Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley (1989,1990) attempted toempirically distinguish the two as part of a line of research inwhich they sought to specify what preliterate children needto know to accomplish phonetic cue reading, the mostrudimentary form of phonological recoding (Ehri, 1991). Inphonetic cue reading, beginners use initial letters in printedwords to cue phonemes, allowing them to select from amongwords active in memory. To operationalize this ability,Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley developed a forced-choicetransfer task in which translating initial letters into pho-nemes would allow children to identify words. For example,after learning to recognize fat and bat, and given printedpairs of words differing only in the initial consonants/and b,children with phonetic cue reading ability could subse-quently point out whether fun is read "fun" or "bun" withabove-chance consistency. Byrne's (1992) initial experi-ments established that preliterate children rarely induce thespelling-to-sound correspondences needed for success onthe forced-choice transfer task. In other words, alphabeticinsight does not seem to arrive by discovery alone. Byrneand Fielding-Barnsley (1989) later established that explicitinstruction in segmentation skill, identity knowledge, andcorrespondences would lead children to succeed in phoneticcue reading.

However, which was more useful to children in gainingalphabetic insight: segmentation skill or identity knowl-edge? This question was addressed by examining whetherphoneme awareness is taught more efficiently by instructionin phoneme identities or in segmentation (Byrne Sc Fielding-Barnsley, 1990). In the identity experiment, children wereindividually taught to identify four phonemes and practicedby selecting from among foils illustrated words that startedwith or ended with the target phoneme. Each child later wastaught correspondences for the letters s and m. Childrenwere tested using sound-to-word matching tasks and withthe forced-choice phonetic cue reading task (e.g., "Is thismow or sow?"). After additional correspondence training,children were asked to distinguish words beginning with /and by representing phonemes whose identities had not beentaught. In a parallel segmentation-training experiment, chil-dren imitated a puppet model to learn to segment initial andfinal consonants. The same illustrated words as in the

GAINING ALPHABETIC INSIGHT 463

identity experiment (composed of a limited set of phonemes)served as stimuli.

Insight into the alphabetic principle seemed closelyrelated to success with identity measures. Children whoreached a criterion on the phonetic cue reading task had thehighest identity scores. Five identity-trained children alsocaught onto phonetic cue reading with untrained phonemes.Fewer segmentation-trained children reached criterion onthe phonetic cue reading task, and these were not all amongthe best segmenters. Again, however, 5 children from thesegmentation group reached criterion on phonetic cue read-ing with untrained phonemes, suggesting that they hadachieved a general insight into the alphabetic principle.

In general, phoneme segmentation showed a weakerrelationship to phonetic cue reading than did identity.Identity scores (r = .49) were better predictors of perfor-mance in phonetic cue reading than were segmentationscores (r = .20). Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley (1990) con-cluded that phoneme identity training is more successfulthan segmentation training in leading children toward thealphabetic insight because identity was easier to teach andled to a more stable alphabetic insight. They also informallyobserved that children were more comfortable with identitytraining, which did not require corrective feedback andseemed less frustrating.

Although tantalizing, Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley's(1990) research does not conclusively establish whethermanipulation and identity teaching differ in their effective-ness. The segmentation and identity groups were not directlycompared on their reading analog performances, and there isno clear indication that such a comparison would favor theidentity group. Moreover, segmentation training seemed tolead to roughly equivalent levels of identity knowledge andalphabetic insight. However, it is probable mat segmentationparticipants learned about phoneme identities because theirsegmentation practice was restricted to the limited phonemeset. In support of this view, their scores in phoneme identityaveraged nearly as high as those of children trained inidentity. By restricting examples to a limited phoneme set,the experimenters repeatedly called attention to the identitiesof these phonemes and provided extended opportunities toexamine their articulation and to locate them in wordcontexts. In other words, identity and segmentation treat-ments were confounded. A clearer test of the relativeeffectiveness of segmentation and identification trainingwould require minimizing identity instruction in the segmen-tation training.

Method

The Problem

Do children better learn about the phonemic structure of wordsthrough instruction in generalized manipulation skill, throughinstruction in particular phoneme identities, or through indirectlanguage experiences? Do children more readily begin using thealphabet to decode when they learn to manipulate phonemes orwhen they learn the identities of particular phonemes?

To answer this question, 1 conducted an experimental studycomparing the progress of preliterate children given these three

types of instruction. Prereaders were randomly assigned to threeinstructional programs. One group studied particular phonemeidentities; a second learned generalized phoneme manipulationskills; and a third, a treated control group, worked with sharedreading and the language experience approach. To control forhidden bias, I used a double-blind procedure in which neither theparticipants nor the posttest examiner was aware of treatmentassignments. At issue were (a) the differential effects of instructionon outcome measures of phoneme manipulation ability (i.e., skill inblending, isolating, and segmenting phonemes); (b) knowledge ofphoneme identities (i.e., recognition of particular phonemes inspoken word contexts); (c) ease of learning correspondences (i.e.,the number of trials required to match up a set of letters andphonemes); (d) phonetic cue reading (i.e., using initial consonantsto identify written words from known alternatives); and (e)decoding (i.e., identification of unfamiliar words from spellingsalone). Also of interest was whether children would differ in theirattitudes toward instruction in phoneme identities, phoneme manipu-lation training, or a language experience approach.

Participants

Kindergarten children in five classrooms in a small city in thesoutheastern United States participated in the study during the earlypart of the second semester of the kindergarten year. Three of theclassrooms were in two public schools, and two were in a Catholicparochial school. The public school children represented a widerange of socioeconomic statuses, whereas the parochial schoolchildren were largely from upper-middle-class backgrounds. Sixty-one children returned signed permission forms, a condition ofparticipation. Of these, 32 were boys (52%) and 29 were girls(48%); 20 children were Black (33%), 38 children were White(62%), and 3 were Hispanic (5%). English was the native languageof all participants. The average age of the children was 5.9 years(SD = 0.40). Eight children were screened from the experimentduring pretesting; 3 children relocated before instruction began,and 2 other children could not be matched with partners forinstruction, leaving 48 participants in the treatment conditions.

