WORD-FREQUENCY AND AGE EFFECTS IN NORMALLY DEVELOPING CHILDRENS PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING

Eleven kindergarten-age students and 11 second-grade students were ask ed to perform each of four phonological processing tasks: (a) confront ation naming of object drawings, (b) rapid sequential naming of object drawings and letters, (c) segmentation of words into Sounds, and (d) blending sounds to produce words. Response accuracy and, for the pictu re naming tasks, response latency were measured. In addition, single-w ord reading ability and silent reading comprehension were evaluated. R esults indicated that high-frequency stimuli were named faster and, in one task, more accurately than low-frequency stimuli. Blending sounds to produce high-frequency words was less difficult than blending soun ds to produce low-frequency words, but word frequency did not affect s ound segmentation performance. Children in second grade generally were faster and more accurate than kindergarten children in naming picture s. They also were able to segment more sounds and correctly blend soun ds to produce more target words than kindergarten students. Confrontat ion naming accuracy, rapid object- and letter-naming latency, and soun d segmentation and blending accuracy were intercorrelated and were rel ated to word recognition and to reading comprehension. Serial naming s peed was highly related to phonological awareness in kindergarten, whe reas confrontation naming accuracy was highly related to phonological awareness in second grade. A limited cognitive resources framework was adopted to interpret these findings.