Explicit speech segmentation and syllabic onset structure: developmental trends.

Recent applications of the hierarchical theory of the syllable to the development of explicit speech segmentation are critically examined. One particular prediction, that an initial consonant is more easily isolated when it constitutes the complete onset of a syllable than when it is part of a cluster onset, was tested on children with grade levels ranging from kindergarten to second grade. At each level, two independent groups of children worked with either CVCC (first consonant complete onset) or CCVC (part of cluster onset) syllables. First- and second-graders performed better on the CVCC than on the CCVC material in an initial consonant deletion task, but not when the task was comparison on the basis of that consonant. With the same instructions as the older children, kindergarten children performed at floor level on both tasks with both materials. However, in a new experiment in which the deletion task was presented as a puppet game, and with pretraining and selection on vowel deletion, a significantly higher level of success was achieved by the children working with the CVCC material. These results are consistent with the notion of developmental precedence of onset segmentation on phoneme segmentation. On the other hand, the results of the first and second graders show that onset superiority is not specific for the pre-reading stage.