CHILDRENS SENSITIVITY TO SYLLABLES, ONSETS, RIMES, AND PHONEMES

It has been argued that children's performance on phonological awarene ss tasks varies with the linguistic level that is tapped by the task. For example, tasks that involve syllables are thought to be easier tha n tasks that involve lower-level linguistic units, and tasks that tap the level of onsets are thought to be easier than tasks that require a ccess to single phonemes. In previous research, however, the linguisti c status of a unit has often been confounded with its size. Five exper iments were carried out in an attempt to disentangle these variables a nd so to provide a better test of the linguistic status hypothesis. In the first study, preschoolers and kindergartners more readily judged that two stimuli shared a beginning sound when that sound was an onset on its own than when it was part of a cluster onset. In two additiona l experiments, there was an advantage for syllables over rimes in kind ergarten and first-grade children when the shared units occurred in th e middle syllables of trisyllabic stimuli. The superiority for syllabl es was largely masked in two other studies in which the stimuli that s hared a unit rhymed. This latter result suggests that children's famil iarity with rhyme can override the syllable advantage. Overall, the re sults support the linguistic status hypothesis by indicating that effe cts of linguistic level on phonological sensitivity cannot always be r educed to effects of unit size. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.