PHONEMIC PROCESSES IN CHILDRENS READING-COMPREHENSION

This experiment employed two tasks to investigate the role of phonemic information in children's silent reading. Task 1 consisted of a sentence acceptability task, and results indicated that second- and fourth-grade readers required more time to read and comprehend sentences containing repetitions of word-initial phonemes (i.e., tongue twisters) than matched control sentences. This ''tongue-twister effect,'' observed in skilled and less skilled readers of both ages, suggests that phonemic information is activated during sentence comprehension. In Task 2, when asked to coordinate a digit memory task with the sentence acceptability task, children no longer showed effects of phoneme repetition. The disappearance of the tongue-twister effect is compared with the disappearance of phonemic confusability effects in difficult memory tasks, pointing toward memory as the locus of the tongue-twister effect. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.