Pretests

I pretested the children for word identification, oral vocabulary,alphabet knowledge, and phoneme awareness. Data were gatheredin individual testing sessions in relatively quiet areas outside thechildren's regular classrooms.

Word identification. A preprimer word list and passage fromthe Basic Reading Inventory (BRI), Fifth Edition, Form A (Johns,1991) was used to screen out children who could read more thanthree preprimer words. Five children were excluded on this basis.The mean BRI word recognition score for eligible children was0.36 words (SD = 0.84).

The test of phonetic cue reading (TPCR), an experimenter-constructed reading analog test similar to measures used by Byrneand Fielding-Barnsley (1990), assessed ability to use initial conso-nant letters to distinguish words differing by only the beginningphoneme. Items were rhyming words that differed only in theirinitial consonant. For example, the examinee was shown a cardwith the printed word SELL and was asked, "Is this sell or tell?"

Oral vocabulary. Oral vocabulary knowledge was assessedusing the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Form L (PPVT; Dunn& Dunn, 1981). Three children with raw scores below 37 wereexcused from participation. The mean PPVT raw score for eligiblechildren was 64.7 (SD = 14.6), corresponding to a standard scoreof 97 for children 5.9 years old.

464 MURRAY

Alphabet knowledge. An experimenter-constructed measure ofalphabet knowledge was administered as a pretest. In this recogni-tion paradigm, the 26 uppercase letters were printed in groups of 5or 6 on laminated paper in 48-point Times New Roman font.Participants were asked to find them by name (e.g., "Show me H").Participants proved to be highly proficient at recognizing lettersusing this procedure, correctly identifying a mean of 24.2 letters(SD = 4.09), a strong ceiling effect.

Phoneme awareness. The tests of phoneme manipulations(TPM), an experimenter-constructed measure requiring respon-dents to blend, isolate, and segment phonemes in spoken words,was administered both at pretest and at posttest. The TPM wasadapted from measures used in earlier studies (Stahl & Murray,1994) using puppets to make the assessment more gamelike and byincluding an introductory set of linguistically simple items.

The Test of Phonological Awareness (TOPA; Torgesen & Bryant,1994), a commercially published test of phoneme identity knowl-edge, was modified for purposes of this study. The standardinstructions for the TOPA, which require children to compare thebeginnings or endings of illustrated words for common soundswithout hearing the target sounds in isolation, were modified todirect the examiner to explicitly pronounce the target phoneme. Forexample, in the adapted version, the examiner pronounced thetarget phoneme for the first word (e.g., "Girl begins with the sound/g/"), named the other pictures, and told the children to "show methe picture of the word that begins with /g/ as in girl.** In the first 10items the phonemes to be matched were initial consonants (theoriginal kindergarten-level TOPA), and in the 10 remaining itemsthe phonemes to be matched were final consonants (the TOPAfirst-grade level).

No significant difference between groups was found on any ofthe pretests, suggesting that the groups were generally of equalknowledge and ability at the outset of the study.

Posttests

All posttests except the measures of mastery during the letter-phoneme trials were administered by a doctoral student who did notknow the children's instructional assignments.

Phoneme awareness. Posttests for phoneme awareness in-cluded (a) an alternate form of the TPM and (b) the Word-to-WordMatching Test (WWMT) from Gunning (1992), modified toinclude additional items requiring matching of final phonemes. Asan example, the examiner asked, "Which word begins like bus andbun: book, fish, or jet?" To parallel the construction of the TOPA, Idevised a second section in which the target phoneme to bematched was the final phoneme.

Reading. Reading-related posttests included the followingmeasures:

1. A count of trials to mastery in learning eight letter-phonemecorrespondences during the final lesson, to a maximum of 20 trials.The number of perfect trials was recorded, with credit given for alltrials after a mastery criterion of 2 consecutive perfect trials wasmet.

2. An alternate form of the TPCR.3. An experimenter-constructed test of decoding, which featured

simplified spellings of two- and three-phoneme words constructedof the eight letters whose correspondences were taught to allparticipants. The spellings of the words were simplified so that asimple one-to-one relationship existed between phonemes andletters (e.g., ET represented the word eat).

4. An experimenter-constructed attitudinal measure. Childrenresponded to a Likert scale of images of the cartoon characterGarfield (McKenna & Kear, 1990). Participants were asked to ratetheir school, their instructional program, the letter-phoneme corre-

spondence lesson, and the posttesting experience they had justcompleted.

Assignment of participants. Children were taught in pairs toincrease the efficiency of instruction and to cushion the novelty ofwork outside the classroom with the familiarity of a classmatepartner. Fifty eligible participants were matched for pretestedphoneme awareness and randomly assigned to one of three groups.Matching was based on the sum of the scores on the phonemeawareness pretests. Children within each classroom were ranked onthis summary measure and then paired so that the highest scoringchild was paired with the lowest scoring child, the second highestwith the second lowest, and so on. These pairs were then assignedto one of three instructional programs by a random drawing.Because children were to work in pairs, an even and equal numberof participants were selected per group per classroom. For example,in one classroom with 12 eligible participants, two pairs of childrenwere assigned to each of the three instructional programs. In thisway, the differential effects of literacy instruction in their regularkindergarten classes were equalized across groups. Two childrenrepresenting median scores within their class distributions couldnot be matched, leaving 48 participants. Because of the varyingavailability of participants within classrooms, I gave priority toassignments in the phoneme identity and manipulation groups (i.e.,to the groups whose performance was most informative concerningthe research hypothesis). Accordingly, the experiment proceededwith 18 participants in each of the phoneme awareness teachinggroups and 12 participants in the language experience group.

Paired participants in each group were instructed in a plannedseries of 15 lessons for 15-20 min per day over the course of 15consecutive schooldays, although special activities or holidaysoccasionally delayed the instructional programs. All lessons weretaught by me. Lessons for the phoneme identity and manipulationgroups were scripted to ensure uniformity of instruction. Theteaching took place in quiet areas outside of the kindergartenclassrooms. Children who were absent received makeup lessons toenable them to complete their programs.

