Segmental Analysis of Speech and its Relation to Reading Ability Jos~ Morals Laboratoire de Psychologie exp6rimentale Universit6 libre de Bruxelles
The relationships between the acquisition of segmental awareness, i.e. the awareness of phonemic and phonetic units, and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy are examined: segmental awareness is elicited by learning to read and write in the alphabetic system and is crucial to success in this learning. It is also argued that the development of the ability of explicit analysis of speech into segments requires a general analytic capacity. Cognitive explanations of dyslexia must take into account the fact that the ability of segemental analysis of most dyslexics is very poor. Given that dyslexics do not lack experience with alphabetic material nor, as suggested by their performance on nonspeech tasks, analytic capacity, one likely factor of this inability may be related to the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity operates. The normal format of this representation probably corresponds to a sequence of articulatory acts or syllables. In most dyslexics, the format of this representation might not be adequate for the isolation of segments.
Segmental Awareness and Alphabetic Literacy F i f t e e n y e a r s a g o , I s a b e l l e L i b e r m a n p u b l i s h e d in The Bulletin of the Orton Society a p a p e r i n w h i c h s h e s t a t e s t h a t r e a d i n g in t h e a l p h a b e t i c I thank Alain Content and R6gine Kolinsky for helpful remarks on a previous version. Our work received support from the Belgian "Fonds de la Recherche fondamentale collective" under contracts No. 2.4505.76 and 2.4505.80 and from the Belgian Minist6re de la Politique et de la Programmation scientifiques (Action de Recherche concert6e "Processus cognitifs dans la lecture"). Requests for reprints should be sent to Jos6 Morais, Laboratoire de Psychologie exp6rimentale, Av. Ad. Buyl 117, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.
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system requires awareness of the phonemic structure of language (Liberman 1971). The same statement was made in the following years by other outstanding researchers, like Mattingly (1972) and Elkonin (1973). This idea, which may seem obvious today, provided the basis for a revolutionary development in the study of reading acquisition and its failures. The notion that reading in the alphabetic system requires segmental awareness made it imperative to assess whether segmental awareness is immediately available to prereaders or not. (Henceforth in this paper, the term segmental awareness and its derivatives will refer to sublexical elements at the phonemic level.) Liberman et al. (1974) ran an experiment in which they asked their subjects to indicate the number of phonemes of a spoken word. No preschool child reached the criterion of six consecutive errorless trials, and only 17 percent of the kindergartners did so. By contrast, 70 percent of the first-graders reached the same criterion. A tempting interpretation of the apparent discovery of the segmental structure of speech during the first grade is, of course, that reading instruction itself triggers segmental awareness. However, since first-graders are one year older than kindergartners, the alternative explanation of intellectual maturation could not be discarded. This alternative was examined by our group (Morais et al. 1979). We reasoned that illiterate adults should display segmental ability if this depended only on intellectual maturation, but would give no evidence of it if reading instruction were a critical factor. To disentangle the two hypotheses we tested illiterate and exilliterate adults in Portugal, where there still exist people who, for socioeconomic reasons, neither attended school during childhood nor learned to read later on, and people who, coming from the same milieu, have learned to read only as adults. The task we used consisted of repeating an utterance provided by the examiner, but either omitting or adding an initial consonant. The illiterates scored less than 20 percent of correct responses on average, while the exilliterates scored more than 70 percent. These results have since been replicated (Morais et al. 1986). We concluded that the ability to deal explicitly with the phonetic units of speech is not acquired spontaneously in the course of cognitive growth, but demands some specific experiences, which, for most persons, are provided by learning to read and write in the alphabetic system. This reference to the alphabetic system could be thought of as premature, since we did not test people who read and write in nonalphabetic systems. Fortunately, Read et al. (1986) compared alphabetic and nonalphabetic literates in China on a test similar to ours and found similar results, i.e. nonalphabetic literates performed like the Portuguese illiterates, and alphabetic literates performed like the Portuguese exilliterates. Read and his colleagues have thus demonstrated
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that the ability to analyze speech into segments is related specifically to alphabetic literacy, not to literacy in general. On the other hand, Mann (1986) has found that third- and fourth-grade Japanese children who read kana and who have no knowledge of the alphabet show an important ability of segmental analysis. However, though the kana does convey some information about phonemic and phonetic distinctions, it mainly represents language at a syllable level. It is of interest then that the ability develops much later in the Japanese than in the American children. In conclusion, though segmental awareness is not exclusively tied to alphabetic literacy, it is the voie royale for segmental awareness. How extensive are the effects of literacy? Has alphabetic literacy a specific effect on the ability of segmental analysis, or does it have a general effect on analytic abilities? To be sure, the effect is not general. Illiterate adults have much trouble in detecting a target consisting of scattered elements within a figure. However, on such tasks exilliterates perform as poorly as illiterates. As a matter of fact, both groups are clearly inferior to second-graders (Kolinsky et al. in press). It is normal schooling, rather than literacy per se, that stimulates this sort of visual analysis. In a similar vein, we have found that acquiring literacy has no significant effect on the ability to segment a melody (Morais et al. 1986). The task consisted of listening to a four-note sequence played by the examiner on a xylophone, and then replaying the sequence but omitting the initial note. Exilliterates, though scoring relatively high on the task of initial consonant deletion, performed at roughly the same low level as illiterates on this task of initial note deletion. We did not use other nonspeech sounds, but it is likely that literacy specifically affects the analysis of speech. Language has constituents of a different nature and at different levels of structure. It would not be surprising if literacy affected analysis of language at other levels than the segmental one. For instance, sentences are made of words, but the notion of word might only become clear after one had learned to represent each word as a character or a group of characters separated from the adjacent words by an empty space. We have asked illiterate adults to repeat short sentences and to introduce pauses between words (Cary, Morais, and Bertelson in preparation). Only 6.4 percent of the responses were correct. Of course, exilliterates performed at a much higher level, 65.9 percent on average. Most of the time the illiterates segmented the sentences into main syntactic constituents. For instance, the sentence, "O carro estfi parado a porta" (The car stands in front of the door), yielded the segmentation, "O carro / est~ parado / a porta," in the majority of subjects. One might say that the illiterates' abnormal behavior results simply from misunderstanding of the term "word." However, this is not the case. In a further experiment, we presented the same sentences to a new group of subjects, but only after giving them a series of six exam-
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ples for which we provided the correct response. Giving examples had no effect on the score. The only difference was a somewhat greater tendency to segment into syllabic units (10 percent and 2 percent of the responses in the situation with and without examples, respectively). Thus, the main syntactic constituents provide the most apparent units with meaning, and, if discouraged from making this kind of segmentation, illiterates may eventually shift to segmentation into the most apparent units of expression, i.e. the syllables. One of the effects of literacy on language analysis is to disclose the word unit. However, this effect is likely to be related to literacy in general, and not specifically to alphabetic literacy. What about illiterates' ability to analyze speech into syllables? We know, for instance, from the study of Liberman et al. (1974) that many kindergartners display this ability. However, the percentage of children reaching the criterion of six consecutive errorless trials in syllable counting increased from 48 percent in kindergarten to 90 percent in first grade. Testing illiterate adults, we have found that most illiterates perform at a reasonably good level on initial syllable deletion, though as a group they are significantly inferior to exilliterates (Morais et al. 1986). Thus, literacy acquisition may elicit syllable awareness in some people w h o earlier had not reached awareness of these units, but this effect is clearly less dramatic than the effect on segmental awareness. In addition, nonalphabetic literacy may guarantee syllable awareness as well as alphabetic literacy, as demonstrated by Mann (1986) with Japanese children. One may therefore conclude that awareness of phonemic segments is the main, the characteristic effect of alphabetic literacy. The lack of segmental awareness in illiterates has an important practical implication: it would be foolish to wait for signs of segmental awareness before initiating reading instruction. Naturally, kindergartners who live in highly literate environments may exhibit a much greater ability of segmental analysis than their peers living in a less literate milieu. But this does not mean that the latter have less potential capacity to acquire both segmental awareness and literacy. On the other hand, there are at least two extrapolations from the illiterates' finding that we should rigorously examine. The first is that segmental awareness cannot arise without reading instruction. As will be seen, there are some data suggesting it can. The second is that segmental awareness follows, but is not a cause of literacy. There are also data showing that such awareness plays a crucial role in the first stages of literacy acquisition. I will examine both issues in the following sections. The fact that segmental awareness is usually acquired in the situation of learning to read does not imply that it cannot be acquired under the influence of other experiences. (The qualification "in an alphabetic
