HOW DO ILLITERATE ADULTS REACT TO METALINGUISTIC TRAINING

The present study focuses on the capacity of illiterate adults to mast er three different metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological leng th of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of s entences. Illiterates' performance, during a pre-test and after traini ng, was compared with that of literates and partial illiterates (adult s at the beginning of the process of acquiring literacy) who received the same training. In the pre-test, illiterates were lower than litera tes in the three tasks; and partial-illiterates were at an intermediat e level in two of the tasks. The three groups profited from the traini ng, especially illiterates and partial-illiterates for whom improvemen t was dramatic across all three tasks. Finally, the results revealed a hierarchy of difficulty across the tasks. The capacity to focus on th e phonological dimension seemed to be a prerequisite for the phoneme d eletion ability. The task of lexical segmentation seemed to be more a measure of syntactic awareness than a measure of phonological awarenes s.