Instructional Programs

The three instructional treatments in this experiment involvedprograms about phoneme identities, phonological manipulation,and language experience. (See Table 1 for an overview ofinstructional treatments and the Appendix for a more detaileddescription of the lessons.)

The phoneme identity treatment was designed to familiarizeparticipants with a limited set of phonemes. The program intro-duced eight particular phonemes (If!, /!/, /m/, IxJ, /s/, /t/, I\I, and /ei/)with activities to make these phonemes memorable and to helpchildren recognize the phonemes in word contexts. Participantslearned an alliterative tongue twister featuring the target phonemeand then stretched words from the tongue twister to see how theisolated phoneme sounded and felt in spoken words. Identityparticipants looked for each target phoneme in both initial and finalpositions in example words. Perforce, the identity group engaged insome phoneme manipulation activities, but only to blend orsegment the target phoneme. A limited admixture of blending andmanipulation activities was deemed necessary to show children theidentity between the isolated phoneme approximations and thecoarticulated phonemes in spoken words. Manipulation activitiesfor the identity group were included to demonstrate this identityrather than to teach blending and segmentation as skills.

The activities of the phonological manipulation group weredesigned to parallel the instruction in the phoneme identity groupbut to exclude activities that directly taught participants about theidentities of particular phonemes. Children worked with a wide

GAINING ALPHABETIC INSIGHT 465

Table 1Lessons During Instructional Period

Day Identity Manipulations Language

1-8 Introduce phoneme withsemantic representation(Open Court soundcards)

Learn tongue twister

Isolate initial phoneme intongue twister (puppet)

Stretch and explore articu-lation (stretchablefigure)

Isolate phoneme in final-medial position(puppet)

Sound-to-word matchingBlend to partial words

9-14 Blending (8-phoneme set)

Segmentation (8-phonemeset)

Word-to-word matching(8-phoneme set)

15 Learn letter-phonemecorrespondences (A, E,Ft U M, N, S, and T)

Demonstrate alphabeticprinciple (lockingblocks)

Learn rhyming verse

Isolate phonemes inrhyming verse (puppet)

Stretch initial phonemes(stretchable figure)

Isolate phonemes in final-medial position(puppet)

Onset-rime segmentationOnset-rime blendingBlending (unrestricted

phoneme set)Segmentation (unre-

stricted phoneme set)Word-to-word matching

(unrestricted phonemeset)

Learn letter-phonemecorrespondences (A, E,F, Ly M, N, S, and T)

Odd days: Read alouds

Even days: Shared storywriting

Odd days: Read alouds

Even days: Shared storywriting

Learn letter-phonemecorrespondences (A, E,F, L, M, N, S, and T)

variety of phonemes found in the words of nursery rhymes. Theiractivities involved the manipulations of blending and segmenta-tion, first as onset and rime activities and later using the completephoneme sequence. The manipulation group practiced blendingand segmentation as skills rather than as demonstrations of theidentity of phoneme approximations with actual phonemes in wordcontexts. Because they were not explicitly taught about theparticular phonemes they used in blending and segmentation, theirmanipulation activities were presumed not to be applications ofidentity knowledge.

The activities of the language experience group were designed toprovide an equivalent amount of friendly educational attentionwithout explicit instruction in phoneme awareness (i,e., to providea Hawthorne control). These participants engaged in developmen-tally appropriate early literacy activities. They looked at theillustrations in storybooks as they were introduced, listened as thestories were read aloud, talked about the stories, and jointlycomposed their own stories. Their compositions were typed in alarge font and presented during the next lesson as texts for cuedrecitation.

All participants were individually taught the letter-phonemecorrespondences for eight letters that would appear in posttestmaterials (Ft L, M, N, S, T, E, and A) in their final session (Day 15)using a paired-association method. In this lesson, which was thesame across instructional groups, participants were shown cardswith printed capital letters, asked to repeat a spoken phonemeapproximation for each letter, and then tested with feedback untilthey could recite the phoneme approximation for all eight letterswithout error in 2 consecutive trials or until 20 trials had beencompleted.

Note that none of the participants studied letter-phonemecorrespondences until the final instructional session. Neither phono-logical instructional group used letters to represent phonemesduring their instructional program; their instructional conversations

were strictly oral, or occasionally in the case of the identity group,they were cued by phoneme illustrations (e.g., a picture of a flat tireto illustrate the phoneme /s/). Language experience participants, ofcourse, were exposed to letters when composing and attempting toreread their stories, but no explicit reference was made to letteridentities. Although the use of letter representations for phonemesis instructionally powerful (Adams, 1990; Bradley & Bryant, 1983;Hatcher, Hulme, & Ellis, 1994), the design here was to teach aphonological awareness program without introducing phonicsinstruction.

Results

Phoneme Awareness

Phoneme awareness was examined both as phonememanipulation ability, using the TPM, and as phonemeidentity knowledge, using the revised TOPA and the WWMT.

TPM. The means and standard deviations for the TPMare presented in Table 2. Because the TPM was administeredas both a pretest and a posttest, I analyzed the data for theentire battery and for each subtest using a 3 (groups) X 2(time) analysis of variance (ANOVA), with the time factorconsidered to be a repeated measurement of the threetreatment groups. Of particular interest for the questionsguiding this research were significant interactions betweeninstructional groups and time, which imply differentialgrowth under the three instructional conditions. Interactionswere examined using an analysis of gain scores, withHelmert orthogonal contrasts to test (a) the effectiveness ofphoneme awareness treatments (identity and manipulations)versus the language experience treatment (language) and (b)

466 MURRAY

Table 2Mean Scores by Instructional Groupon Phoneme Manipulation Measures

Test

TPM total scoreBlendingIsolation

InitialFinal

SegmentationWordsPhonemes

TPM total scoreBlendingIsolation

InitialFinal

SegmentationWordsPhonemes

Identity(n =

M

9.561.616.894.332.56

1.064.56

17.566.399.895.894.00

1.3910.00

18)

