Auditory Reassembly Abilities of Black and White First- and Third-Grade Children

Abstract

The auditory reassembly ability of Black and white, inner-city school children was investigated as a function of grade level (first and third grade). The stimuli were temporally segmented CVC monosyllables. Both semantically meaningful and nonmeaningful monosyllables were used. Interphonemic intervals (IPI) of 100, 200, 300, and 400 msec were studied. Ten children from each race/grade group responded to 10 meaningful and 10 nonmeaningful CVCs at one of the four values of interphonemic interval. In all, 160 subjects were studied. The results indicated that third-grade children performed the auditory reassembly task significantly better than the first-grade children. Although there was no difference between Black and white children averaged across grade level, white first graders performed significantly better than Black first graders. All children, irrespective of race or grade level, performed better on the meaningful than nonmeaningful stimuli. Performance for the 100 msec interphonemic interval was significantly better than that for 200, 300, or 400 msec intervals.