READING IV

FINAL ASSIGNMENT
“REPORT TEXT”
According to Book
“Language Development and Learning to Read”

By.Birgitha Yuliana S/17060053

Lecturer : Eka Wilany, S.Pd., M.Pd.

Universitas Riau Kepulauan

Batam
2020
 Phonological Awareness Develops
Two major questions guide the research on reading. The first and most obvious has to do with
methods of reading instruction: What works best, and why? This is the topic of the companion
book, Early Reading Instruction. The second question, and the topic of this book, is more subtle
and complex. It stems from the fact that there are striking individual differences in reading skill
even when children are taught in the same classroom with the same method by the same teacher.
Why do some children learn to read easily and quickly, while others don’t learn to read at all?
This report will explore each of these explanations in more depth to put them into a context.
Because methods of reading instruction are not the topic of this book, It will devote more space
here to the environmental explanation. The strongest evidence for an environmental explanation
for reading skill is that individual differences in decoding and spelling skills are not found in
countries with a transparent alphabetic writing system.The scientific study of reading is about the
mastery of a human invention, not the study of natural laws like those in chemistry, physics, and
biology. This complicates things. To begin with, there’s no universal thing called ‘‘reading’’
independent of a particular language and a particular solution for how that language was written
down. A reading problem in one country is not necessarily a reading problem in another. In
English-speaking countries, the main test of reading success is decoding accuracy, the ability to
read isolated words one word at a time. This discrepancy is due to the way speech sounds
(phonemes) are mapped to symbols in the different alphabetic writing system. The phonological-
development theory is based on a putative developmental sequence for receptive language from
infancy to childhood. Yet, despite the fact that this sequence is central to the theory, it has never
been tested directly by the authors of the theory, or anyone else in the field.
The phonological-awareness theory was framed on the basis of Liberman et al.’s single study
plus the various ad hoc assumptions identified above. For the authors, ‘‘explicit phonological
awareness’’ didn’t mean implicit knowledge made conscious, but awareness that is fully
cognitive and analytic. Children should be able to count phonemes in sequence and keep track of
their precise location in order to decode an alphabetic writing system. This theory has had
profound implications. The notion that children gradually become aware developmentally that
words are made up of individual phonemes means there is some optimum time to teach
reading.The phonological-development theory had a powerful, hypnotic effect on its authors. If
you truly believe that reading acquisition depends entirely on the development of phonological
awareness, there is a temptation to look at other correlates of reading skill as inevitably linked to
phonological processing (human understanding ‘‘feigns and supposes all other things to be
somehow similar’’).It isn’t clear here whether this means that children with reading problems
should get special remedial help, or whether appropriate training should be used in the first place
for all beginning readers.Reading researchers needed much more than analogies and
assumptions; they needed norms for language-related tasks across the age span, preferably using
large populations of children. They needed good language tasks to measure developmental shifts
from a time well before children were taught to read, across the beginning reading phase, and
into the more advanced phase. Without such tasks, language development can’t be disentangled
from the impact of being taught to read an alphabetic writing system. Reading researchers
needed a road map for natural language development.Scientists doing research on children’s
language face another difficulty. Language isn’t all of a piece. Receptive language always
precedes productive language, a technical way of saying that children understand a lot more
words than they can say. Studying spoken language alone is insufficient without knowledge of
the size of the receptive vocabulary, and of how well the children comprehend other aspects of
spoken language, such as syntax, pronoun reference, relative clauses, and so forth. This means
that there are two time lines—natural temporal variation in receptive language and natural
temporal variation in productive language—as well as the relationship between them.This is the
problem of designing tasks that measure what you think they measure, tasks children can carry
out to their highest possible level. Edifices built from carefully collected data can collapse like a
house of cards when someone discovers that children couldn’t do a task simply because of the
way it was presented. We have already seen one example of this in the last chapter, and there are
many more to come. Having said this, the scientific study of children’s early language
development is one of the great success stories of the late twentieth century.This paper laid the
foundation for the modern study of speech perception and has also strongly influenced reading
research, for reasons that have already become apparent. Two major discoveries were reported in
the paper. The first was coarticulation. Speech sounds are coarticulated to such an extent that an
initial consonant in a word is produced in tandem with the following vowel, which, in turn, is
coarticulated with what comes next, and so on. Coarticulation dramatically speeds up speech
production and speech recognition. The other major discovery reported in the paper was
categorical perception—‘‘categorical’’ because the brain insists on filing speech sounds in
separate bins or categories.
These studies are at the frontier of our knowledge and present a number of challenges for the
researchers. They are difficult technically, conceptually, and practically, in the sense of creating
tasks that young children find interesting and that reflect their true capabilities. For this reason,
studies on children younger than age 3 are rare. Nittrouer and Kennedy were looking for answers
to how young children process speech signals, and whether these processing skills improve with
age. They wanted to know the precise elements in spoken words that children were listening to in
order to make their judgments. To do this, they designed a categorical-perception task and varied
coarticulation patterns at the same time. This allowed them to make inferences about what
children could hear on the basis of their performance. The authors speculated that there were two
ways the auditory system would process these words. First, if the child was sensitive to the
acoustic variations caused by coarticulation effects (as adults were known to be), this would
mean that they, like adults, use these transitional elements to ‘‘recover phonetic form’’—
