Recombinative Generalization of Within-Syllable
Units in Intellectual Disabilities
Funded by NICHD
(11/07) Kate Saunders
Many individuals with mental retardation (MR) read at levels below what
might be expected based on other cognitive skills. Further, reading instruction
historically has emphasized sight words, and this emphasis limits reading
vocabulary to words that have been taught directly. There is a critical
need for effective methods to teach word-attack, or decoding, skills
to this difficult-to-teach population. Word-attack skills enable reading
words that have not been taught directly.
In the literature on reading instruction for normally developing children, the
major scientific development of the last few decades has been the identification
of prerequisite and component skills that help to make decoding instruction
successful. There is now incontrovertible evidence that phonological
awareness, especially the ability to perceive sounds that make up spoken
syllables, facilitates the acquisition of word-attack skills. Examples
of phonological awareness include recognizing rhyming words, and recognizing
that several words begin with the same sound. Phonemes
are the smallest within-syllable units of sound that make a difference
to meaning. It is important to note that learning to produce individual
phonemes to corresponding printed letters (a part of phonics instruction)
does not automatically ensure the awareness of phonemes within syllables.
This is because phonemes within syllables are “smeared together,” they
do not have discrete boundaries (this characteristic is called coarticulation).
Our long-term goal is to develop computerized instructional programming
to teach foundational skills for reading to individuals with MR. The
current project will take a step towards that goal by addressing the
most neglected area of instruction for this population: the critical
early reading skills of phonological awareness and the related concept
that print maps the sounds that comprise syllables. The scientific foundation
for our work lies in the conclusion of the National Reading Panel (2000)
that phonological-awareness training that involves linking letters to
sub-syllable sounds is more effective than training that is conducted
only in the auditory mode. Thus, we plan to study the development of
these skills using a word-construction task, in which the participants
build words that they hear by touching individual letters in a pool of
letters on a touch-sensitive computer screen. The word-construction procedures
have several benefits. They promote left-to-right scanning and attention
to each letter in a word. Further, if carefully composed sets of words
that have subsyllable components in common are taught, these procedures
can simultaneously promote the development of generalized sound-print
relations and phonological awareness.
We will know that a participant has learned generalized skills when
the participant can construct words that are composed of new combinations
of sound-letter relations contained in words that the participant has
learned to construct. For example, if a participant learns to construct
the words cat, rat, and ran, and then proves able
to construct can, even though can has not been taught,
s/he has demonstrated generalization of the sound-letter relations across
words. Further, our work has shown that it is not necessary for participants
to be able to read words before learning to construct them. Given that
the word construction task teaches component skills of individual-word
reading, it is important that word-construction training can occur prior
to or in conjunction with learning to read the words. This is an unstudied
approach to establishing foundational skills in individuals with MR.
The project is being carried out with adults served by Community Living
Opportunities and by Cottonwood, in Lawrence. Children participants come
from the Educare preschool in the Dole building and we are planning for
an expansion to children with intellectual disabilities in the Lawrence
Public Schools. Four graduate students within the Department of Applied
Behavioral Sciences are working on the project: Janna Skinner, Tanya
Bayhnam, Katey Schmidt, and Megan Weaver.
