Spoken vocabulary growth: Its role in the development of phoneme awareness and early reading ability

摘要: In this paper, two theoretical positionsregarding the developmental origins of thephoneme as a unit for lexical representationand processing are outlined – theaccessibility and emergent positions. OurLexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley1998), which is consistent with secondposition, focuses on role vocabularygrowth in prompting implementation morefine-grained, segmental representations forlexical items childhood; restructuringis viewed an important precursor to theexplicit segmentation or phoneme awarenessskills implicated early reading success.Empirical evidence that supports model issummarized, including preliminary results fromone our most recent studies. Severalsuggestions made future research thatwill lead better understanding thedevelopment spoken word recognition thelinks between speech- reading-relatedabilities.