Syllable Units during Oral Reading.

Abstract

Children progress from making grapheme-phoneme connections to making grapho-syllabic connections before whole-word connections during reading development (Ehri, 2005b). More is known about the development of grapheme-phoneme connections than is known about grapho-syllabic connections. Therefore, we explored the trajectory of syllable use in English developing readers during oral reading. Fifty-one developing readers in grades three, four and five read aloud sentences with an embedded target word while their eye movements and voices were recorded. Targets contained six-letters and were either one or two syllables. Children in grade five had shorter gaze duration, shorter articulation duration and wider spatial eye-voice span (EVS) than children in grade four. Children in grades three and four did not significantly differ on these measures. A syllable number effect was found for gaze duration but not for articulation duration and spatial EVS. Interestingly, one-syllable words took longer to process compared to two-syllable words suggesting that more syllables may not always signify greater processing difficulty. Importantly, we found no evidence of change in the use of syllable units across the three grades. The findings suggest that syllable representations are relatively stable from grades three to five.