How do Illiterate Adults React to Metalinguistic Training? Jean Emile Gombert Universit4 de Bourgogne Bourgogne, France
The present study focuses on the capacity of illiterate adults to master three different metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Illiterates" performance, during a pre-test and after training, was compared with that of literates and partial illiterates (adults at the beginning of the process of acquiring literacy) who received the same training. In the pre-test, illiterates were lower than literates in the three tasks; and partial-illiterates were at an intermediate level in two of the tasks. The three groups profited from the training, especially illiterates and partial-illiterates for whom improvement was dramatic across all three tasks. Finally, the results revealed a hierarchy of difficulty across the tasks. The capacity to focus on the phonological dimension seemed Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 44, 1994 Copyright©1994 by The Orton Dyslexia Society ISSN 0736-9387 I would like to thank Fabrice Largy who was the examiner in this study. I wrote this paper duringa sabbatical stay in the department of Experimental Psychology ot Oxford University. I am very grateful to several members of this department, especially to Nicola Warrick, for helpful comments on an earlier version. Remarks from two anonymous reviewer-s and especially from Anne E. Fowler, really helped for an improvment of the quality of the paper. Address for correspondence: Jean Emile Gombert, Universit4 de Bourgogne, LEAD/CNRS, BP 138, F-21004 Dijon Cedex, France.
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to be a prerequisite for the phoneme deletion ability. The task of lexical segmentation seemed to be more a measure of syntactic awareness than a measure of phonological awareness. Introduction
Among the numerous studies devoted to investigating the relationship between metalinguistic development and learning to read, very few have focused on the metalinguistic abilities of illiterate adults (Cf. Bertelson et al. 1991). The aim of these few studies was to establish that such abilities are a byproduct of learning to read and hence do not exist in individuals who have never attended school. This research has shown that illiterate adults are very low in: (1) initial consonant deletion and addition in syllables (Morais et al. 1979), (2) judgments of phonological length of words (Kolinsky, Cary, and Morais 1987), and (3) lexical segmentation of sentences (Barton and Hamilton 1982). Morais et al. (1979) asked two groups of adults to process a metaphonological task. One group was illiterate Portuguese, the other group was comprised of adults who were from the same social background but who had gained literacy either as adolescents or as adults. The subjects were asked either to add a certain phoneme to the beginning of a word, or to remove the initial phoneme. While the illiterate group attained only a 19% success level, 72% of the responses of the literate group were correct. Read et al. (1986) obtained similar results with two groups of Chinese literate adults. One group had learned to read via an alphabetic writing system introduced in China for teaching purposes, while the other had learned only the traditional logographic characters. In tasks similar to those used by the Morais team, subjects who had learned to read with an alphabetic system had a success rate of 83% whereas those not exposed to an alphabet achieved only 21% correct, a performance comparable to that of the group of Portuguese illiterate adults. Kolinsky et al. (1987) also tested illiterate Portuguese adults. These subjects were asked to select examples of short words and long words; a correct response required an intention to produce a short or long segment of the speech chain whether or not it corresponded to a "word," as the unschooled subjects would not necessarily be aware of this concept. With this scoring, 52% of the answers would have to be regarded as wrong: 24% of the responses were based on the size of referent (for example "nogueira'--'walnut[tree]" is a long word because it is a big tree and "galinka'--'chicken" is a short word because a
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chicken is smaller); 14% attended to the emotional weight of the objects or events referred to; and the remaining 14% relied on the characteristics of the actual act of saying the relevant segment (thus, an expression that is uttered slowly a n d / o r in a loud voice is regarded as longer). In a second experiment, ten other illiterate adults were asked to designate which of two pictures represented the object with the longer name. For each item, one of the two names was actually phonologically longer than the other, but sometimes the difference in the size of the objects referred to corresponded to the difference in the length of their names ("camelo'm"camel" versus "olho'm"eye'), sometimes there was an opposite relation between the linguistic and extralinguistic dimensions ("casa'~"house" versus "televisao'~'television'), and sometimes the objects referred to were much the