Letter Sounds
There were significant group differences in letter sound knowledge
as indicated by an analysis of covariance, again using pretest scores as the
covariate, F (2, 85) = 6.90, p < .0002. Follow-up comparisons indicate that
both the treatment group (phoneme segmentation training) and control
group I (language activities) had significantly higher letter sound scores
than control group II, but did not differ from each other (see Table V).
These results show that the letter sound instruction (identical in the treatment
group and control group I) was effective in improving letter sound
knowledge for both the phoneme segmentation group (treatment group)
and language activities group (control group I). However, this finding
also indicates that increased letter sound knowledge alone does not improve
segmentation skills, because only the phoneme segmentation treatment
group (and not the language activities group) made significant
gains in segmentation skills.