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system" should be understood to apply throughout.) In one study of our group (Content et al. 1982), it was found that kindergartners improved their scores in the task of initial consonant deletion after several sessions of oral games during which subjects' attention was called to the phonetic structure of speech. The improvement after such training was greater than in a control group whose training time had been devoted to mathematical games. In a further study (Content et al. 1986), we could observe improvements in the same deletion task only by giving constant corrective feedback throughout the test. However, the segmental ability acquired this way may be very limited. Content (1985) has obtained data suggesting that what the child learns in the situation of corrective feedback is not to represent, for example, the two segments contained in a CV syllable, but simply to focus on the vowel. As a matter of fact, improvements in the deletion test transfered significantly to a subsequent task of classification of CV syllables on the basis of common vowel, but not to classification on the basis of common consonant. Acquiring full segmental awareness without literacy instruction is certainly not an impossible task, but it would require much more extensive training than that contained in our experiments. I have claimed that segmental awareness is elicited by literacy instruction. This is not inconsistent with the idea that, on the other hand, segmental awareness may be a crucial factor in literacy acquisition. Segmental awareness is of the greatest utility in learning the rules of grapheme-phoneme conversion; it would be very hard to reach high standards of literacy if these rules were not mastered. There are now many data supporting the idea that segmental awareness plays a crucial role in the first stages of literacy acquisition. They were obtained either by inspecting the effect of training on segmental analysis on later reading scores (cf. Lundberg, Olofsson, and Wall 1980; Bradley and Bryant 1983), or by using multivariate methods to determine the contribution of one variable to another (cf. Torn6us 1984; Juel, Griffith, and Gough 1986). A more detailed analysis of this causal relationship was carried out by Treiman and Baron (1983) and by Fox and Routh (1984) with kindergarten subjects. Treiman and Baron taught their subjects to segment CVC utterances into initial consonant and rhyme (example: HEM = H + EM). Then the subjects had to learn, by a paired-associate procedure, to sound out a series of four orthographic patterns. This included one isolated consonant, one rhyme, one item combining the consonant and the rhyme (pronunciation of which could be obtained by combining the pronunciations of the two preceding items), and one item phonologically unrelated to the others. In the experimental condition, the first three items corresponded to utterances that had been analyzed orally, while in the control condition they had simply been repeated during the same time. The results showed that in the control condition the subjects were confused by the similarity of the related
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item, while in the experimental condition they took advantage of the spelling-to-sound correspondences. Thus, subsyllabic analysis was used to establish spelling-to-sound correspondences, and these were used to read orthographic patterns. When reading is taught using a "phonic" method, both the segmental structure of speech and the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are made explicit by the teacher. Neither of these factors is present, however, when reading is taught using the whole-word method. Then, an interesting question is whether or not children learning to read according to the whole-word method acquire segmental awareness and whether or not they manage to use grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences in reading. Our data indicate that phonic instruction makes the ability of segmental analysis develop much more quickly. Using a task requiring the subject to reverse units in an utterance, we have found that phonic-trained first graders tested at the fourth month of the school year perform much better on phoneme-reversal than those trained by a whole-word method. By contrast, on syllable-reversal, the two groups were both rather good and did not differ significantly from each other (Alegria, Pignot, and Morais 1982). In a further study of first graders who were learning to read according to the whole-word method (Alegria, Morais, and D'Alimonte submitted), we tested them twice, first at the fourth and then at the ninth month of the school year. Performance on the task of initial consonant deletion was very low, and on average very little progress was observed (from 6 percent to 18 percent of correct responses) in five months. However, there were large interindividual differences. Five of the subjects (13 percent) made considerable progress, reaching a high level of performance. These particular children have probably acquired segmental awareness through their confrontation with the alphabetic material. Thus, segmental awareness can be attained by some children even if segments are not made explicit by the method of instruction. The more interesting aspect of this study concerns the relationship between segmental awareness and success in reading. At the ninth month, the children were given a word reading test. Reading scores were on average very low, probably reflecting the fact that the words were unfamiliar to the subjects. However, here again there were large interindividual differences. While most of the subjects were totally unsuccessful, some managed to decode a substantial number of words. According to Uta Frith's (1985) model, the former would still be at a "logographic" stage, i.e. they can only apprehend words they have met before, while the latter would have reached the "orthographic" stage, i.e. they can decode unfamiliar words. The most interesting point is that all the subjects who made significant progress in the task of consonant deletion had apparently reached the "orthographic" stage. Only two subjects who failed segment deletion were able to read
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at the same level. However, even they probably had some degree of segmental ability, since they succeeded in a further task of segment counting. Thus, autonomous reading seems to require segmental awareness. Moreover, first graders who have acquired some segmental ability, despite the whole-word method of instruction, are much better readers than those w h o have not. Another notable aspect of the study concerns the specificity of the relation between autonomous reading and segmental awareness. Children were also tested twice on initial syllable deletion and rhyme detection. The results show that a large number of subjects could obtain high scores on these tasks while performing very poorly on word reading. Thus, the ability to read unfamiliar words in the first stages of the learning process is specifically related to segmental awareness rather than to any other form of phonological or speech awareness. As much as the ability to read, and perhaps even more, the ability to spell depends on segmental awareness. A recent study by Liberman et al. (1985) indicates that the kindergartners' insights into the segmental structure of speech underlie their proficiency in invented spelling. While two tests of segmental analysis and one of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence together accounted for 93 percent of the variance, the other tests--picture naming, receptive vocabular~ letter naming and writing, word repetition, syllable deletion--did not contribute to the variance in a significant way. This study makes two important suggestions. First, segmental awareness may be stimulated by experience with alphabetic material in the absence of formal instruction. Second, analysis at the level of phonemic segment is the crucial factor of early spelling; linguistic abilities and analysis at higher levels are less important. Factors in Awareness of Phonemic Segments
Having asserted that awareness of phonemic segments is crucial to reading and writing, it is urgent to try to assess the conditions that must be met to allow a child to develop that awareness. One of the conditions has already been specified: it is reading instruction or, more generally, experience with alphabetic writing. But it is clear that instruction and experience are not enough. The few children in the study by Alegria et al. (submitted) who acquired some segmental ability in five months were not superior to the others on the initial test, and their alphabetic experience during those months was presumably not greater. What makes the difference, assuming that there was not too much family intervention, must be some cognitive capacity or capacities. One capacity that a priori seems to underlie segmental ability is the capacity to ignore the most apparent or useful properties of an object or event and focus on other properties. In the speech domain, this
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means the possibility of paying attention to the sound of speech while disregarding meaning. Thus, we would expect the ability to compare length of spoken words, whenever this conflicts with the size of the referents, to be correlated with the ability of segmental analysis. In one of our studies (Content et al. in preparation), we tested kindergartners on an oral version of the mow-motorcycle task. The words to be compared for length were such that their referents' size was nearly the same (example: "chaussette/pied" [sock/foot]), or incongruent with phonological length ("chat/papillon" [cat/butterfly]). In the former, or neutral condition, performance was about the same for subjects who did reach a particular criterion in deleting either the initial syllable or the initial phonemic segment as for those who did not. In the incongruent condition, performance was much poorer. But here subjects who did succeed in the deletion tasks showed a much smaller effect of semantic distraction than subjects who did not. Thus, while simply paying attention to phonology does not allow any prediction regarding speech analysis, the ability to disregard meaning w h e n this is a salient property correlates with the ability to analyze utterances into syllables and into segments. In other words, though the ability to disregard meaning has some relationship with the ability of segmental analysis, it cannot account for what distinguishes segmental awareness from syllable awareness. Presumably, segmental awareness can only be reached if, in addition to ignoring semantic information, the child is able to ignore the unity of the articulatory act, which corresponds roughly to the syllable. Breaking the syllable into segments probably requires some degree of analytic capacity, a capacity that is crucial to the acquisition of segmental awareness. In my view, it establishes a link between segmental awareness and other forms of phonological awareness. Attention to phonology is present, for instance, in the self-corrections of pronunciation observed in two- and three-year-olds (cf. Clark 1978). But attention to pronunciation does not imply representing each segment as such: at this stage, the phonological string is probably represented in an unsegmented form or in syllabic constituents. Some authors (e. g. Bradley and Bryant 1985) believe that sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration "depend on breaking words and syllables into phonological segments" (p. 5). However, there is now m u c h evidence to reject this view. Experiments in which rhyming and segmentation tasks are used show that the former are much easier. For instance, Stanovich, Cunningham, and Cramer (1984), testing kindergartners, found only 25 percent of correct responses on average for segment deletion, but 77 percent and 86 percent for rhyme choice and rhyme supply, respectively. In the study on illiterates (Morais et al. 1986), many of those subjects had no special difficulty in a rhyme detection task. Illiterates were on average inferior to exilliterates (66 percent and 97 percent of correct responses,