same size ("pato'~"duck" versus "galinka'-"chicken"). Two of the ten subjects gave correct answers whatever the item, and four gave consistently correct answers for only the "concordant" items; for the "nonconcordant" items they based their answers on the size of the referents, and, for the "neutral" items they seemed to guess the answer (about 50% correct answers). The remaining four subjects gave correct answers for the "concordant" and "neutral" items but failed on half of the "nonconcordant" items. A further relevant study (Barton and Hamilton 1982) showed that, when asked to repeat a sentence word by word, adults with little schooling (reading level below fourth grade) tended to repeat meaningful units (often phrases) instead of words. On the whole, these results seem to suggest that the kind of metalinguistic abilities tested in these studies are by-products of learning to read. This conclusion is highly congruent with the whole literature dealing with learning to read and metalinguistic development (for reviews see Gombert 1992; Goswami and Bryant 1990). In fact, most studies showed that beginning reading also requires metalinguistic abilities. Thus, the reason such abilities co-occur is their absolute necessity in reading tasks for beginners. The fact is that, in the first two studies summarized above (Morais et al. 1979; Kolinsky, Cary, and Morais 1987) "ex-illiterates" (who had gained literacy after childhood) were used as controls and succeeded in the tasks their illiterate counterparts failed. Clearly, performance in this type of test is sensitive to the effect of schooling and most specifically to the effect of learning to read--in an alphabetical language, as Read et al. (1986) indicate. It would seem then that metalinguistic awareness of the phonological structure of
TRAINING ILLITERATE ADULTS IN METALINGUISTICS
253
spoken language would be part of reading skill; thus, the development of the latter would imply the increase of the former. We note h o w e v e r that if the e m e r g e n c e of this metaphonological awareness did not occur before learning to read, it is only because this awareness is not of the slightest utility outside of this very particular kind of language manipulation (which also includes spelling, and some oral language games with sounds) and not because it cannot be taught outside of reading. If the above interpretation is correct, one can induce the development of these kinds of metalinguisfic abilities by specific training in language manipulation which, like the task of beginning reading, requires language awareness in order to succeed. Some evidence that training can be effective was provided in preliterate children (see in particular, Bradley and Bryant 1983; Content et al. 1986; Fox and Routh 1984; Olofsson and Lundberg 1985), as well as in illiterate adults (Morals et al. 1988). Morals et al. showed that, when required to delete the initial consonant of spoken monosyllabic pseudowords and provided with both explicit instructions and continuous corrective feedback, nine out of twelve Portuguese illiterate adults displayed rapid improvements in performance. From this result, Morals et al. concluded that a majority of illiterate adults are ready to acquire segmental analysis skills, given adequate instruction. This confirms the interpretation that considers explicit segmental analysis as a subcomponent of developing reading skill which normally is of little utility outside this activity, and so does not develop in non- (pre- or il-) literates. Moreover, the study suggested that there is no critical period for acquiring the ability to do segmental analysis. This last point may have important implications for teaching reading to adults. Nevertheless, the Morals et al. (1988) study suffered from some limitations. First, instructions and corrective feedback are provided as early as the first trial from the subject, so it is not possible to compare the performance after training with the performance before the training session. Second, this experiment did use literate subjects as a control group, which brings into question the interpretation of results in terms of their specificity for illiterate individuals. Finally, as in the previous studies, this one concerned Portuguese. Even if it is highly improbable that the particularities of illiterates established by the Brussels team are specific to the Portuguese language, their results have to be replicated in other languages. The results of Morais et al. (1988) need to be confirmed in another experiment
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that includes more methodological precautions and that is conducted in another language. The present study is partially devoted to such a confirmation. Moreover, in order to extend the results beyond the acquisition of phoneme deletion ability, the study tries to show that the other metalinguistic skills, thought to be at a lower level in illiterates than in literates, may also be improved by specific training. Thus, judgments of phonological length and lexical segmentation of sentences were also trained in illiterates and literates.