phonemes. Second, if the younger children weren’t sensitive to these cues but older children
were, this would mean that early speech perception is more likely to be based on ‘‘the invariant
aspects of the signal.’’ In other words, speech would be processed more holistically or globally
by younger children. The children were trained to listen to the four words using natural speech
until they could point to the correct picture 100 percent of the time. Next, they were trained on
synthetic speech (using the widest contrasts) until they were 90 percent correct. Then they started
the main task. It is important to stress that these words did not sound in any way like natural
speech. Only four of the thirty-six word varieties had any resemblance to what a child actually
hears in spoken language. No child had any difficulty making these judgments with natural
speech. The studies in this chapter were presented in some depth because they represent the most
promising approaches in the field. In every case, this is groundbreaking work, and these are truly
innovative attempts to access the inner sanctum of how children hear and process speech. One
thing is troubling. This field is as difficult as it is new. There is a tendency for some to conjure up
deductive theories on the basis of a few studies. These theories can drive the research in a
particular direction like a blinkered horse, blocking out all other vistas. Deductive theories are
especially seductive when they seem logically plausible. The very appealing theory of Metsala
and Walley is reminiscent of the ‘‘very appealing theory’’ of Liberman et al. that sent us down
the garden path in the first place, Nevertheless, we can see from these carefully crafted studies
that even very young children are explicitly aware of phonemes in natural speech, and that this
can be demonstrated at least by the age of 3. These results strongly confirm the findings of Fox
and Routh that conscious manipulation of phoneme sequences is coming online between the ages
of 3 and 4. They do not, however, support the claim of The Dogma that phoneme awareness
materializes after the age of 6, if it materializes at all. Whether a 3-year-old would be able to
apply this aptitude to the logic of an alphabetic writing system is another matter.
The link to the phonological-development model lies in the proposal that phonological awareness
stems from motor programs in the brain that control speech gestures. These ideas were tied to
reading in a subsequent paper by I. Y. Liberman and A. M. Liberman in 1989. The central
question for us here is whether these new ideas shed any light on the central issue of how or
whether phonological awareness develops and affects learning to read. There is a speech-
perception module in the brain that has different neural architecture and operates by different
principles from the module for basic auditory processing. This explains how the listener is able
to extract invariant phonetic patterns from coarticulated speech. There are no consistent acoustic
signals, or specific, identifiable cues in the speech stream that yield the same perception.
Everything depends on phonetic sequences, on what sits next to what within a word. For this
reason, listening to speech must involve implicit perception of the overlapping gestures produced
by the speaker, because only these gestures have any reality. A major problem with the theory is
that there is no known biological process where the perceptual component is up and running at
birth but its behavioral counterpart takes several years to catch up. Speech-motor accuracy,
monitored over childhood, keeps improving until age 18. Reviewing the evidence for the model,
one gets the sense that it suffers from the very technology that led to such intriguing findings.
Liberman and Mattingly devote a good deal of attention to the problem that auditory cues (those
revealed by speech spectograms) don’t combine in sufficiently consistent ways to positively
identify the acoustic code or template for a word, syllable, or phoneme. In this type of bottom-up
logic, individual cues are the building blocks of perception. Liberman and Mattingly reached an
impasse following this path, and their model is the result. If the ability to hear speech arises from
perception of speech gestures, and awareness of phonetic sequences (phonological structure) is
the hallmark of a good reader, speech-motor problems should predict reading problems. Indeed,
I. Y. Liberman and Shankweiler (1985) made precisely this argument in an earlier paper, stating
that speech errors are a product of perceptual errors, and speech-motor difficulties are due to
deficits in perceiving, storing, and retrieving ‘‘phonological structures’’—the same problem that
makes learning an alphabetic writing system difficult. Because everything is linked in this
developmental model, articulation problems ought to be a red flag for reading problems. Poor
articulation, on its own, does not predict reading problems. One unanswered question is whether
articulation or receptive language is connected to subtle auditory-processing abilities that aren’t
picked up by the standard tests. The key question is whether these subtle perceptual problems
affect phoneme awareness and reading.
For some reason, good research on the speech-perception/speechproduction link is scarce. The
earliest work was a series of studies by Stark, Tallal, and Curtiss (Stark, Tallal, and Curtiss 1975;
Tallal, Stark, and Curtiss 1976; Stark and Tallal 1979) on language-impaired children.The report
on the paper by Stark and Tallal (1979), the most comprehensive of the three. They tested twelve
aphasic children attending a special school in England on their ability to hear vowel and syllable
contrasts and on speech production. The children were between 7 and 91 2 years old, had
superior nonverbal intelligence, and had no auditory or neurological problems. They were
matched in age, sex, and nonverbal IQ to a group of normal children. Stark and Tallal concluded
that speech-production problems were likely to be the consequence of perceptual problems in
discriminating brief auditory cues and rapidly changing auditory signals. But they also suggested
the process could go both ways: ‘‘It seems probable that the speech perception and speech
production difficulties of the dysphasic children will interact with one another in a number of
ways’’ (p. 1711). The research by Stark and Tallal (1979), Edwards et al. (1999), and Nittrouer
and her group (1989, 1995, 1996) shows that if speech gestures are the templates for speech
recognition, they are very poor templates indeed. Accuracy, placement, and timing are so
imprecise in young children or children with language delays that these speech patterns are
highly unlikely to derive from innate gestural templates for speech perception. This argument is
supported by the fact that perception of natural speech is essentially normal in these children.
Furthermore, the gestural theory can’t explain why speech perception is so strongly affected by
receptive vocabulary.

