Preschool children's ability to disregard meaning and focus attention on the phonological properties of speech: Some discrepant findings

In the present study, preschool and kindergarten children's ability to disregard meaning and focus attention on the phonological properties of speech was evaluated through two different tasks. (1) The word-size task evaluated the child's ability to compare the size of words, for pairs in which length of word and size of referent were incongruent (e.g. train-telephone). (2) The word-similarity task evaluated the child's ability to identify, between two different words, the one that was like a standard word. One of the words rhymed with the standard word, while the other was semantically related to it. The kindergarten children, who were learning to read, were able to disregard meaning and attend to the phonological properties of speech, regardless of the task. The preschool children, on the other hand, were, in general, more likely to disregard meaning and pay attention to the phonological properties of speech in the word-similarity task than in the word-size task. This discrepancy in the performance of the preschool children is interpreted in terms of differences in the type of phonological operation presupposed by the two tasks.