SD

Manipulations(« =

M

Pretest

9.312.406.673.962.96

1.396.35

10.502.396.834.442.39

1.277.00

Posttest

12.714.507.483.974.07

2.037.75

24.839.39

12.227.564.67

4.6117.78

18)

SD

8.052.485.253.222.87

1.997.20

12.414.155.143.092.66

4.8511.71

Language(« =

M

10.753.425.504.251.25

1.838.17

18.005.50

10.677.003.67

2.1714.75

12)

SD

11.073.406.654.942.18

2.128.85

12.584.586.563.463.98

2.377.58

Note. The maximum score for the TPM was 50, broken down asfollows: blending, 15 points; isolation, 20 points, broken down intoinitial and final, 10 points each; and segmentation (words), 15points. Maximum points for segmentation (phonemes), a count ofthe number of phonemes isolated regardless of success in fullsegmentation, was 40. TPM = tests of phoneme manipulations.

the effectiveness of identity instruction (identity) versusgeneralized manipulation instruction (manipulations).

A repeated measures ANOVA of TPM total scores re-vealed a statistically significant Group X Time interaction,F(2, 45) = 4.27, p = .02, indicating differential phonememanipulation performance between groups. In other words,participants changed in their ability to manipulate phonemesover the course of the study depending on their instructionalprogram. This interaction is shown in Figure 1. Helmertorthogonal contrasts, based on a separate ANOVA on gainscores computed from the pre- and posttest scores on theTPM, indicated that the mean of the combined phonemeawareness instructed groups (identity and manipulations)did not exceed that of language, t(45) = 1.54,/? = .13, butthat manipulations outperformed identity, t(45) = -2.49,p = .02. The TPM effect size for manipulations relative tolanguage (the treated control group) was 0.54 SD, a moder-ately strong effect.

A repeated measures analysis of the blending subtest ofthe TPM showed a statistically significant Group X Timeinteraction, F(2, 45) = 7.34, p = .002, indicating that theeffects of the instructional program on blending perfor-mance were not distributed equally between the treatmentgroups. The interaction is shown in Figure 2. Helmertorthogonal contrasts based on a separate ANOVA on gainscores indicated that the combined phoneme awarenessinstructional groups significantly outscored language, f (45) =3.31, p — .002, and that manipulations tended to outperform

identity, although differences only approached statisticalsignificance, f(45) = -1 .93, p = .06. The blending effectsize for manipulations relative to language (treated controls)was 0.85 SD, a large effect; identity registered a small effectof0.19 5D.

Although no statistically significant Group X Time inter-action was found for the TPM isolation subtest, F(2, 45) =1.59, p = .22, a repeated measures analysis of the segmenta-tion results showed a statistically significant Group X Timeinteraction, F(2, 45) = 4.97, p = .01, indicating thatinstructional groups differed in full segmentation perfor-mance at posttest. This interaction is shown in Figure 3.Helmert orthogonal contrasts, using a separate analysis ofgain scores, showed no statistically significant differencebetween the mean of the combined phoneme awarenessinstructed groups (identity and manipulations) and language,f(45) = 1.41, p ~ .16. However, manipulations significantlyoutgained identity in full segmentation, ?(45) = -2.82,/? =.007. The segmentation effect size for manipulations relativeto language (the treated control group) was 1.03 SD, a largeeffect.

Tests of phoneme identity knowledge. The mean scoresand standard deviations of the revised TOPA, administeredat pretest, and the adaptation of the WWMT are presented inTable 3. Instructional groups did not differ significantly atpretest on the sound-to-word matching test, the TOPA, F(2,45) = .21, p = .81. At posttest, no reliable differencesbetween groups were detected on the WWMT, F(2, 45) -0.42, p = .66. A repeated measures ANOVA was computedto test for differences in group gains over time afterremoving variation attributable to kindergarten class place-ment. To facilitate this comparison, I normalized scores onthe TOPA and the WWMT. No statistically significant groupdifferences were found, F(2, 33) = 0.08, p - .92, nor wasthere evidence of overall gains across time, F(l, 33) = 0.04,p = .84, or a Group X Time interaction, F(2, 33) = 1.00,p — .38. Mean scores indicate that the WWMT was moredifficult than the TOPA sound-to-word matching test. Themean scores for the entire sample were 11.40 (SD = 4.30)for TOPA (illustrated) and 10.52 (SD = 3.33) for word-to-word matching (no illustrations), even though three fourthsof the sample had just completed 15 days of phonemeawareness instruction.

Table 4 shows the intercorrelations between the phonemeidentity subtests, including initial and final phoneme sub-tests on both the TOPA (sound-to-word matching) and theWWMT (word-to-word matching). Correlations between allinitial and final phoneme matching subtests across thesound-to-word and word-to-word tests were statisticallysignificant (p < .01). Of particular interest was the apparentstronger correlation within locations (initial and final) acrosstests than the correlation of subtests within tests. The twoinitial-phoneme matching subtests correlated .68, and thetwo final-phoneme matching subtests correlated .55, stron-ger relationships than those between the initial and finalsubtests of the sound-to-word matching test (.45) andbetween the subtests of the WWMT (.37).

Correspondence learning. No reliable differences be-tween groups were detected in participants' capacity for

GAINING ALPHABETIC INSIGHT 467

Pretest Posttest

'Identity —^—-Manipulations - — - Language

Figure 1. Change in phoneme manipulation scores by instructional group.phoneme manipulations.

». TPM = tests of

learning letter-phoneme correspondences. Table 5 showsthe mean scores on the correspondence learning trials.Instructional groups did not differ significantly on thenumber of trials needed to master the eight letter-phonemecorrespondences taught, F{2,45) = 0.01,/? = .99. Similarly,no differences were revealed when the number of correctcorrespondence items was considered, F(2, 45) = 0.02, p —.98.