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respectively), but the effect of literacy here might consist exactly in providing subjects with an analytic strategy to deal with rhyme. Recently, we (Cary, Morais, and Bertelson in preparation) have examined an illiterate poet who is extremely expert in manipulating rhyme. Of course, he performed perfectly on several tasks of rhyme detection and production. He had no difficulty whatsoever in repeating the alliterating words presented in a sentence, and he spontaneously added other alliterating words. However, he was unable to identify immediately thereafter the phoneme responsible for the alliteration. Moreover, his performance on the task of initial consonant deletion was low and well within the range of the Portuguese illiterate groups. The fact that rhyme and alliteration may be described in terms of common constituents does not imply that people cannot judge this kind of relationship on a different basis, either by evaluating global similarity or by paying attention to prominent parts of the utterances. Our poet probably had these capacities to a high degree, but since he was illiterate, he lacked the opportunity to exercise the analytic capacity that would make him able to isolate the common segments. Versification and segmental analysis may be quite different metalinguistic abilities. In sum, segmental awareness would d e p e n d on the conjunction of three factors: the experience of attempting to read alphabetic material, the capacity to disregard irrelevant but otherwise salient properties, and the capacity of analysis. The two capacities may be present in the absence of speech. This is probably the situation of many illiterate adults. The alphabetic experience may exist, but one or both capacities may be deficient. This would result in some reading disability. Now, an important question is: What kind of capacity is the capacity of analysis that underlies segmental awareness? Is it a general cognitive capacity, or something specific, i.e. built in the mind to allow the discovery of the segmental structure of speech? It is important, in my view, to distinguish between the ability of segmental analysis and the cognitive capacity that underlies this ability. The ability is, of course, specific, as specific as the abilities of musical or visual analysis. Each one requires specific experiences. But the cognitive capacity must be general. The alphabetic system of writing is a cultural product, shared by only a minority of the more recent humans. And alphabetic literacy is probably the only function of segmental awareness. Why, then, should people be born with a specific capacity for segmental awareness that would be only waiting for a particular experience to develop? Unlike language, the immediate roots of literacy are not biological. Biological functions have characteristic rates of development. This does not seem to be the case for literacy. People can learn to read and write as adults. The ability of segmental analysis apparently can be learned also in adulthood, since our exilliterate subjects perform relatively well on tasks tapping on this ability. Moreover,
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it does not seem that illiterate adults are less responsive to the attempts to teach them segmental analysis than preliterate children. Recently, we presented a group of twelve illiterates with the task of initial consonant deletion, providing explicit instruction and using the procedure of constant corrective feedback (Morais et al. submitted). Performance increased from 24 percent correct responses on the first block to 69 percent on the fifth and last block. Seventy-five percent of the subjects did learn the task. This is roughly what we found in the kindergarten studies (Content 1985; Content et al. 1986). Thus, the capacity necessary to analyze speech at the segmental level does not seem to atrophy with age in the absence of reading instruction. There seems to be no critical period for acquiring segmental awareness. How and Why are Dyslexics Deficient in Segmental Ability?
At this point, we have to solve an apparent paradox. If the analytic capacity necessary to develop segmental ability is general, how then can we account for reading disabilities that seem both to be highly specific and to depend on biological factors? Dyslexics have had much experience with alphabetic material; therefore, experience cannot be the critical factor. Regarding the ability to shift attention from meaning to sound, it has been frequently noted that young dyslexics have difficulty in avoiding semantic content. However, it does not seem that shifting attention from content to form constitutes a serious problem in older dyslexics. There remains the third factor, i.e., the capacity of analysis. Dyslexics often exhibit clear signs of analytic competence in other domains. If the analytic capacity I have been talking about is general, and if segmental awareness is actually the stumbling-block for many dyslexics, then there should be some additional, and this time specific, factor of segmental ability. Before trying to answer this question, let us verify whether or not dyslexics have trouble with segmental analysis. The evidence is enormous. As reported by Savin (1972), many young dyslexics are unable to play games like Pig Latin, which involve the manipulation of segments. Take also the influential finding of Rozin, Poritsky, and Sotsky (1971): American second graders with clear reading disability can learn relatively easily to read English written material with Chinese characters. Indeed, the fact that these children are able to deal with a logographic system, but not with the alphabetic one, suggests that the lack of ability to analyze speech into segments underlies much reading failure. Consistent with these observations, we (Morais, Cluytens, and Alegria 1984) have found that a group of Belgian young children diagnosed as dyslexics by an official center and attending a school specializing in dyslexia (mean age: 8 years) performed very poorly on initial consonant deletion. They scored only 14 percent correct responses, while normal readers from first grade
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(mean age: 6 years, 7 months) and from second grade (mean age: 7 years, 8 months) were much better: 71 percent and 95 percent, respectively. By contrast, the dyslexics did not show any inferiority on a task consisting of replaying a melody without the first note. Their mean score (29 percent correct responses) was only slightly and not significantly inferior to that of the second graders (39 percent); and it was significantly superior to that of the first graders (17 percent). Thus, for nonspeech analysis, dyslexics seem near the norm. The conclusion is that they are specifically impaired in speech analysis. Another study was run recently in France by Lecocq (1986). He tested 45 dyslexics, w h o m he divided into three groups by age: between eight and nine years, between ten and eleven, and between twelve and thirteen. One of the tasks consisted in repeating a threesegment nonword but omitting one segment which occupied the initial, medial, or final position. The three groups scored on average 51 percent, 60 percent, and 78 percent correct responses, respectively, while three groups of normal readers matched in terms of chronological age, scored 80 percent, 96 percent, and 100 percent. Thus, the dyslexics were clearly inferior to their age peers. From the 45 dyslexics tested, two groups of 15 subjects each were constituted, corresponding to two different levels of mean reading age: 82 and 94 months. These two groups scored 55 percent and 61 percent, respectively. These scores are clearly inferior to that of normal readers with the same mean reading age: 86 percent and 98 percent. Can dyslexics acquire segmental awareness? Fox and Routh (1983) report the results of a longitudinal study showing that 9-year-old children with relatively severe reading disabilities were able to analyze words into segments; however, three years earlier, w h e n they were in first grade, they lacked segmental ability, differing in this respect from good readers. In a similar vein, we have tested a group of 11- to 13-yearold dyslexics, in the same school where we tested the young dyslexics of the above mentioned study; we found their performance to be quite good: 96 percent correct responses in initial consonant deletion. Since there is little exodus in this school from the elementary to the advanced classes, it seems that most dyslexics attain, after considerable effort, some segmental ability. The snag is that reading and writing require not only segmental awareness but also the automatization of segmentation and blending abilities. According to Stanovich, Cunningham, and Feeman (1984), decoding speed accounts for the largest amount of unique variance in the reading comprehension scores measured at the end of the first grade. The level of segmental analysis attained by the dyslexics is thus probably insufficient. More complex tasks of segmental manipulation should reveal such deficiencies. Snowling, Stackhouse, and Rack (1986) have examined seven dyslexics (three with reading ages around seven and four with reading ages from ten to
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twelve) who revealed a range of phonological deficits in reading and spelling. They were perfect at identifying the first segment of monosyllabic words. But, in the "spoonerism" task, consisting in permuting the initial segment of two names, no subject of low reading age could grasp the principle of the task, and among the others one interchanged initial syllables instead of segments, and two were successful but took a long time to complete each item. In our laboratory, Gavrilovic, Content, and I (unpublished data) tested an adult dyslexic who has a university degree. He does not make errors in reading words, but he is much slower than normal readers and sometimes makes errors in reading nonwords. In a task consisting of detecting a phoneme target in lists of words, he performed without any error. However, he was much slower than normal subjects. In the "spoonerism" task he was very poor, with only three correct responses out of 27 trials. A syllabic permutation was apparent in most responses, although there were additional errors revealing how difficult the task was for him. Accepting the fact that dyslexics have serious trouble with segmental analysis, I turn now to the question of why they have it. One possibilit~ contemplated in some of the current research, is that they have a linguistic deficiency. Several linguistic competences have been examined. Dyslexics, compared to normal readers, are slower on name retrieval, use phonological codes in short-term memory to a lesser extent, perceive and/or repeat speech sounds less well, and are inferior in syntactic ability. Evidence on each of these points remains either scarce or unclear, and certainly not as massive as for the ability of segmental analysis. In addition, the researchers seldom take into account the possibility that differences in those abilities between normal readers and dyslexics, or between good and poor readers, are an effect rather than a cause of reading ability. Regarding this issue, examining the linguistic competences of illiterate adults may be of some interest. We have found, for instance, that illiterates recognize speech sounds presented dichotically, that is, in difficult conditions of listening, much more poorly than literates (Morais et al. 1987). They also have smaller verbal memory span (Morais et al. 1986). And preliminary results suggest that they have trouble with some syntactic constructions, which are infrequent in oral language. Of course, huge differences, like those obtained between illiterates and literates should not be expected between dyslexics and normal readers during literacy acquisition. But, whenever huge differences are observed betweeen illiterates and literates, we may wonder if small differences between good and poor readers are not due to expertise in reading. After all, the benefit of reading proficiency is being able to handle more information more efficiently. On the other hand, a most exciting result for the researcher interested in the causes of dyslexia would be that dyslexics and normal readers differ in some ability or phenomenon in which illiterates and literates do not.