Method Subjects The subjects were 21 adults from North-Africa (mostly Moroccan) who had immigrated to France for economic reasons. All came from a single source, a work preparation center for adults in Dijon. All subjects had been in France for at least three years, and obviously spoke and understood French quite well; many probably had learned French while still in Moracco. There were three groups of subjects: seven illiterates-I (aged 19 to 39 years, mean: 29) who had never attended school and who had been identified by the work center as totally illiterate; seven "partial-illiterates'-PI (aged 19 to 51 years, mean: 30) had also never attended school, but who in just the last year had been learning to read French; and seven literates-L (aged 25 to 42 years, mean: 30) who could read and write French. These subjects had some schooling though none of them attended school after adolescence. Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain authorization to use standardized tests (reading age, IQ, etc.), so the above grouping was made following the indications of teachers. Procedure Each subject had to perform three tasks (presented in random order): (1) Judgment of phonological length (JP), (2) Initial consonant deletion (ID), and (3) Lexical segmentation (LS). (These tasks are described in detail below). There were two stages to this experiment: (1) Pre-test: Subjects had to perform six items in each of the three tasks, without feedback from the examiner. (2) Training: For each task which had not been performed totally successfully during the pre-test (i.e., six successes out of six trials), each subject went on to perform other trials; when an error was made, the examiner provided corrective feedback and expla-
TRAIN1NG ILLITERATE ADULTS IN METALINGUISTICS
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nations. For each task, the training was discontinued after the subject gave six consecutive correct responses or after 18 trials. Presentation of the tasks
(1) Judgment of Phonological Length (JP). The subject had to indicate which of two pictures represented the object with the phonologically longer name. For each item, one of the two names was actually longer than the other (one syllable at least), but in half the cases the difference in the size of the objects referred to did not correspond to the difference in the length of their n a m e (for example "coccinelle"--"lady-bird" versus "vache"--"cow"), and in half the cases the objects referred to were much the same size (for example "clou'--"nail" versus "aiguille'~"needle") (for complete presentation of the list of items, see Appendix 1). In order to simplify the task, items for which the size of the referrant and the length of the name were concordant, performed correctly by all the illiterate subjects in the Kolinsky et al. study, were not included in our material. In each phase, items were presented in random order. The picture that corresponded to the correct answer was, in half the cases, the left one and in the remaining half, the right one. When one of the two objects is supposed to be bigger than the other, its pictorial representation was also bigger (though not proportionally so). In order to permit a correct evaluation of the subject choice, after each response the subject had to tell the names of the two objects. Six examples were provided and explained before the pre-test. (2) Initial Consonant Deletion (ID). As in the Brussels team studies, the subject had to repeat each utterance without the initial sound, but some changes were made from the original studies, in order to increase the necessity of phonemic awareness to complete the task: 1. There was no training with initial vowel (i.e., initial univocalic syllable) deletion (i.e., no vowel-consonantvowel items were used). 2. The consonant that was to be deleted was not always the same phoneme, but sometimes [fl and other times [r]. 3. In order to compel subjects to distinguish syllabic and infrasyllabic levels, items were mono- or multisyUabic, not always monosyllabic. 4. Half of the items were meaningful words, but, in order to prevent the subjects from applying a strategy of recognizing words inside presented items, all the products
