The impact of the articulatory properties of phonemes on the evolution of pre-school children's writing

Abstract

Our aim was to analyse the impact of the characteristics of occlusive versus fricative phonemes used in writing programmes on the evolution of pre-school children’s writing. The participants were 39 5-year-old grapho-perceptive children. Their intelligence, number of letters known and phonological skills were controlled. Their writing was evaluated in a pre and a post-test using words beginning with fricatives and occlusives. In-between ExpG.1 trained the associations between letters and occlusive phonemes and ExpG.2 between letters and fricative phonemes. The control group classified geometric shapes. Both experimental groups achieved better results than the control group. There were no differences between the experimental groups concerning the use of F, V, Z and P but Exp.G.1 achieved better results for B and D. The programme which lead children to think about the relationships between speech and writing under linguistically more complex conditions – i.e. which involve the mobilisation of occlusive phonemes – seem to be more effective in terms of the generalisation of phonetisation procedures, than the programme which mobilise phonemes that are easier to isolate within the acoustic flow, such as fricative phonemes.