Chaney (1992) set out to investigate the ‘‘metalinguistic’’ skills of normal 3-year-olds, and the
subsequent impact of these skills on the process of learning to read. Metalinguistic (‘‘above or
beyond language’’) skills involve an explicit awareness of one’s own speech attempts. There is
considerable debate about whether metalinguistic awareness is part of general cognitive
development—not specific to language per se—or whether it arises through competence in
individual language skills. The ‘‘general cognitive’’ argument has been used to explain why 5-
and 6-year olds have problems with complex phoneme-awareness tests. In this view, it’s not the
test that’s the problem, the child’s developmental level is the problem. The alternative idea is
that any metalevel skill develops in tandem with a particular domain and emerges as a function
of competence in that domain. When basic-level skills become proficient and nearly automatic,
there is more spare capacity to reflect on what you are doing while you are doing it. According to
Chaney, metalinguistic abilities change as children go through stages of acquisition. From this
perspective, the tests are the problem, not the child’s developmental level. Chaney’s solution was
to design tests that would allow children to show whether they were able to exhibit these more
spontaneous behaviors in a controlled situation. She based her tasks on previous research (Smith
and Tager-Flusberg 1982), as well as on the literature documenting children’s spontaneous
utterances. She was able to elicit some surprising linguistic feats from very young children. This
requires cleverly designed tasks plus a good deal of skill putting young children at ease. She
relied heavily on the use of puppets that had various difficulties with English, sometimes due to
place of origin (Mars), and sometimes due to personal idiosyncrasies. The tasks, where possible,
were set up in pairs. The child first had to listen for the puppet’s mistakes (speech perception)
and then help the puppet fix them (speech production). This made it possible to measure
receptive and productive language on the same type of task.
Chaney found that 3-year-olds can easily detect a phoneme error in a word (phoneme ID) and fix
the error by saying the word correctly. And nearly everyone met criterion (significantly above
chance) for blending isolated phonemes into words. Phoneme synthesis has all the hallmarks of a
high-level skill involving explicit awareness, the ability to hold phoneme sequences in mind
(verbal memory), the ability to synthesize them mentally, and the ability to then match the final
product to a picture.Yet this task was so easy that 93 percent of the children scored well above
chance, scoring an average of 88 percent correct. Doubts have been raised that children even
need normal intelligence to have enough awareness of phonemes to be able to learn an alphabetic
writing system. Cossu, Rossini, and Marshall (1993) studied ten Down’s syndrome children in
Italy, all of whom could read (decode) at close to a third-grade level, yet couldn’t pass any of
four basic phonemeawareness tests (counting, deletion, segmenting, blending). The children do
use normal implicit segmentation skills. What they apparently cannot do is access those abilities
metalinguistically. In the word-analysis test the child has to repeat a word, delete a phoneme
from the word, close up the remaining phonemes, and say the word that is left. After the
phoneme is deleted and the remaining sounds elided, the outcome is another real word. Children
were carefully trained on how to take the test. They had to repeat spoken words and phonemes,
then master the concept. In general, prereaders can perform tasks that require segmentation of
words into syllables but not tasks that require segmentation into phonemes; their performance on
tasks that are based on the intrasyllabic units of onset—and rime—falls in between. Through a
yet-to-be understood transformation, experienced readers are able to perform phoneme-based
tasks and perform at ceiling on most syllable-based tasks. (Wagner et al. 1993, 83). It is obvious
from these consistent findings that phoneme segmenting and blending are important skills in
learning an alphabetic writing system, that they are easy to teach, and that they should be taught
in conjunction with letters and print for the best effect—nothing that wasn’t known by many
teachers in the nineteenth century (Dale 1898). What matters is how and when these skills should
be trained and used in reading instruction.
In a sense, the emphasis on phonological development and reading skill, while important initially
to redirect the focus away from visual models of reading, is like a genie that escaped from the
bottle, went out of control, and gobbled up the reading landscape. The central platform of the
theory—that awareness phonological units ‘‘develops’’ and becomes ‘‘explicit’’ in a specific
sequence and time—is not supported by the data.
 The Development of Expressive Language
This report text is about to explore one of two biological explanations for a languageliteracy
connection, the theory that phonological analysis develops in a particular manner and sequence,
plus the inference that this has an impact on the process of learning to read. The evidence does
not support the developmental sequence nor most of the assumptions about the aptitudes of
young children. The primary aspect of reading skill addressed by this model was decoding, the
ability to master the mechanics of reading—the phoneme-grapheme correspondences in our
spelling system and how these are ordered in words. Next part will addresses a second possible
biological basis for a languageliteracy connection. Here, the parameters are different. This is
‘‘language’’ with a broad palette, and ‘‘reading’’ defined by a range of aptitudes. While the first
biological explanation was more theoretical than factual, this explanation is the reverse. Instead,
the search for a language-literacy connection is based on descriptive and exploratory research.
This field is relatively free of presumptive theories. These studies have laid the foundation for a
new awareness of the natural variation in general language, as well as of how or whether specific
language skills have an impact on reading success in all its forms.