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Take, for instance, the rhyme effect in short-term memory, i.e. that nonrhyming lists are better recalled than rhyming ones. This effect seems to reflect the use of a speech-based code. Illiterates exhibit the rhyme effect to a similar extent as exilliterates (Morais et al. 1986). Though the evidence on the rhyme effect as a function of reading ability is not clear, some recent studies suggest no difference between dyslexics and normal readers with auditory presentation (e.g. Hall et al. 1981; Hall et al. 1983; Jorm et al. 1984; Morais et al. 1986; Lecocq 1986), but a smaller rhyme effect in dyslexics than normal readers with visual presentation of words (Rack 1985). If the latter result were replicated with object pictures, and if in the same situation there were no literate/ illiterate difference, then one would be allowed to suggest that dyslexics suffer from some inability to code visual information in a speechbased way. For the moment this is simply a conjecture offered to illustrate one of the ways illiteracy can be used to study dyslexia. In the present state of the art, the unfortunate conclusion is that we do not know why dyslexics have such serious trouble with segmental analysis. Given that most of them seem capable of analysis of other sorts of material than speech, I am tempted to believe that there is something wrong with the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity operates. In the dyslexics, the format of this representation could not be structured in such a way as to permit an easy analysis into segments. The normal format probably corresponds more or less to a sequence of syllables, thus allowing relatively easy access to these units. One interesting finding is that the young dyslexics we have tested (Morais, Cluytens, and Alegria 1984) scored only 68 percent correct responses on average in a task of initial syllable deletion. Though this performance is much better than for segment deletion, it remains much inferior to that of first graders (95 percent). In the group of dyslexics, three subjects were specially poor (less than 30 percent correct). The curious thing is that two of them were among the best subjects of their group and better than any normal reader from the first grade in the task of musical segmentation. In songs, notes frequently correspond to syllables. How can someone be unable to delete the first syllable from an utterance while being able to delete the first note from a melody? Consistent with our results, in the study already mentioned of Lecocq (1986), deleting a syllable from the beginning, the middle, or the end of a trisyllabic word created important difficulties for dyslexics: 46 percent, 65 percent, and 88 percent of correct responses on average, for groups of age between eight and nine, ten and eleven, and twelve and thirteen, respectively, while corresponding groups of normal readers were much better: 93 percent, 98 percent, and 100 percent. For groups equated in terms of mean reading age, dyslexics were also clearly inferior to normal readers: 55 percent and 87 percent, respectively (mean reading age: 82 months), 61 percent and 92
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percent (mean reading age: 92 months). (Unfortunately, the fact that the syllable task used words and the phonemic segment task used nonwords prevents the syllable/segment comparison.) At odds with the present hypothesis, our group of illiterate adults (Morais et al. 1986) did not obtain a better score than the dyslexics in the syllable deletion task. However, in the experiment in which we tried to teach segmental analysis to illiterates, we observed that, in a preliminary phase of syllable deletion, all the illiterates could delete the initial syllable correctly and without hesitation after no more than a few training trials. We still do not have corresponding data on dyslexics, and we need them. Since a slightly difficult access to syllables could strongly affect the analysis into segments, my feeling is that we need to assess more exactly how much dyslexics are sensitive to the syllabic structure of speech. More generally, we need to develop experimental situations that could tell what speech looks like to the dyslexic.
RefeFences Alegria, J., Morais, J. and D'Alimonte, G. Submitted. The development of speech analysis abilities and reading acquisition in a whole-word setting. Alegria, J., Pignot, E. and Morais, J. 1982. Phonetic analysis of speech and memory codes in beginning readers. Memory and Cognition 10:451-456. Bradley, L. and Bryant, E E. 1983. Categorizing sounds and learning to read--a causal connection. Nature 301:419-421. Bradley, L. and Bryant, E 1985. Rhyme and Reason in Reading and Spelling. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cary, L., Morais, J., and Bertelson, E In preparation. A case study: The metaphonological abilities of an illiterate poet. Clark, E. V. 1978. Children's awareness of language. In A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella, and W. J. M. Levelt (eds.). The Child's Conception of Language. Berlin: Springer. Content, A. 1985. L'analyse exp&imentale de la parole chez l'enfant. Universit6 libre de Bruxelles: Ph.D. thesis. Content, A., Kolinsky, R., Morais, J. and Bertelson, P. 1986. Phonetic segmentation in prereaders: Effect of corrective information. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 42:49-72. Content, C., Kolinsky, R., Morais, J., and Bertelson, P. In preparation. Correlates of speech segmentation skills in kindergarteners. Content, A., Morals, J., Alegria, J. and Bertelson, P. 1982. Accelerating the development of phonetic segmentation skills in kindergartners. Cahiers de Psychologie cognitive 2:259-269. Elkonin, D. B. (1973). U.S.S.R. In J. Downing (ed.). Comparative Reading. New York: MacMillan. Fox, B. and Routh, D. K. 1983. Reading disability, phonemic analysis and dysphonetic spelling: A follow-up study. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 12:28-32. Fox, B. and Routh, D. K. 1984. Phonemic analysis and synthesis as word-attack skills: Revisited. Journal of Educational Psychology 76:1059-1064. Frith, U. 1985. Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia. In K. Patterson, J. C. Marshall and M. Coltheart (eds.). Surface Dyslexia. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Hall, J. W., Ewing, A., Tinzmann, M. B. and Wilson, K. P. 1981. Phonetic coding in dyslexics and normal readers. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 17:177-178. Hall, J. W., Wilson, K. E, Humphreys, M. S., Tinzmann, M. B. and Bowyer, P. M. 1983. Phonemic-similarity effects in good vs. poor readers. Memory and Cognition 11:520-527. Jorm, A. F., Share, D. L., MacLean, R. and Matthews, R. 1984. Phonological confusability in short-term memory for sentences as a predictor of reading ability. BritishJournal of Psychology 75:393-400. Juel, C., Griffith, R L. and Gough, P. B. 1986. Acquisition of literacy: A longitudinal study of children in first and second grade. Journal of Educational Psychology 78:243-255. Kolinsky, R., Morals, J., Content, A. and Cary, L. In press. Finding parts within figures: A developmental study. Perception. Lecocq, P. 1986. Sensibilit~/~ la similarit~ phon6tique chez les enfants dyslexiques et les bons lecteurs. L'Annde Psychologique86:201-221. Liberman, I. Y. 1971. Basic research in speech and lateralization of language: Some implications for reading disability. Bulletin of the Orton Society 21:71-87. Liberman, I. Y., Rubin, H., Duqu~s, S. and Carlisle, J. 1985. Linguistic abilities and spelling proficiency in kindergartners and adult poor spellers. In D. Gray (ed.). Biobehavioral Measures of Dyslexia. Parkton, MD: York Press. Liberman, I. Y., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F. W. and Carter, B. 1974. Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child. Journalof Experimental Child Psychology 18:201-212. Lundberg, I., Olofsson, A. and Wall, S. 1980. Reading and spelling skills in the first school years predicted from phonemic awareness skills in kindergarten. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 21:159-173. Mann, V. A. 1986. Phonological awareness: The role of reading experience. Cognition 24:65-92. Mattingly, I. G. 1972. Reading, the linguistic process and linguistic awareness. In J. E Kavanagh and I. G. Mattingly (eds.). Language by Ear and by Eye: The relationship between speechand reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Morais, J., Bertelson, P., Carj6 L. and Alegria, J. 1986. Literacy training and speech segmentation. Cognition 24:45-64. Morais, J., Cary, L., Alegria, J. and Bertelson, P. 1979. Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously? Cognition 7:323-331. Morais, J., Castro, S. L., Sdiar-Cabral, L., Kolinsky, R. and Content, A. 1987. In press. Effects of literacy on the recognition of dichotic words. QuarterlyJournal of Experi-
