Children's sensitivity to syllables, onsets, rimes, and phonemes

It has been argued that children's performance on phonological awareness tasks varies with the linguistic level that is tapped by the task. For example, tasks that involve syllables are thought to be easier than tasks that involve lower-level linguistic units, and tasks that tap the level of onsets are thought to be easier than tasks that require access to single phonemes. In previous research, however, the linguistic status of a unit has often been confounded with its size. Five experiments were carried out in an attempt to disentangle these variables and 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 additional experiments, there was an advantage for syllables over rimes in kindergarten and first-grade children when the shared units occurred in the middle syllables of trisyllabic stimuli. The superiority for syllables was largely masked in two other studies in which the stimuli that shared a unit rhymed. This latter result suggests that children's familiarity with rhyme can override the syllable advantage. Overall, the results support the linguistic status hypothesis by indicating that effects of linguistic level on phonological sensitivity cannot always be reduced to effects of unit size.