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of initial deletion were meaningless pseudowords. This point was explicitly made in the instructions. Data were not analyzed separately for words and non-words. In each phase, items (presented in Appendix 2) were presented in random order. Six examples were provided and explained before the pre-test. (3) Lexical Segmentation of Sentences (LS). The subject had to repeat each sentence (orally presented in random order) with a silent pause between words. As the subjects were adults, the sentences used were more complex than in studies with children. Each sentence was from four to seven words long (see items listed in Appendix 3), longer than in most earlier studies (for an extensive review, see Gombert 1992). However, the correctness of the responses provided was estimated on the basis of sentences produced, even when they did not correspond to the models. Six examples were provided and explained before the pretest. The experiment subjects were then asked for the meaning of the sentences. All the subjects correctly understood all the sentences. Data processing and design Three successive analyses were conducted: First, we calculated the number of subjects who reached the criterion of success (six successive correct trials) as a function of group, task, and phase. Second, we calculated the average number of correct items as a function of group, phase, and task. (To permit the statistical calculations, two decisions were made: (1) items that would have been presented after reaching criterion--after six successive correct itemsmwere considered as correct; (2) if the first phase--pre-testBwas completely correct, the training phase not presented to the subject--was also considered as being completely correct). The ANOVA design used was: $7 * B2* C3, with S=subjects, A=groups, B=phases, and C=tasks. When appropriate, analytic comparisons (Sid~k test: Sid~k 1967) were done. Finally, when appropriate, qualitative analyses of the errors were done. Results A Priori Analyses Individual rates of success as a function of group, task, and phase appear in figure 1. For the task of phonological judgment and the task of consonant deletion, the effect of training was
TRAININGILLITERATE ADULTS IN METAUNGUISTICS
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Phonological judgments
100 80
oo O9 w 0 0 O9
60 20 0
L1 L2 L3 L4 L5 L6 L7
o~
80 60
O9
20 0
I1 12 13 14 15 16 17
Consonant deletions
100
O9 O9 W 0 0
P1P2P3P4P5P6P7
L1 1_2 L3L4L5L6L7
100
PIP2P3P4P5P6P7
I1 12 13 14 15 16 17
Lexical segmentations
80 cO LU
60
0 0 o9
20 0
L1 L2 L3L4L5L6L7 I
Figure 1.
Pretest
I
P1P2P3P4P5P6P7
Iphase 2 gain
Individual rates of success
M
I1 12 13 14 15 16 17
phase 2 loss
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THEADULTPOORREADER
powerful, especially in the deletion task for illiterates and partial-illiterates from whom there were, globally, 9 subjects out of 14 who fully succeeded after training, compared to only one during the pre-test. These results deserve emphasis, for the training itself did not involve reading. Nevertheless, at first glance, two results were unexpected. First, literates were not largely successful in all tasks during the pre-test and also profited from training. Second, for the task of lexical segmentation, they seemed to be the only subjects who profited from the training which, by contrast, seemed to be ineffective in partial-illiterates and illiterates, who performed surprisingly poorly in pre- and post-tests. In fact, this result may be a consequence of the very strict criterion used to consider a subject as successful and must be moderated by taking into account the individual patterns of response. Task of Judgment of Phonological Length. This task (for which chance alone predicts a long-term success rate of 50%) is performed totally accurately, as early as the first phase, by 6/7 literates, 4/7 partial-illiterates, and 3/7 illiterates. As for the other subjects, most of them gave many good responses in the pretest and notably increased their rate of success during the training (only three subjects, one partial-illiterate and two illiterates, did not reach the criterion of success). On the whole, after training, only one subject (illiterate) based his responses on the size of the objects referred to instead of on the phonological length of the names. Task of Initial Consonant Deletion. It was noted above that literates were not totally successful in the pre-test. In fact, of the 3/7 subjects who gave some wrong responses, two performed a majority of accurate deletions and became quickly successful as early as the beginning of the training phase; the third totally failed during the pre-test but learned how to perform the task during the training. Only this subject presented a pattern of results that corresponded to that expected from the illiterates. None of the partial-illiterates fully succeeded during the pre-test. Nevertheless, 3/7 gave a majority of accurate responses, and 2 gave at least one. These five subjects, plus one who totally failed during the pre-test, became totally efficient during the training. Only one subject seemed to be unable to learn how to do initial consonant deletion. One of the illiterates knew how to delete initial phonemes as early as the pre-test as discussed below. Of the other six subjects, only one gave one correct answer during the pre-test, but
TRA~NG ILLITERATEADULTS IN METALINGUISTICS