Some differences in the ease of learning of particularletter-phoneme correspondences emerged from the data (seeTable 6). A one-way ANOVA revealed significant differ-ences among correspondences in their ease of learning, F(l,329) = 15.40, p < .01. These data indicate that the longvowel correspondences E and A, which are the same as theletter names for the vowels, were acquired most rapidly,followed by three unvoiced consonants 5, T, and F. The threevoiced consonants M, L, and N proved more difficult tolearn.

Word Reading

The ability to generate pronunciations of written wordswas measured by tests of phonetic cue reading and decoding.

The means and standard deviations for these measures arepresented in Table 7.

Phonetic cue reading. Because the TPCR was adminis-tered both before and after instruction, I analyzed the datausing a 3 (treatment groups) X 2 (time) ANOVA, with thetime factor considered to be a repeated measurement of thethree treatment groups. No evidence was found for astatistically significant main effect of group, F(2, 45) =0.14, p = .87, or of time, F(l, 45) = 2.9, p = .10. TheTime X Group interaction did not meet the criterion forstatistical significance but revealed a strong trend in the data,F(2, 45) = 2.49, p = .09, displayed in Figure 4. In ananalysis in which the effect of class assignment wasstatistically removed from the effects of instructional group,the interaction was statistically significant, F(2,33) = 4.13,p = .03. Helmert orthogonal contrasts based on an analysisof gain scores on the TPCR revealed a statistically signifi-cant difference in the contrast between identity and manipu-lations, f(45) = 2.01, p = .05, indicating that identitysurpassed manipulations in acquiring phonetic cue readingability. The effect size for identity on the TPCR relative tolanguage (the treated controls) was 0.30.

MURRAY

Pretest Posttest

-Identity -—*~Manipulations - •• - Language

Figure 2. Change in blending scores by instructional group.

Because the TPCR offered children a forced choicebetween two alternatives, one could expect a score of 6 onthe 12-item test by chance alone. It is interesting, then, toexamine beyond-chance scores on phonetic cue reading, inwhich a beyond-chance score is defined by a score of 9 ormore correct responses, a score that would occur by chancealone only 8% of the time. Using this criterion, 6 of the 18identity participants moved from a chance score to abeyond-chance score; only 2 members of manipulations and1 child in language made a similar gain. Although mostchildren failed to score beyond chance on the phonetic cuereading task after instruction, an examination of the datarevealed that participants in identity made net gains in allfive kindergarten classrooms. Manipulations made gains inthree classes and lost ground in two, and language registeredgains in two classes and losses in three.

The distribution of scores on the TPCR appeared to departfrom normality with a tendency toward bipolarity. A bipolardistribution might result from the nature of the test. Becausethe items required a forced choice between two alternatives,a child with no ability to use phonetic cues could still beexpected to guess half the items (6 of 12) correctly.However, a child who could use phonetic cues to decidebetween the alternatives could be expected to answer most

or all of the items correctly, creating a second mode near thetest ceiling.

Wilcoxon's matched-pairs signed-ranks test (Langley,1970; Siegel, 1956), a nonparametric statistic, was used tocompare pretest and posttest differences within each treat-ment group. Statistically significant pretest-posttest improve-ment occurred only with identity, z(17) = -2 .41 ,p = .016.Pretest-posttest differences were not statistically significantfor manipulations, z(17) = -0.55, p = .58, or for language,z(ll) = -0.24,/> = .81.

Decoding. The test of decoding required participants todecode simplified spellings of words constructed fromletter-phoneme pairings taught during training. An ANOVAshowed no statistically significant difference between instruc-tional groups in their performance on the test of decoding,F(2,45) = 0.60, p = . 55.

Attitude Toward Instructional Program

Participants rated their instructional programs (identity,manipulation, or language) and other aspects of theirparticipation on a 4-point Likert-type scale using Garfieldimages adapted from McKenna and Kear (1990). Results areshown in Table 8. ANOVAs indicated no differences be-

GAINING ALPHABETIC INSIGHT 469

Pretest Posttest

• Identity — ^ • " Manipulations - — - Language

Figure 3. Change in segmentation scores by instructional group.

Table 3Mean Scores by Instructional Groupon Phoneme Identity Measures

Test

PretestTOPA sound-

to-wordmatching(total)InitialFinal

PosttestWord-to-

wordmatching(total)InitialFinal

Identity(» =

M

11.837.334.50

9.946.173.78

18)

SD

3.312.451.50

2.922.281.35

Manipulations(n =

M

10.897.223.67

10.896.504.39

18)

SD

4302.442.57

2.972.091.69

Language(« =

M

11.506.175.33

10.836.504.33

12)

SD

5.733.432.84

4432.842.10

Note. Maximum on each test is 20, with 10 items targeting theinitial phoneme and 10 targeting the final phoneme. TOPA = Testof Phonological Awareness.

tween groups in attitude toward school, F(2,45) = 1.20, p =.31, in attitude toward instructional program, F(2, 45) =0.14, p = .87, in attitude toward the letter-phonemecorrespondence lesson, F(2, 45) = 0.10, p = .90, or inattitude toward the posttest battery, F(2,45) = 0.79, p = .46.Ratings tended to be uniformly high across treatmentgroups.

Discussion

This study was designed to determine whether insight intoalphabetic writing depends on knowledge of particularphoneme identities or on skill in phoneme manipulations.These two different concepts of phoneme awareness suggestdivergent paths to instruction.

Table 4Intercorrelations Between Phoneme Identity Subtests

Subtest 1

1. Sound to word initial2. Sound to word final3. Word to word initial4. Word to word final

— .45* .68*.49*

.39*

.55*

.37*

*p < .01, two-tailed.

470 MURRAY

Table 5Mean Scores by Instructional Groupon Correspondence Learning

Table 7Mean Scores by Instructional Groupon Reading Analog Measures

Measure

Trials to crite-rion

No. of itemscorrect

Identity(n = 18)

M

11.89

133.67

SD

8.40

31.7

Manipulations(n - 18)

M

11.89

132.44

SD

8.76

30.9

Language(n = 12)

U

12.17

134.67

SD

8.19

25.9

Note. Trials ranged from a minimum of 2 to a maximum of 22.There were 160 possible correspondence items (8 items pertrial X 20 trials).

