Identification of vowel speech sounds by skilled and less skilled readers and the relation with vowel spelling

Reading and spelling errors of vowels are reported in many studies (Bryson and Werker 1989; Fowler, Liberman, and Shankweiler 1977; Fowler, Shankweile r, and Liberman 1979; Goswami 1993; Landerl, Wimmer, and Frith 1997; Shankw eiler and; Liberman 1972); The pre sent study tested the hypothesis that sp elling errors involving vowels ave linked to difficulties in vowel percepti on. Second to fourth graders (total n = 155) were divided into five groups according to reading skill and were tested an a variety of measures involvi ng vowel identification, vowel discrimination, and vowel spelling. Despite little difficulty on the vowel discrimination tasks, participants made many errors on the vowel identification measures, Vowel identification errors w ere linearly associated with reading skill with least skilled readers havin g significantly move difficulty with stressed "short" vowels as in dip than with stressed "long" vowels as in deep, presented in identical contexts. V owel identification errors were also associated with vowel spelling errors. It is hypothesized that errors in vowel spelling may relate to weak access to the phoneme at the oral language level and may indicate a lack of const ancy in the representation of vowels by less skilled readers, Weaknesses in vowel perception can be detected with a simple vowel identification test i n which phonological similarity of test items is used as linguistic manipul ation, and where phonemes must be identified based on presentation of a sin gle test item in a forced choice format.