259
all of them increased their performance during training, two reaching the exacting criterion of success. Task of Lexical Segmentation of Sentences. For this task, the only one that had never been presented to genuine illiterates (the subjects mentioned in Barton 1985 were low-literates), the results are more complicated. One out of seven literates entirely succeeded during the pre-test and five out of the other six had some success. All the literates who were trained increased their performance; the only one who did not reach the success criterion was the same subject who totally failed during the pre-test. None of the partial-illiterates did any correct lexical segmentation during the pre-test. Although none reached the criterion of success, 6/7 moved to between three and six correct segmentations during the training phase; only one subject did not seem to profit from the training. Of the seven illiterates, the four who did not succeed at all during the pre-test produced some correct segmentations during the training, this is congruent with what was expected and with what was found in partial-illiterates. In contrast, there was a curious result for the three subjects who did have some success in the pre-test: two subjects actually did worse during the training phase than in the pre-test, and the third reached the criterion of success. These results will be discussed below, after a qualitative analysis of the errors in this task. Intrasubject Performance. On the whole, the individual patterns of performance were coherent with one hierarchy of difficulty w i t h the p h o n o l o g i c a l j u d g m e n t task as the easiest (although chance predicts a success rate of 50%), the deletion task as intermediate and the lexical segmentation task as the most difficult. Subjects who did not correspond to this hierarchy are rare and performed similarly on all tasks. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that the subjects were bilingual, and were not being tested in their native tongue. This fact may have affected the order of difficulty among the tasks. Specifically, the lexical segmentation task might have been easier for native speakers than for those who learned French after their first language. Only one illiterate presented an overall pattern of performance typical of the one that characterized the literates. Two possible explanations exist: first, for unspecified reasons, this subject has developed, without learning to read, capacities that normally develop during this learning (as do some illiterate poets: see Morais, Alegria, and Content 1987; Roazzi, Dowker, and Bryant in press); second, this subject was less illiterate than the teachers of the work preparation center believed.
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THE ADULT POOR READER
Statistical Processing of Results. The percentage of correct items as a function of group, task, and phase are presented in table I. On the whole, these data are congruent with those already presented. From the statistical processing we only report results within tasks, across phases, across groups, but not across tasks since chance performance varies as a function of tasks. The overall rate of success of literates (82%) was globally higher than that of partial-illiterates (52%) and that of illiterates (46%)--F(2,18) = 10.67, p
The present study focuses on the capacity of illiterate adults to master three different metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Illiterates" performance, during a pre-test and after training, was compared with that of literates and partial illiterates (adults at the beginning of the process of acquiring literacy) who received the same training. In the pre-test, illiterates were lower than literates in the three tasks; and partial-illiterates were at an intermediate level in two of the tasks. The three groups profited from the training, especially illiterates and partial-illiterates for whom improvement was dramatic across all three tasks. Finally, the results revealed a hierarchy of difficulty across the tasks. The capacity to focus on the phonological dimension seemed Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 44, 1994 Copyright©1994 by The Orton Dyslexia Society ISSN 0736-9387 I would like to thank Fabrice Largy who was the examiner in this study. I wrote this paper duringa sabbatical stay in the department of Experimental Psychology ot Oxford University. I am very grateful to several members of this department, especially to Nicola Warrick, for helpful comments on an earlier version. Remarks from two anonymous reviewer-s and especially from Anne E. Fowler, really helped for an improvment of the quality of the paper. Address for correspondence: Jean Emile Gombert, Universit4 de Bourgogne, LEAD/CNRS, BP 138, F-21004 Dijon Cedex, France.
