ASSESSMENT OF PERCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF READING

Phoneme Awareness

Letters stand for speech sounds. Speech sounds are produced and perceived based on the way they are made, i.e., on the was they are articulated. The skill of reading requires the ability break apart the steady flow of sounds in speech into units that line up with letter sounds.

This is harder than you might think.

Some sounds are hard hear. Like these:

n in "among"

l in "silk"

Some sounds are easy to confuse with other sounds. Like these:

v vs f
b vs p
g vs k

Some sounds are hard to separate from each other. Like these:

d-o in dog vs d-i in dig

General Phonological Processing

In order to hear phoneme level sounds correctly, there needs to be a more general ability to perceive speech accurately. Some parts of speech are harder to detect than others:

unstressed sounds like word endings and "little" words (is, and, this)
sounds when there is background noise
sounds that are similar to other sounds like ch (in chair) and sh (in shoe)

The ability to manage speech sounds helps other functions besides speech, reading and spelling:

finding words efficiently
using inner language to guide thinking,
using inner language to rehearse in support of working memory
understanding the parts of grammar indicated in word endings and little words

READING HAS NOT BEEN EVALUATED AND INSTRUCTION CANNOT BE PLANNED UNLESS THESE FUNCTIONS ARE ASSESSED AND UNDERSTOOD

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