Children's conceptions of a spoken word: A developmental study

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to partially replicate and to expand a recent investigation on the child's conception of a spoken word. Test stimuli consisted of five examples in each of the following eight different classes of auditory stimuli: non‐verbal abstract, non‐verbal real‐life, isolated phonemes, isolated syllables, short words, long words, phrases, and sentences. The forty stimuli were recorded by a female adult on audio‐tape in four different random orders. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of the orders. The sample consisted of 120 children selected so that there would be twenty boys and twenty girls in each of the following age ranges: 5.6 to 6.5 years, 6.6 to 8.0 years, and 8.1 to 9.5 years. All the children were white and predominately middleclass to upper middleclass. An analysis of the data indicated that by the time children reached the age range of 8.1 to 9.5 their concept of a word was generally good except for confusing isolated phonemes and syllables as a word. There was, nevertheless, a considerable range of individual differences when the data were analyzed by the number of children who consistently knew whether a particular class of stimuli was a word. By the time the children reached second or third grade (8.1 ‐ 9.5) at least 80 percent were able to distinguish non‐verbal abstract, nonverbal real‐life, phrase, and sentence stimuli from words. Confusions still existed among phonemes, syllables, and long words as words. The findings of this study generally support the results from related studies; i.e., young children do not have an adequate concept of what constitutes a spoken word. This confusion exists whether the children are British, Canadian, or American. This state of “cognitive confusion” may partially explain why some children have difficulty making sense out of instruction aimed at helping them to process print.