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TRAININc ILLITERATE ADULTS IN METALINGUISTICS
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to be a prerequisite for the phoneme deletion ability. The task of lexical segmentation seemed to be more a measure of syntactic awareness than a measure of phonological awareness. Introduction
Among the numerous studies devoted to investigating the relationship between metalinguistic development and learning to read, very few have focused on the metalinguistic abilities of illiterate adults (Cf. Bertelson et al. 1991). The aim of these few studies was to establish that such abilities are a byproduct of learning to read and hence do not exist in individuals who have never attended school. This research has shown that illiterate adults are very low in: (1) initial consonant deletion and addition in syllables (Morais et al. 1979), (2) judgments of phonological length of words (Kolinsky, Cary, and Morais 1987), and (3) lexical segmentation of sentences (Barton and Hamilton 1982). Morais et al. (1979) asked two groups of adults to process a metaphonological task. One group was illiterate Portuguese, the other group was comprised of adults who were from the same social background but who had gained literacy either as adolescents or as adults. The subjects were asked either to add a certain phoneme to the beginning of a word, or to remove the initial phoneme. While the illiterate group attained only a 19% success level, 72% of the responses of the literate group were correct. Read et al. (1986) obtained similar results with two groups of Chinese literate adults. One group had learned to read via an alphabetic writing system introduced in China for teaching purposes, while the other had learned only the traditional logographic characters. In tasks similar to those used by the Morais team, subjects who had learned to read with an alphabetic system had a success rate of 83% whereas those not exposed to an alphabet achieved only 21% correct, a performance comparable to that of the group of Portuguese illiterate adults. Kolinsky et al. (1987) also tested illiterate Portuguese adults. These subjects were asked to select examples of short words and long words; a correct response required an intention to produce a short or long segment of the speech chain whether or not it corresponded to a "word," as the unschooled subjects would not necessarily be aware of this concept. With this scoring, 52% of the answers would have to be regarded as wrong: 24% of the responses were based on the size of referent (for example "nogueira'--'walnut[tree]" is a long word because it is a big tree and "galinka'--'chicken" is a short word because a
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chicken is smaller); 14% attended to the emotional weight of the objects or events referred to; and the remaining 14% relied on the characteristics of the actual act of saying the relevant segment (thus, an expression that is uttered slowly a n d / o r in a loud voice is regarded as longer). In a second experiment, ten other illiterate adults were asked to designate which of two pictures represented the object with the longer name. For each item, one of the two names was actually phonologically longer than the other, but sometimes the difference in the size of the objects referred to corresponded to the difference in the length of their names ("camelo'm"camel" versus "olho'm"eye'), sometimes there was an opposite relation between the linguistic and extralinguistic dimensions ("casa'~"house" versus "televisao'~'television'), and sometimes the objects referred to were much the same size ("pato'~"duck" versus "galinka'-"chicken"). Two of the ten subjects gave correct answers whatever the item, and four gave consistently correct answers for only the "concordant" items; for the "nonconcordant" items they based their answers on the size of the referents, and, for the "neutral" items they seemed to guess the answer (about 50% correct answers). The remaining four subjects gave correct answers for the "concordant" and "neutral" items but failed on half of the "nonconcordant" items. A further relevant study (Barton and Hamilton 1982) showed that, when asked to repeat a sentence word by word, adults with little schooling (reading level below fourth grade) tended to repeat meaningful units (often phrases) instead of words. On the whole, these results seem to suggest that the kind of metalinguistic abilities tested in these studies are by-products of learning to read. This conclusion is highly congruent with the whole literature dealing with learning to read and metalinguistic development (for reviews see Gombert 1992; Goswami and Bryant 1990). In fact, most studies showed that beginning reading also requires metalinguistic abilities. Thus, the reason such abilities co-occur is their absolute necessity in reading tasks for beginners. The fact is that, in the first two studies summarized above (Morais et al. 1979; Kolinsky, Cary, and Morais 1987) "ex-illiterates" (who had gained literacy after childhood) were used as controls and succeeded in the tasks their illiterate counterparts failed. Clearly, performance in this type of test is sensitive to the effect of schooling and most specifically to the effect of learning to read--in an alphabetical language, as Read et al. (1986) indicate. It would seem then that metalinguistic awareness of the phonological structure of
TRAINING ILLITERATE ADULTS IN METALINGUISTICS
253