Phoneme Manipulations

Results of the TPM provide evidence for the superiority ofconventional blending and segmentation instruction in im-proving the ability to manipulate phonemes. Participantstaught to blend and segment across a range of phonemesdemonstrated superior improvement in phoneme manipula-tion over time relative to the other instructional groups onthe total TPM battery, on the blending subtest, and on thesegmentation subset. These data support the commonsenseexplanation that when instruction emphasizes phonememanipulations, children learn what they were taught. Bycontrast, teaching beginners about phoneme identities doesnot seem to enhance phoneme manipulation skill. Thissuggests that phoneme manipulation skill may be relativelyindependent of the knowledge of phoneme identities. Consis-tent with this explanation, the gains made by the manipula-tions group did not translate into alphabetic insight on theTPCR.

Phoneme Identity Knowledge

Whether children acquired differential knowledge ofphoneme identities in this study remains unclear. No groupdifferences emerged on the WWMT posttest. In addition, theinstructional groups demonstrated no reliable performancedifferences on the isolation subtest of the TPM, the pretestversion of which correlated strongly (r = .75) with themodified TOPA (Stahl & Murray, 1994). Notwithstanding,

Table 6Mean Perfect Trials by Letter-Phoneme Correspondence

Correspondence

A = /ei/E = /i/S = /s/T = /t/F-/f/M = /m/L = /l/N = /n/

M

18.9018.3318.3117.9616.4015.9614.1313.48

SD

1.793.521.693.255.405.966.977.27

Identity(n = 18)

Manipulations(n = 18)

Language(n = 12)

Test

PretestPhonetic cue

readingPosttest

Phonetic cuereading

Decoding

M

7.61

9.332.28

SD

2.45

2.703.58

M

8.78

8.831.67

SD

2.34

2.532.40

M

8.33

8.411.67

SD

2.64

3.091.64

Note. The maximum number of perfect trials was 20.

Note. The maximum score on the test of phonetic cue reading andon the test of decoding was 12.

ability differences emerged at posttesting on the TPCR, ameasure presumed to require phoneme identity knowledge.

A likely explanation is that the memory demands of theWWMT obscured learning gains in identity knowledge. Onthis test the examiner does not pronounce the target pho-nemes separately, and unlike the TOPA, there are noillustrations to support working memory. The higher meanscores on the TOPA pretest than on this posttest, despiteconsiderable instruction, suggested that the WWMT wasmore difficult. The task of holding three words in memorywhile making mental comparisons with the phonologicalstructure of a fourth word is probably too taxing forkindergarten children to exercise their emergent knowledgeof phoneme identities. For this reason, the WWMT posttestis probably not a valid measure of phoneme identityknowledge for kindergarten children.

The failure to independently demonstrate that the identitygroup acquired useful knowledge of phoneme identities is alimitation of this study. I attribute this to an errant choice ofphoneme identity measures at posttest and perhaps moregenerally to the limited progress in learning to measurephoneme awareness in a way unconfounded by readingability. The identity treatment was designed to produce thisknowledge, and identity participants revealed identity knowl-edge indirectly in demonstrating alphabetic insight. Never-theless, further evidence is needed to demonstrate unambigu-ously that identity knowledge is causal in gaining alphabeticinsight.

Correspondence Learning

Neither the number of trials required to master letter-phoneme correspondences nor the number of correctlyreported correspondences during these trials differed be-tween the instructional groups. Familiarity with phonemeidentities seems to play little if any role in learningassociations between" isolated phoneme approximations andletter forms. The independence of letter-sound knowledgeand phoneme awareness explains the common phenomenonof the child who can report the phoneme approximations of

GAINING ALPHABETIC INSIGHT 471

10

Pretest Posttest

"Identity ~~" —~Manipulations ~ •* - Language

Figure 4. Change in phonetic cue reading scores by instructional group. TPCR = test of phoneticcue reading.

letters (e.g., "s says /s/") but who is unable to make use ofthis knowledge in decoding words.

Phonetic Cue Reading

Results of the TPCR lend some support to the view thatphoneme identity instruction enhances early application ofthe alphabetic principle in using initial letters to signal

phonemes to recognize partially activated words. The omni-bus ANOVA showed a strong trend toward group differencesin improving phonetic cue reading. Post hoc contrasts indi-cated a statistically significant difference favoring identity-instructed participants over manipulation-trained participants.Nonparametric analyses using Wilcoxon's matched-pairssigned-ranks test showed statistically significant pretest-posttest improvement only with the identity group. The

Table 8Means of Participant Evaluation of Instructional Activities

Question

What do you think about school so far thisyear?

What do you think about the lessons youleft class for every day?

What do you think about the last lesson,when you learned the sounds for letters?

What do you think about the tests you justfinished?

Identity(« =

M

3.28

3.50

3,28

3.06

18)

SD

1.27

1.04

1.02

1.39

Manipulations(n =

M

3.78

3.39

3.17

3.28

= 18)

SD

0.73

1.04

0.99

1.07

Language(« =

M

3.67

3.58

3.33

3.58

12)

SD

0.89

0.90

1.15

0.69

Note. Scores ranged from 4 (mostpositive) to 1 (most negative).

472 MURRAY

small improvements in phonetic cue reading registered bythe manipulations and language groups fell within a rangethat could have occurred by chance. These results suggest,but do not provide conclusive evidence, that kindergartnersin the identity treatment gained an advantage in initialdecoding ability.

Phonetic cue reading demonstrates insight into the alpha-betic principle that letters represent phonemes and hencethat the spelling of a word maps the sequence of phonemesin the pronunciation. Knowledge of phoneme identities isneeded to recognize phonemes, allowing beginners to matchup letters and phonemes. Children can apparently gain skillin manipulating phoneme approximations without focusingon phonemes as common word elements and thus withoutachieving the alphabetic insight that letters signal stableelements in pronunciations. In other words, learning pho-neme identities and learning to manipulate phonemes appearto be distinct tasks for the beginning reader.