mental Psychology. Morais, J., Cluytens, M. and Alegria, J. 1984. Segmentation abilities of dyslexics and normal readers. Perceptualand Motor Skills 58:221-222. Morais, J., Cluytens, M., Alegria, J. and Content, A. 1986. Speech-mediated retention in dyslexics. Perceptualand Motor Skills 62:119-126. Morais, J., Content, A., Bertelson, P., Cary, L. and Kolinsky, R. Submitted. Is there a sensitive period for the acquisition of segmental analysis? Rack, J. E 1985. Orthographic and phonetic coding in developmental dyslexia. British Journal of Psychology 76:325-340. Read, C., Zhang, Y., Nie, H. and Ding, B. 1986. The ability to manipulate speech sounds depends on knowing alphabetic writing. Cognition 24:31-44. Rozin, P., Poritsky, S. and Sotsky, R. 1971. American children with reading problems can easily learn English represented by Chinese characters. Science 171:1264-1267. Savin, H. B. 1972. What the child knows about speech when he starts to learn to read. In J. E Kavanagh and I. G. Mattingly (eds.). Languageby Ear and by Eye: The relationship between speech and reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Snowling, M., Stackhouse, J. and Rack, J. 1986. Phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia-a developmental analysis. Cognitive Neuropsychology 3:309-339. Stanovich, K. E., Cunningham, A. E. and Cramer, B. B. 1984. Assessing phonological awareness in kindergarten children: Issues of task compatibility. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 38:175-190. Stanovich, K. E., Cunningham, A. E. and Feeman, D. J. 1984. Intelligence, cognitive skills and reading progress. Reading Research Quarterly 19:278-303. Torn6us, M. 1984. Phonological awareness and reading: A chicken and egg problem? Journal of Educational Psychology 76:1346-1358. Treiman, R. and Baron, J. 1983. Phonemic analysis training helps children benefit from spelling-sound rules. Memory and Cognition 11:382-389.
The relationships between the acquisition of segmental awareness, i.e. the awareness of phonemic and phonetic units, and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy are examined: segmental awareness is elicited by learning to read and write in the alphabetic system and is crucial to success in this learning. It is also argued that the development of the ability of explicit analysis of speech into segments requires a general analytic capacity. Cognitive explanations of dyslexia must take into account the fact that the ability of segemental analysis of most dyslexics is very poor. Given that dyslexics do not lack experience with alphabetic material nor, as suggested by their performance on nonspeech tasks, analytic capacity, one likely factor of this inability may be related to the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity operates. The normal format of this representation probably corresponds to a sequence of articulatory acts or syllables. In most dyslexics, the format of this representation might not be adequate for the isolation of segments.
Segmental Awareness and Alphabetic Literacy F i f t e e n y e a r s a g o , I s a b e l l e L i b e r m a n p u b l i s h e d in The Bulletin of the Orton Society a p a p e r i n w h i c h s h e s t a t e s t h a t r e a d i n g in t h e a l p h a b e t i c I thank Alain Content and R6gine Kolinsky for helpful remarks on a previous version. Our work received support from the Belgian "Fonds de la Recherche fondamentale collective" under contracts No. 2.4505.76 and 2.4505.80 and from the Belgian Minist6re de la Politique et de la Programmation scientifiques (Action de Recherche concert6e "Processus cognitifs dans la lecture"). Requests for reprints should be sent to Jos6 Morais, Laboratoire de Psychologie exp6rimentale, Av. Ad. Buyl 117, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.
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system requires awareness of the phonemic structure of language (Liberman 1971). The same statement was made in the following years by other outstanding researchers, like Mattingly (1972) and Elkonin (1973). This idea, which may seem obvious today, provided the basis for a revolutionary development in the study of reading acquisition and its failures. The notion that reading in the alphabetic system requires segmental awareness made it imperative to assess whether segmental awareness is immediately available to prereaders or not. (Henceforth in this paper, the term segmental awareness and its derivatives will refer to sublexical elements at the phonemic level.) Liberman et al. (1974) ran an experiment in which they asked their subjects to indicate the number of phonemes of a spoken word. No preschool child reached the criterion of six consecutive errorless trials, and only 17 percent of the kindergartners did so. By contrast, 70 percent of the first-graders reached the same criterion. A tempting interpretation of the apparent discovery of the segmental structure of speech during the first grade is, of course, that reading instruction itself triggers segmental awareness. However, since first-graders are one year older than kindergartners, the alternative explanation of intellectual maturation could not be discarded. This alternative was examined by our group (Morais et al. 1979). We reasoned that illiterate adults should display segmental ability if this depended only on intellectual maturation, but would give no evidence of it if reading instruction were a critical factor. To disentangle the two hypotheses we tested illiterate and exilliterate adults in Portugal, where there still exist people who, for socioeconomic reasons, neither attended school during childhood nor learned to read later on, and people who, coming from the same milieu, have learned to read only as adults. The task we used consisted of repeating an utterance provided by the examiner, but either omitting or adding an initial consonant. The illiterates scored less than 20 percent of correct responses on average, while the exilliterates scored more than 70 percent. These results have since been replicated (Morais et al. 1986). We concluded that the ability to deal explicitly with the phonetic units of speech is not acquired spontaneously in the course of cognitive growth, but demands some specific experiences, which, for most persons, are provided by learning to read and write in the alphabetic system. This reference to the alphabetic system could be thought of as premature, since we did not test people who read and write in nonalphabetic systems. Fortunately, Read et al. (1986) compared alphabetic and nonalphabetic literates in China on a test similar to ours and found similar results, i.e. nonalphabetic literates performed like the Portuguese illiterates, and alphabetic literates performed like the Portuguese exilliterates. Read and his colleagues have thus demonstrated
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that the ability to analyze speech into segments is related specifically to alphabetic literacy, not to literacy in general. On the other hand, Mann (1986) has found that third- and fourth-grade Japanese children who read kana and who have no knowledge of the alphabet show an important ability of segmental analysis. However, though the kana does convey some information about phonemic and phonetic distinctions, it mainly represents language at a syllable level. It is of interest then that the ability develops much later in the Japanese than in the American children. In conclusion, though segmental awareness is not exclusively tied to alphabetic literacy, it is the voie royale for segmental awareness. How extensive are the effects of literacy? Has alphabetic literacy a specific effect on the ability of segmental analysis, or does it have a general effect on analytic abilities? To be sure, the effect is not general. Illiterate adults have much trouble in detecting a target consisting of scattered elements within a figure. However, on such tasks exilliterates perform as poorly as illiterates. As a matter of fact, both groups are clearly inferior to second-graders (Kolinsky et al. in press). It is normal schooling, rather than literacy per se, that stimulates this sort of visual analysis. In a similar vein, we have found that acquiring literacy has no significant effect on the ability to segment a melody (Morais et al. 1986). The task consisted of listening to a four-note sequence played by the examiner on a xylophone, and then replaying the sequence but omitting the initial note. Exilliterates, though scoring relatively high on the task of initial consonant deletion, performed at roughly the same low level as illiterates on this task of initial note deletion. We did not use other nonspeech sounds, but it is likely that literacy specifically affects the analysis of speech. Language has constituents of a different nature and at different levels of structure. It would not be surprising if literacy affected analysis of language at other levels than the segmental one. For instance, sentences are made of words, but the notion of word might only become clear after one had learned to represent each word as a character or a group of characters separated from the adjacent words by an empty space. We have asked illiterate adults to repeat short sentences and to introduce pauses between words (Cary, Morais, and Bertelson in preparation). Only 6.4 percent of the responses were correct. Of course, exilliterates performed at a much higher level, 65.9 percent on average. Most of the time the illiterates segmented the sentences into main syntactic constituents. For instance, the sentence, "O carro estfi parado a porta" (The car stands in front of the door), yielded the segmentation, "O carro / est~ parado / a porta," in the majority of subjects. One might say that the illiterates' abnormal behavior results simply from misunderstanding of the term "word." However, this is not the case. In a further experiment, we presented the same sentences to a new group of subjects, but only after giving them a series of six exam-
