What is the Role of Audition in Literacy?
by Donna Geffner
The single best predictor of reading success has been known to be phonological awareness. That is, children need to be aware of sounds of speech in order to acquire sound-letter correspondence knowledge and use this knowledge to decode the printed word. If a child is not aware of the sounds contained in a word, the child will have difficulty associating sounds with letters.
According to Sally Shaywitz (2003), for children with dyslexia, phonemes are less well developed. As a consequence, children when speaking may have a hard time selecting the appropriate phoneme. The phoneme is the fundamental element of the language system, the "essential building block of all spoken and written words" (p. 41). It is at the lowest level of the language hierarchy, relegated to processing the distinctive sound elements of language. The upper language hierarchy involves semantics-words, syntax-grammar, and discourse-connected speech. Dyslexia involves a weakness within the language system at the phonologic level.
Shaywitz believes that before words can be identified, understood, stored in memory, or retrieved from it, they must be broken down into phonemes. It is the phoneme that gets processed by the brain's language system. Shawitz contends that the reader needs to convert the letters of words on a page into their sounds and appreciate that words are composed of smaller segments or phonemes. Dyslexics perceive words as an "amorphous blur," without appreciating the underlying segmental nature, and fail to recognize the internal sound structure of words.
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http://www.asha.org/Publications/leader/2005/050927/f050927b.htm
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