Phoneme Segmentation
Our first question concerned the feasibility of teaching kindergarten
children to segment words into their constituent phonemes. The effect of
the training on phoneme segmentation scores was analyzed using an
analysis of covariance with the phoneme segmentation pretest as covariate.
Adjusted means and standard deviations for this variable are shown
in Table V. Results indicate that differences on the phoneme segmentation
posttest were significant among the three conditions, F (2, 85) = 28.46,
p < .0001. Follow-up multiple comparisons indicate that the treatment
group (segmentation training) performed significantly better than either
control group, and there were no significant differences between control
group I and control group II. Thus, these data indicate that the kindergarten
children who received segmentation training successfully learned
to segment words into phonemes as measured by the phoneme segmentation
test.