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ples for which we provided the correct response. Giving examples had no effect on the score. The only difference was a somewhat greater tendency to segment into syllabic units (10 percent and 2 percent of the responses in the situation with and without examples, respectively). Thus, the main syntactic constituents provide the most apparent units with meaning, and, if discouraged from making this kind of segmentation, illiterates may eventually shift to segmentation into the most apparent units of expression, i.e. the syllables. One of the effects of literacy on language analysis is to disclose the word unit. However, this effect is likely to be related to literacy in general, and not specifically to alphabetic literacy. What about illiterates' ability to analyze speech into syllables? We know, for instance, from the study of Liberman et al. (1974) that many kindergartners display this ability. However, the percentage of children reaching the criterion of six consecutive errorless trials in syllable counting increased from 48 percent in kindergarten to 90 percent in first grade. Testing illiterate adults, we have found that most illiterates perform at a reasonably good level on initial syllable deletion, though as a group they are significantly inferior to exilliterates (Morais et al. 1986). Thus, literacy acquisition may elicit syllable awareness in some people w h o earlier had not reached awareness of these units, but this effect is clearly less dramatic than the effect on segmental awareness. In addition, nonalphabetic literacy may guarantee syllable awareness as well as alphabetic literacy, as demonstrated by Mann (1986) with Japanese children. One may therefore conclude that awareness of phonemic segments is the main, the characteristic effect of alphabetic literacy. The lack of segmental awareness in illiterates has an important practical implication: it would be foolish to wait for signs of segmental awareness before initiating reading instruction. Naturally, kindergartners who live in highly literate environments may exhibit a much greater ability of segmental analysis than their peers living in a less literate milieu. But this does not mean that the latter have less potential capacity to acquire both segmental awareness and literacy. On the other hand, there are at least two extrapolations from the illiterates' finding that we should rigorously examine. The first is that segmental awareness cannot arise without reading instruction. As will be seen, there are some data suggesting it can. The second is that segmental awareness follows, but is not a cause of literacy. There are also data showing that such awareness plays a crucial role in the first stages of literacy acquisition. I will examine both issues in the following sections. The fact that segmental awareness is usually acquired in the situation of learning to read does not imply that it cannot be acquired under the influence of other experiences. (The qualification "in an alphabetic
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system" should be understood to apply throughout.) In one study of our group (Content et al. 1982), it was found that kindergartners improved their scores in the task of initial consonant deletion after several sessions of oral games during which subjects' attention was called to the phonetic structure of speech. The improvement after such training was greater than in a control group whose training time had been devoted to mathematical games. In a further study (Content et al. 1986), we could observe improvements in the same deletion task only by giving constant corrective feedback throughout the test. However, the segmental ability acquired this way may be very limited. Content (1985) has obtained data suggesting that what the child learns in the situation of corrective feedback is not to represent, for example, the two segments contained in a CV syllable, but simply to focus on the vowel. As a matter of fact, improvements in the deletion test transfered significantly to a subsequent task of classification of CV syllables on the basis of common vowel, but not to classification on the basis of common consonant. Acquiring full segmental awareness without literacy instruction is certainly not an impossible task, but it would require much more extensive training than that contained in our experiments. I have claimed that segmental awareness is elicited by literacy instruction. This is not inconsistent with the idea that, on the other hand, segmental awareness may be a crucial factor in literacy acquisition. Segmental awareness is of the greatest utility in learning the rules of grapheme-phoneme conversion; it would be very hard to reach high standards of literacy if these rules were not mastered. There are now many data supporting the idea that segmental awareness plays a crucial role in the first stages of literacy acquisition. They were obtained either by inspecting the effect of training on segmental analysis on later reading scores (cf. Lundberg, Olofsson, and Wall 1980; Bradley and Bryant 1983), or by using multivariate methods to determine the contribution of one variable to another (cf. Torn6us 1984; Juel, Griffith, and Gough 1986). A more detailed analysis of this causal relationship was carried out by Treiman and Baron (1983) and by Fox and Routh (1984) with kindergarten subjects. Treiman and Baron taught their subjects to segment CVC utterances into initial consonant and rhyme (example: HEM = H + EM). Then the subjects had to learn, by a paired-associate procedure, to sound out a series of four orthographic patterns. This included one isolated consonant, one rhyme, one item combining the consonant and the rhyme (pronunciation of which could be obtained by combining the pronunciations of the two preceding items), and one item phonologically unrelated to the others. In the experimental condition, the first three items corresponded to utterances that had been analyzed orally, while in the control condition they had simply been repeated during the same time. The results showed that in the control condition the subjects were confused by the similarity of the related
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item, while in the experimental condition they took advantage of the spelling-to-sound correspondences. Thus, subsyllabic analysis was used to establish spelling-to-sound correspondences, and these were used to read orthographic patterns. When reading is taught using a "phonic" method, both the segmental structure of speech and the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are made explicit by the teacher. Neither of these factors is present, however, when reading is taught using the whole-word method. Then, an interesting question is whether or not children learning to read according to the whole-word method acquire segmental awareness and whether or not they manage to use grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences in reading. Our data indicate that phonic instruction makes the ability of segmental analysis develop much more quickly. Using a task requiring the subject to reverse units in an utterance, we have found that phonic-trained first graders tested at the fourth month of the school year perform much better on phoneme-reversal than those trained by a whole-word method. By contrast, on syllable-reversal, the two groups were both rather good and did not differ significantly from each other (Alegria, Pignot, and Morais 1982). In a further study of first graders who were learning to read according to the whole-word method (Alegria, Morais, and D'Alimonte submitted), we tested them twice, first at the fourth and then at the ninth month of the school year. Performance on the task of initial consonant deletion was very low, and on average very little progress was observed (from 6 percent to 18 percent of correct responses) in five months. However, there were large interindividual differences. Five of the subjects (13 percent) made considerable progress, reaching a high level of performance. These particular children have probably acquired segmental awareness through their confrontation with the alphabetic material. Thus, segmental awareness can be attained by some children even if segments are not made explicit by the method of instruction. The more interesting aspect of this study concerns the relationship between segmental awareness and success in reading. At the ninth month, the children were given a word reading test. Reading scores were on average very low, probably reflecting the fact that the words were unfamiliar to the subjects. However, here again there were large interindividual differences. While most of the subjects were totally unsuccessful, some managed to decode a substantial number of words. According to Uta Frith's (1985) model, the former would still be at a "logographic" stage, i.e. they can only apprehend words they have met before, while the latter would have reached the "orthographic" stage, i.e. they can decode unfamiliar words. The most interesting point is that all the subjects who made significant progress in the task of consonant deletion had apparently reached the "orthographic" stage. Only two subjects who failed segment deletion were able to read
