Phonemic awareness in Dutch kindergartners: Effects of task, phoneme position, and phoneme class

The aim of the present study was to provide more insight in the relative difficulty of four tasks testing phonemic awareness: (a) blending, (b) isolation, (c) segmentation, and (d) deletion. At the same time the roles of phoneme position and phoneme class were taken into account in a fully balanced way. To this purpose, 141 kindergartners were presented with four phonemic-manipulation tasks consisting of the same 32 CVC items. Children performed better on phoneme blending and phoneme isolation compared to phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion. However, performance between and within phoneme tasks appeared also to be dependent on phoneme position. Phoneme class exerted effects within the initial and final position of the four different tasks. The effect of plosives and fricatives compared to that of nasals and liquids on performance was particularly striking. Our findings were explained in terms of sonority and degree of co-articulation in pre-vocalic and post-vocalic plosives.