Research on these important issues comes from a variety of disciplines, including phonetics,
developmental psychology, and the speech and hearing sciences, This becomes an issue of
specifying a time line. This is not a simple or straightforward story, because the developmental
path of expressive language—unlike that of receptive language— is lengthy and unpredictable.
And even though scientists have something more tangible to work with than those who study
speech recognition, this doesn’t make it any easier.
During the 1970s a minor rebellion took place that had a major impact as newly fledged graduate
students began to take a long, serious look at speech development. Linguists and phoneticians
took on the ‘‘universal phoneme production machine’’ model of infant speech development.
People in the speech and hearing sciences were faced with applied problems that couldn’t be
solved without good tests and solid norms. One key question was how much of a delay in talking
had to occur, how many mispronounced phonemes had to exist, and how mangled syntax had to
be, for this to constitute a language disorder, something the child is unlikely to outgrow with
time.
Individual variation in speech production is so great during the first 2 years of life that even
identical twins don’t follow the same path. In a study by Leonard, Newhoff, and Mesalam
(1980), twins were compared to ten unrelated children at the early stages of speech production.
The twins had no more speech patterns in common with each other than they did with the
unrelated children. And individual variation is so great that some children don’t speak at all.
Three things happen together when the infant starts babbling at around 6 to 9 months, and they
continue to influence speech production long after the infant has decided to say something
meaningful. First, there are anatomical constraints on speech production.Second, Work from the
same team showed that even at the babbling stage, vowel and consonant production is influenced
by the native language, The third element in early speech production is the enormous individual
variation, which is largely due to chance.
What a child chooses to talk about can be a wild card in the foundation of a phonetic repertoire.
A child’s first words may be linked to a particular phoneme through something as simple as the
first consonant in his or her name.
Individual variation in speech production is so great during the first 2 years of life that even
identical twins don’t follow the same path. In a study by Leonard, Newhoff, and Mesalam
(1980), twins were compared to ten unrelated children at the early stages of speech production.
In a study by Leonard, Newhoff, and Mesalam (1980), twins were compared to ten unrelated
children at the early stages of speech production. The twins had no more speech patterns in
common with each other than they did with the unrelated children. And individual variation is so
great that some children don’t speak at all.
In the speech and hearing sciences, phonological processing refers to speech production and not
to speech recognition. This term includes measures of speech accuracy, phonetic output, voicing,
breath control, and prosody.
All studies point to about a fifty-fifty split at around age 3 between late talkers who show a
sudden spurt (developmental compression) and become late bloomers, and those who continue to
lag behind. There is a strong consensus that nothing in particular seems to predict which child
will end up in which group. These effects are due to the impact of natural variation (both
temporal and lateral). While children with continuing delays fall significantly below normal
children on every measure, the late bloomers catch up first on volubility and intelligibility. They
speak at a normal rate in clearly articulated words. At age 3, they still lag behind the average
child on measures of phoneme count and syllable complexity. Undoubtedly they will catch up
here as well. Perhaps the children in the continuing-delay group will begin a language spurt like
the late bloomers did. Unfortunately, we don’t know what happens next, because late talkers
have not been followed up past the age of 3.