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at the same level. However, even they probably had some degree of segmental ability, since they succeeded in a further task of segment counting. Thus, autonomous reading seems to require segmental awareness. Moreover, first graders who have acquired some segmental ability, despite the whole-word method of instruction, are much better readers than those w h o have not. Another notable aspect of the study concerns the specificity of the relation between autonomous reading and segmental awareness. Children were also tested twice on initial syllable deletion and rhyme detection. The results show that a large number of subjects could obtain high scores on these tasks while performing very poorly on word reading. Thus, the ability to read unfamiliar words in the first stages of the learning process is specifically related to segmental awareness rather than to any other form of phonological or speech awareness. As much as the ability to read, and perhaps even more, the ability to spell depends on segmental awareness. A recent study by Liberman et al. (1985) indicates that the kindergartners' insights into the segmental structure of speech underlie their proficiency in invented spelling. While two tests of segmental analysis and one of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence together accounted for 93 percent of the variance, the other tests--picture naming, receptive vocabular~ letter naming and writing, word repetition, syllable deletion--did not contribute to the variance in a significant way. This study makes two important suggestions. First, segmental awareness may be stimulated by experience with alphabetic material in the absence of formal instruction. Second, analysis at the level of phonemic segment is the crucial factor of early spelling; linguistic abilities and analysis at higher levels are less important. Factors in Awareness of Phonemic Segments
Having asserted that awareness of phonemic segments is crucial to reading and writing, it is urgent to try to assess the conditions that must be met to allow a child to develop that awareness. One of the conditions has already been specified: it is reading instruction or, more generally, experience with alphabetic writing. But it is clear that instruction and experience are not enough. The few children in the study by Alegria et al. (submitted) who acquired some segmental ability in five months were not superior to the others on the initial test, and their alphabetic experience during those months was presumably not greater. What makes the difference, assuming that there was not too much family intervention, must be some cognitive capacity or capacities. One capacity that a priori seems to underlie segmental ability is the capacity to ignore the most apparent or useful properties of an object or event and focus on other properties. In the speech domain, this
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means the possibility of paying attention to the sound of speech while disregarding meaning. Thus, we would expect the ability to compare length of spoken words, whenever this conflicts with the size of the referents, to be correlated with the ability of segmental analysis. In one of our studies (Content et al. in preparation), we tested kindergartners on an oral version of the mow-motorcycle task. The words to be compared for length were such that their referents' size was nearly the same (example: "chaussette/pied" [sock/foot]), or incongruent with phonological length ("chat/papillon" [cat/butterfly]). In the former, or neutral condition, performance was about the same for subjects who did reach a particular criterion in deleting either the initial syllable or the initial phonemic segment as for those who did not. In the incongruent condition, performance was much poorer. But here subjects who did succeed in the deletion tasks showed a much smaller effect of semantic distraction than subjects who did not. Thus, while simply paying attention to phonology does not allow any prediction regarding speech analysis, the ability to disregard meaning w h e n this is a salient property correlates with the ability to analyze utterances into syllables and into segments. In other words, though the ability to disregard meaning has some relationship with the ability of segmental analysis, it cannot account for what distinguishes segmental awareness from syllable awareness. Presumably, segmental awareness can only be reached if, in addition to ignoring semantic information, the child is able to ignore the unity of the articulatory act, which corresponds roughly to the syllable. Breaking the syllable into segments probably requires some degree of analytic capacity, a capacity that is crucial to the acquisition of segmental awareness. In my view, it establishes a link between segmental awareness and other forms of phonological awareness. Attention to phonology is present, for instance, in the self-corrections of pronunciation observed in two- and three-year-olds (cf. Clark 1978). But attention to pronunciation does not imply representing each segment as such: at this stage, the phonological string is probably represented in an unsegmented form or in syllabic constituents. Some authors (e. g. Bradley and Bryant 1985) believe that sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration "depend on breaking words and syllables into phonological segments" (p. 5). However, there is now m u c h evidence to reject this view. Experiments in which rhyming and segmentation tasks are used show that the former are much easier. For instance, Stanovich, Cunningham, and Cramer (1984), testing kindergartners, found only 25 percent of correct responses on average for segment deletion, but 77 percent and 86 percent for rhyme choice and rhyme supply, respectively. In the study on illiterates (Morais et al. 1986), many of those subjects had no special difficulty in a rhyme detection task. Illiterates were on average inferior to exilliterates (66 percent and 97 percent of correct responses,
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respectively), but the effect of literacy here might consist exactly in providing subjects with an analytic strategy to deal with rhyme. Recently, we (Cary, Morais, and Bertelson in preparation) have examined an illiterate poet who is extremely expert in manipulating rhyme. Of course, he performed perfectly on several tasks of rhyme detection and production. He had no difficulty whatsoever in repeating the alliterating words presented in a sentence, and he spontaneously added other alliterating words. However, he was unable to identify immediately thereafter the phoneme responsible for the alliteration. Moreover, his performance on the task of initial consonant deletion was low and well within the range of the Portuguese illiterate groups. The fact that rhyme and alliteration may be described in terms of common constituents does not imply that people cannot judge this kind of relationship on a different basis, either by evaluating global similarity or by paying attention to prominent parts of the utterances. Our poet probably had these capacities to a high degree, but since he was illiterate, he lacked the opportunity to exercise the analytic capacity that would make him able to isolate the common segments. Versification and segmental analysis may be quite different metalinguistic abilities. In sum, segmental awareness would d e p e n d on the conjunction of three factors: the experience of attempting to read alphabetic material, the capacity to disregard irrelevant but otherwise salient properties, and the capacity of analysis. The two capacities may be present in the absence of speech. This is probably the situation of many illiterate adults. The alphabetic experience may exist, but one or both capacities may be deficient. This would result in some reading disability. Now, an important question is: What kind of capacity is the capacity of analysis that underlies segmental awareness? Is it a general cognitive capacity, or something specific, i.e. built in the mind to allow the discovery of the segmental structure of speech? It is important, in my view, to distinguish between the ability of segmental analysis and the cognitive capacity that underlies this ability. The ability is, of course, specific, as specific as the abilities of musical or visual analysis. Each one requires specific experiences. But the cognitive capacity must be general. The alphabetic system of writing is a cultural product, shared by only a minority of the more recent humans. And alphabetic literacy is probably the only function of segmental awareness. Why, then, should people be born with a specific capacity for segmental awareness that would be only waiting for a particular experience to develop? Unlike language, the immediate roots of literacy are not biological. Biological functions have characteristic rates of development. This does not seem to be the case for literacy. People can learn to read and write as adults. The ability of segmental analysis apparently can be learned also in adulthood, since our exilliterate subjects perform relatively well on tasks tapping on this ability. Moreover,
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it does not seem that illiterate adults are less responsive to the attempts to teach them segmental analysis than preliterate children. Recently, we presented a group of twelve illiterates with the task of initial consonant deletion, providing explicit instruction and using the procedure of constant corrective feedback (Morais et al. submitted). Performance increased from 24 percent correct responses on the first block to 69 percent on the fifth and last block. Seventy-five percent of the subjects did learn the task. This is roughly what we found in the kindergarten studies (Content 1985; Content et al. 1986). Thus, the capacity necessary to analyze speech at the segmental level does not seem to atrophy with age in the absence of reading instruction. There seems to be no critical period for acquiring segmental awareness. How and Why are Dyslexics Deficient in Segmental Ability?