Share (1995) defined phoneme awareness as "the abilityto recognize identity between learned letter names or soundsand sublexical phonological segments in spoken words" (p.161). Share's definition of phoneme awareness is supportedby the disparate success of the manipulation and identitygroups in the current study. Participants in the manipulationgroup gained skill in manipulating phonemes, but, unlike theidentity participants, they did not seem to recognize that thesounds they could manipulate were sublexical segmentsfound in spoken words, TTiey gained the ability to deal withletter sounds as phones (i.e., speech sounds), but not asEnglish phonemes (the vocal gestures from which Englishwords are composed).

Decoding

Not surprisingly, the kindergarten participants in thisstudy showed little ability to decode simplified spellings ofwords. The mean score across instructional group was approxi-mately 2 of 12 words, and 28 of 48 children were unable todecode any words. Because mean performance was so low,the few individual successes in the test of decoding were allthe more remarkable. Although children were screened forword recognition and no instruction in reading words wasoffered to any children, 6 participants (4 in identity and 2 inmanipulations) correctly decoded at least half of the wordswithout context using only the simplified spellings. Thisaccomplishment indicates a major breakthrough in under-standing and applying the alphabetic cipher to recognizewords. The ability to decode pseudowords is the strongestknown correlate of word recognition ability (Jorm & Share,1983; Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992; Stanovich & Siegel,1994; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987), accounting for more thanhalf the variance in word recognition.

Context-free decoding requires both ready access tophoneme identities and phoneme manipulation ability. Blend-ing is implicated because to decode, a reader must activateand hold a phoneme sequence in working memory whileuniting the separate vocal gestures into an approximatepronunciation sufficient for lexical access. Each of the sixsuccessful decoders were above the mean in blending.

Segmentation is probably also implicated in both skilledword recognition and spelling ability.

Attitude Toward Instructional Program

Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley (1990) suggested that chil-dren find phoneme identity instruction rewarding and gener-alized manipulation instruction frustrating. Language expe-rience approaches are thought to capture children's naturalinterest in texts as "talk written down." However, nodifferences were detected between instructional groups intheir evaluation of their instructional programs, with allprograms receiving high marks, averaging about 3.5 on a4-point scale. Although self-report data obtained with ratingscales is a poor substitute for systematic observations ofbehavior, in this case there was no contradictory evidence inthe informal observations of children by the researcher or bythe children's classroom teachers. Children typically weredelighted to be singled out for special instruction and usuallyresponded well to whatever activities were proposed, includ-ing play with nonsensical word elements in phonemeawareness instruction.

Some Interpretative Issues

Can phoneme awareness be dichotomized into knowledgeand ability? The results of this study suggest that such atheoretical distinction may help researchers better under-stand the nature of phoneme awareness. Lewkowicz's(1980) groundbreaking article on phoneme awareness ar-gued persuasively that segmentation depends on recognizingthe identity of the phonemes being segmented. Contrary tothis view, however, children in the manipulation group inthis study made decided progress on blending and segment-ing phonemes, yet they showed no significant improvementin phonetic cue reading. The disparate results seem tosupport the relative independence of identity knowledge andmanipulation ability, as surprising as this may seem giventhe present understanding of phoneme awareness.

Unexpected observations potentially advance the scien-tific study of reading acquisition. For example, I expectedthat knowledge of phoneme identities would help childrenlearn letter-phoneme correspondences. Yet, there was notthe slightest trend in this direction in the data. This nullfinding may help clarify what phoneme awareness is:familiarity with the vocal gestures of spoken language,sufficient to recognize them in the context of spoken words.Children associate letter identities with sounds that approxi-mate phonemes but often fail to make a connection betweenthese approximations and the actual sublexical segments.For example, a child observed in a reading clinic was unableto blend m to the phonogram -ice. Although he couldproduce a sound "mmm" for the letter m, he did not makethe connection between the sound he produced and theinitial consonant in mice. He lacked phoneme awareness.

Did manipulation and identity participants have differen-tial experience with initial phonemes in words, thus confound-ing the treatments? The lessons for each group werescripted. The manipulation instruction was designed to

GAINING ALPHABETIC INSIGHT 473

parallel the identity instruction in this respect, so thatparticipants in either group received the same amount ofpractice with initial phonemes. However, the identity groupstudied the identities of the particular phonemes that wouldrecur in the correspondence task and in the phonetic cuereading test, whereas the manipulation group worked with anonselect group of phonemes that appeared as the initialsegments of words in nursery rhymes. Knowledge ofphoneme identities apparently paid off in helping identitychildren make use of simple correspondences in identifyingwords.

Phoneme Awareness and Beginning Reading

How does phoneme awareness help children learn toread? Decoding is generally learned in two phases (Ehri,1994): phonetic cue reading and alphabetic decoding. Attain-ment of these phases seems to involve different types ofphoneme awareness. The strategy of phonetic cue reading,selecting from among a few candidate words already activein memory by translating one or more boundary letters, leadsto word identification when strong contextual support ispresent. Phonetic cue reading depends on knowledge ofphoneme identities. For instance, a beginner may recognizethe word me in a memorized rhyme like "pat-a-cake" bytranslating the letter m into the phoneme Iml, but only if/m/is recognized as part of the spoken word me.

Alphabetic decoding also requires skill with blending andsegmentation manipulations. For instance, the ability togenerate a pronunciation for the word me without strongcontextual support requires translation of both the letters mand e into the phonemes /m/ and /i/, recognition of theidentities of /m/ and l\l in spoken words, and the ability toblend their vocal gestures into a recognizable approximationof the spoken word me. Hence, decoding a novel wordrequires, among other knowledge, some skill with phonememanipulations.

My data suggest that two levels of phoneme awarenessmay play different roles in learning to read words. Phonemeidentity knowledge seems to be implicated in phonetic cuereading. Recognition of the identity between learned letternames or sounds and sublexical phonological segments inspoken words, when letters reliably signal that identity,appears to be critical for phonetic cue reading. Alphabetic-phase decoding using the complete spelling of a wordprobably requires additional phoneme manipulation ability.Other research has linked both blending and segmentationabilities with success in decoding and spelling words (e.g.,Fox &Routh, 1984).

