Abstract of

Phonological Skills and Writing of Presyllabic Children

Cristina Silva

Margarida Alves-Martins

The objective of this study was to identify causal relationships between the development of phonological abilities and progress in knowledge about writing in preschool children. The study looked at 71 preschool-aged children, who were divided into three groups and whose writing was governed by presyllabic criteria. The children in the first group were subjected to an experimental intervention that focused on writing and was intended to lead them to evolve in such a way as to produce syllabic writing. The second group was the object of phonological training aimed at syllabic units. The third set of children served as a control group. All three groups were at equivalent intellectual levels and were familiar with a similar number of letters. The two experimental intervention programs also proved equivEl alent in terms of the conceptual evolution they triggered, to the extent that the children in both experimental groups started writing in accordance with syllabic criteria; the writing of the children in the control group continued to be guided by presyllabic criteria. In phonological tests the children in the two experimental groups achieved results that revealed a similar degree of progress (greater than that attained by the control group children) in the initialsyllable deletion and the initial-phoneme classification tests. The second experimental group displayed more statistically significant advances in the initial-phoneme deletion test than either of the other two groups.

Abstract from Silva, C., & Alves-Martins, M. (2002). Phonological Skills and Writing of Presyllabic Children. Reading Research Quarterly, 37(4), 466–483. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.37.4.6