At this point, we have to solve an apparent paradox. If the analytic capacity necessary to develop segmental ability is general, how then can we account for reading disabilities that seem both to be highly specific and to depend on biological factors? Dyslexics have had much experience with alphabetic material; therefore, experience cannot be the critical factor. Regarding the ability to shift attention from meaning to sound, it has been frequently noted that young dyslexics have difficulty in avoiding semantic content. However, it does not seem that shifting attention from content to form constitutes a serious problem in older dyslexics. There remains the third factor, i.e., the capacity of analysis. Dyslexics often exhibit clear signs of analytic competence in other domains. If the analytic capacity I have been talking about is general, and if segmental awareness is actually the stumbling-block for many dyslexics, then there should be some additional, and this time specific, factor of segmental ability. Before trying to answer this question, let us verify whether or not dyslexics have trouble with segmental analysis. The evidence is enormous. As reported by Savin (1972), many young dyslexics are unable to play games like Pig Latin, which involve the manipulation of segments. Take also the influential finding of Rozin, Poritsky, and Sotsky (1971): American second graders with clear reading disability can learn relatively easily to read English written material with Chinese characters. Indeed, the fact that these children are able to deal with a logographic system, but not with the alphabetic one, suggests that the lack of ability to analyze speech into segments underlies much reading failure. Consistent with these observations, we (Morais, Cluytens, and Alegria 1984) have found that a group of Belgian young children diagnosed as dyslexics by an official center and attending a school specializing in dyslexia (mean age: 8 years) performed very poorly on initial consonant deletion. They scored only 14 percent correct responses, while normal readers from first grade
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(mean age: 6 years, 7 months) and from second grade (mean age: 7 years, 8 months) were much better: 71 percent and 95 percent, respectively. By contrast, the dyslexics did not show any inferiority on a task consisting of replaying a melody without the first note. Their mean score (29 percent correct responses) was only slightly and not significantly inferior to that of the second graders (39 percent); and it was significantly superior to that of the first graders (17 percent). Thus, for nonspeech analysis, dyslexics seem near the norm. The conclusion is that they are specifically impaired in speech analysis. Another study was run recently in France by Lecocq (1986). He tested 45 dyslexics, w h o m he divided into three groups by age: between eight and nine years, between ten and eleven, and between twelve and thirteen. One of the tasks consisted in repeating a threesegment nonword but omitting one segment which occupied the initial, medial, or final position. The three groups scored on average 51 percent, 60 percent, and 78 percent correct responses, respectively, while three groups of normal readers matched in terms of chronological age, scored 80 percent, 96 percent, and 100 percent. Thus, the dyslexics were clearly inferior to their age peers. From the 45 dyslexics tested, two groups of 15 subjects each were constituted, corresponding to two different levels of mean reading age: 82 and 94 months. These two groups scored 55 percent and 61 percent, respectively. These scores are clearly inferior to that of normal readers with the same mean reading age: 86 percent and 98 percent. Can dyslexics acquire segmental awareness? Fox and Routh (1983) report the results of a longitudinal study showing that 9-year-old children with relatively severe reading disabilities were able to analyze words into segments; however, three years earlier, w h e n they were in first grade, they lacked segmental ability, differing in this respect from good readers. In a similar vein, we have tested a group of 11- to 13-yearold dyslexics, in the same school where we tested the young dyslexics of the above mentioned study; we found their performance to be quite good: 96 percent correct responses in initial consonant deletion. Since there is little exodus in this school from the elementary to the advanced classes, it seems that most dyslexics attain, after considerable effort, some segmental ability. The snag is that reading and writing require not only segmental awareness but also the automatization of segmentation and blending abilities. According to Stanovich, Cunningham, and Feeman (1984), decoding speed accounts for the largest amount of unique variance in the reading comprehension scores measured at the end of the first grade. The level of segmental analysis attained by the dyslexics is thus probably insufficient. More complex tasks of segmental manipulation should reveal such deficiencies. Snowling, Stackhouse, and Rack (1986) have examined seven dyslexics (three with reading ages around seven and four with reading ages from ten to
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twelve) who revealed a range of phonological deficits in reading and spelling. They were perfect at identifying the first segment of monosyllabic words. But, in the "spoonerism" task, consisting in permuting the initial segment of two names, no subject of low reading age could grasp the principle of the task, and among the others one interchanged initial syllables instead of segments, and two were successful but took a long time to complete each item. In our laboratory, Gavrilovic, Content, and I (unpublished data) tested an adult dyslexic who has a university degree. He does not make errors in reading words, but he is much slower than normal readers and sometimes makes errors in reading nonwords. In a task consisting of detecting a phoneme target in lists of words, he performed without any error. However, he was much slower than normal subjects. In the "spoonerism" task he was very poor, with only three correct responses out of 27 trials. A syllabic permutation was apparent in most responses, although there were additional errors revealing how difficult the task was for him. Accepting the fact that dyslexics have serious trouble with segmental analysis, I turn now to the question of why they have it. One possibilit~ contemplated in some of the current research, is that they have a linguistic deficiency. Several linguistic competences have been examined. Dyslexics, compared to normal readers, are slower on name retrieval, use phonological codes in short-term memory to a lesser extent, perceive and/or repeat speech sounds less well, and are inferior in syntactic ability. Evidence on each of these points remains either scarce or unclear, and certainly not as massive as for the ability of segmental analysis. In addition, the researchers seldom take into account the possibility that differences in those abilities between normal readers and dyslexics, or between good and poor readers, are an effect rather than a cause of reading ability. Regarding this issue, examining the linguistic competences of illiterate adults may be of some interest. We have found, for instance, that illiterates recognize speech sounds presented dichotically, that is, in difficult conditions of listening, much more poorly than literates (Morais et al. 1987). They also have smaller verbal memory span (Morais et al. 1986). And preliminary results suggest that they have trouble with some syntactic constructions, which are infrequent in oral language. Of course, huge differences, like those obtained between illiterates and literates should not be expected between dyslexics and normal readers during literacy acquisition. But, whenever huge differences are observed betweeen illiterates and literates, we may wonder if small differences between good and poor readers are not due to expertise in reading. After all, the benefit of reading proficiency is being able to handle more information more efficiently. On the other hand, a most exciting result for the researcher interested in the causes of dyslexia would be that dyslexics and normal readers differ in some ability or phenomenon in which illiterates and literates do not.
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Take, for instance, the rhyme effect in short-term memory, i.e. that nonrhyming lists are better recalled than rhyming ones. This effect seems to reflect the use of a speech-based code. Illiterates exhibit the rhyme effect to a similar extent as exilliterates (Morais et al. 1986). Though the evidence on the rhyme effect as a function of reading ability is not clear, some recent studies suggest no difference between dyslexics and normal readers with auditory presentation (e.g. Hall et al. 1981; Hall et al. 1983; Jorm et al. 1984; Morais et al. 1986; Lecocq 1986), but a smaller rhyme effect in dyslexics than normal readers with visual presentation of words (Rack 1985). If the latter result were replicated with object pictures, and if in the same situation there were no literate/ illiterate difference, then one would be allowed to suggest that dyslexics suffer from some inability to code visual information in a speechbased way. For the moment this is simply a conjecture offered to illustrate one of the ways illiteracy can be used to study dyslexia. In the present state of the art, the unfortunate conclusion is that we do not know why dyslexics have such serious trouble with segmental analysis. Given that most of them seem capable of analysis of other sorts of material than speech, I am tempted to believe that there is something wrong with the conscious representation of speech on which the analytic capacity operates. In the dyslexics, the format of this representation could not be structured in such a way as to permit an easy analysis into segments. The normal format probably corresponds more or less to a sequence of syllables, thus allowing relatively easy access to these units. One interesting finding is that the young dyslexics we have tested (Morais, Cluytens, and Alegria 1984) scored only 68 percent correct responses on average in a task of initial syllable deletion. Though this performance is much better than for segment deletion, it remains much inferior to that of first graders (95 percent). In the group of dyslexics, three subjects were specially poor (less than 30 percent correct). The curious thing is that two of them were among the best subjects of their group and better than any normal reader from the first grade in the task of musical segmentation. In songs, notes frequently correspond to syllables. How can someone be unable to delete the first syllable from an utterance while being able to delete the first note from a melody? Consistent with our results, in the study already mentioned of Lecocq (1986), deleting a syllable from the beginning, the middle, or the end of a trisyllabic word created important difficulties for dyslexics: 46 percent, 65 percent, and 88 percent of correct responses on average, for groups of age between eight and nine, ten and eleven, and twelve and thirteen, respectively, while corresponding groups of normal readers were much better: 93 percent, 98 percent, and 100 percent. For groups equated in terms of mean reading age, dyslexics were also clearly inferior to normal readers: 55 percent and 87 percent, respectively (mean reading age: 82 months), 61 percent and 92
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percent (mean reading age: 92 months). (Unfortunately, the fact that the syllable task used words and the phonemic segment task used nonwords prevents the syllable/segment comparison.) At odds with the present hypothesis, our group of illiterate adults (Morais et al. 1986) did not obtain a better score than the dyslexics in the syllable deletion task. However, in the experiment in which we tried to teach segmental analysis to illiterates, we observed that, in a preliminary phase of syllable deletion, all the illiterates could delete the initial syllable correctly and without hesitation after no more than a few training trials. We still do not have corresponding data on dyslexics, and we need them. Since a slightly difficult access to syllables could strongly affect the analysis into segments, my feeling is that we need to assess more exactly how much dyslexics are sensitive to the syllabic structure of speech. More generally, we need to develop experimental situations that could tell what speech looks like to the dyslexic.
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