Implications for Instruction

Not all children require direct instruction in phonemeawareness. Some receive informal instruction and literacyexperiences in their homes that prime them to learn to usethe alphabet. Their literate tutors may guide their earlyattempts to read or spell words by exaggerating pronuncia-tions to emphasize the vocal gestures spelled by certainletters. Many children acquire phoneme awareness in the

course of naturalistic encounters with alphabet books (Mur-ray, Stahl, & Ivey, 1996), rhyming and alliterative texts(Maclean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987), and devising inventedspellings (Clarke, 1989). These children tend to learnphoneme identities informally with minimal explanation andpractice, and their reading ability thus seems to emergenaturally.

Other children come to school with impoverished literacybackgrounds. Many of these children come from economi-cally marginal homes in which preschool literacy activitiesgive way before the pressures of survival. If schools do notprovide explicit instruction in phoneme awareness to helpthese children gain a foothold in decoding, they may neverdiscover the pleasure and utility of reading.

The instructional programs used in this study offer usefulexplanations and activities for direct teaching of phonemeawareness. The independent effects found for the identityand manipulation programs suggest that both types ofinstruction are valuable. After children have caught ontohow letters cue the phonemes of spoken words, learning tomanipulate phonemes by blending and segmentation manipu-lations will likely help beginners progress into sequentialdecoding. However, because knowledge of phoneme identi-ties seems more helpful in gaining initial insight intoalphabetic writing, instruction in phoneme identities is likelyof greater value than manipulation instruction for childrenwho have not yet demonstrated alphabetic insight. Activitiesfocused on the identities of individual phonemes, whichmake these phonemes familiar and memorable, and that helpchildren recognize their identities in words could well beincorporated into early literacy programs that contain otheractivities known to be helpful in preparing children to read.

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Appendix

Detailed Description of Treatments

Identity Group Activities

Lessons for the phoneme identity group were focused ondeveloping knowledge of phoneme identities for a restricted set ofeight phonemes: fif, /I/, /m/, /n/, /s/, /t/, I'll (long e), and /ei/ (long a).These phonemes were selected because (a) all but one werecontinuants, permitting children to stretch their pronunciations andexamine their articulation; (b) the vowels were the relativelyfamiliar letter names; and (c) many example words could beconstructed using these phonemes.

During the first eight lessons, a single phoneme was introducedto children in the phoneme identity group each day. Participantsstudied the identity of each phoneme in a systematic instructionalprogram. Each lesson cycled through seven brief activities:

1. Introduction to the phoneme with a semantic representationand demonstration of its production.

2. Learning an alliterative tongue twister featuring the pho-neme (e.g., for /n/; "Nobody was nice to Nancy's neighbor Nick,but he was never nasty").

3. Using a puppet to isolate the initial phoneme in thealliterative words of the tongue twister.

4. Stretching the phoneme to explore its articulation using astretchable action figure as a visual demonstration.

5. Isolating the phoneme in the final (for vowels, the medial)position of other example words.

6. Practicing sound-to-word matching for the target phoneme,first as a yes-no game (e.g., "Do you hear/n/ in next?") and then asa forced choice with a single foil (e.g., "Do you hear /n/ in old ornew?").

7. Blending the target phoneme to partial words in the initialor final position.

After the first day, each lesson began with a brief review ofphonemes previously studied. Lessons 9-14 provided practice withblending, segmentation, and word-to-word matching, with ex-amples restricted to words composed of the limited eight-phonemeset. The blending and segmentation activities for the phonemeidentity group were different from those of the phonologicalmanipulation group in that they focused on locating particularphonemes in word contexts. Lessons were scripted allowing forvariable student input. A sequence of activities was planned foreach day's lessons, but children's spontaneous comments, ques-tions, insights, and miscues were addressed.

Manipulation Group Activities

Lessons for the phonological manipulation group were aimed atdeveloping skills in segmenting words into a relatively unrestrictednumber of phonemes. Their instructional program was devised toparallel the work of the phoneme identity group while eliminating

activities specifically aimed at learning phoneme identities. Eachlesson for manipulations cycled through seven brief activities:

1. Introduction to the alphabetic principle using interlockingblocks as a visual demonstration of segmentation.

2. Learning a brief rhyming verse (e.g., "Rain, rain, go away,come again another day; little Tommy wants to play").

3. Using a puppet to isolate the initial phoneme in the principalwords of the rhyming verse.

4. Stretching words using a stretchable figure as a visualdemonstration.

5. Isolating phonemes in the final (for vowels, the medial)position of other example words.

6. Practicing segmentation with onset-rime feedback.7. Blending onsets and rimes to approximate the pronuncia-

tions of words.Lessons 9-14 provided practice with blending, segmentation,

and word-to-word matching using example words not restricted toparticular phonemes. The phoneme manipulations for the phonologi-cal manipulation group were different from those of the identitygroup in that they used a variety of phonemes to work on the skillsof blending and segmentation rather than on locating particularphonemes in spoken words. Lessons for the manipulation groupwere also improvised around scripts. A sequence of activities wasplanned for each day's lessons, but allowance was made forresponding to children's spontaneous comments, questions, in-sights, and miscues.

Language Experience Group Activities

The language experience group participated in a program ofholistic language instruction equivalent in duration to the instruc-tion of the identity and segmentation groups. Children engaged intwo principal activities: listening and responding to oral readings ofillustrated storybooks and orally composing stories in response tothe oral readings. Oral readings were introduced with questionsdesigned to activate background knowledge and interest. In the oralcomposition, the teacher wrote down the children's words, moder-ated conflicting views when children disagreed on the direction thestory should take, modified ungrammatical constructions, andoccasionally made suggestions when the composition process cameto a halt. Stories written by the children in the shared writingactivities were transcribed to make printed copies in 18-pointTimes New Roman font for children to practice rereading the nextday.

Received February 12, 1997Revision received April 1,1998

Accepted April 4,1998 •