spoken language would be part of reading skill; thus, the development of the latter would imply the increase of the former. We note h o w e v e r that if the e m e r g e n c e of this metaphonological awareness did not occur before learning to read, it is only because this awareness is not of the slightest utility outside of this very particular kind of language manipulation (which also includes spelling, and some oral language games with sounds) and not because it cannot be taught outside of reading. If the above interpretation is correct, one can induce the development of these kinds of metalinguisfic abilities by specific training in language manipulation which, like the task of beginning reading, requires language awareness in order to succeed. Some evidence that training can be effective was provided in preliterate children (see in particular, Bradley and Bryant 1983; Content et al. 1986; Fox and Routh 1984; Olofsson and Lundberg 1985), as well as in illiterate adults (Morals et al. 1988). Morals et al. showed that, when required to delete the initial consonant of spoken monosyllabic pseudowords and provided with both explicit instructions and continuous corrective feedback, nine out of twelve Portuguese illiterate adults displayed rapid improvements in performance. From this result, Morals et al. concluded that a majority of illiterate adults are ready to acquire segmental analysis skills, given adequate instruction. This confirms the interpretation that considers explicit segmental analysis as a subcomponent of developing reading skill which normally is of little utility outside this activity, and so does not develop in non- (pre- or il-) literates. Moreover, the study suggested that there is no critical period for acquiring the ability to do segmental analysis. This last point may have important implications for teaching reading to adults. Nevertheless, the Morals et al. (1988) study suffered from some limitations. First, instructions and corrective feedback are provided as early as the first trial from the subject, so it is not possible to compare the performance after training with the performance before the training session. Second, this experiment did use literate subjects as a control group, which brings into question the interpretation of results in terms of their specificity for illiterate individuals. Finally, as in the previous studies, this one concerned Portuguese. Even if it is highly improbable that the particularities of illiterates established by the Brussels team are specific to the Portuguese language, their results have to be replicated in other languages. The results of Morais et al. (1988) need to be confirmed in another experiment
254
THE ADULT POOR READER
that includes more methodological precautions and that is conducted in another language. The present study is partially devoted to such a confirmation. Moreover, in order to extend the results beyond the acquisition of phoneme deletion ability, the study tries to show that the other metalinguistic skills, thought to be at a lower level in illiterates than in literates, may also be improved by specific training. Thus, judgments of phonological length and lexical segmentation of sentences were also trained in illiterates and literates.
Method Subjects The subjects were 21 adults from North-Africa (mostly Moroccan) who had immigrated to France for economic reasons. All came from a single source, a work preparation center for adults in Dijon. All subjects had been in France for at least three years, and obviously spoke and understood French quite well; many probably had learned French while still in Moracco. There were three groups of subjects: seven illiterates-I (aged 19 to 39 years, mean: 29) who had never attended school and who had been identified by the work center as totally illiterate; seven "partial-illiterates'-PI (aged 19 to 51 years, mean: 30) had also never attended school, but who in just the last year had been learning to read French; and seven literates-L (aged 25 to 42 years, mean: 30) who could read and write French. These subjects had some schooling though none of them attended school after adolescence. Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain authorization to use standardized tests (reading age, IQ, etc.), so the above grouping was made following the indications of teachers. Procedure Each subject had to perform three tasks (presented in random order): (1) Judgment of phonological length (JP), (2) Initial consonant deletion (ID), and (3) Lexical segmentation (LS). (These tasks are described in detail below). There were two stages to this experiment: (1) Pre-test: Subjects had to perform six items in each of the three tasks, without feedback from the examiner. (2) Training: For each task which had not been performed totally successfully during the pre-test (i.e., six successes out of six trials), each subject went on to perform other trials; when an error was made, the examiner provided corrective feedback and expla-
TRAIN1NG ILLITERATE ADULTS IN METALINGUISTICS
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nations. For each task, the training was discontinued after the subject gave six consecutive correct responses or after 18 trials. Presentation of the tasks
(1) Judgment of Phonological Length (JP). The subject had to indicate which of two pictures represented the object with the phonologically longer name. For each item, one of the two names was actually longer than the other (one syllable at least), but in half the cases the difference in the size of the objects referred to did not correspond to the difference in the length of their n a m e (for example "coccinelle"--"lady-bird" versus "vache"--"cow"), and in half the cases the objects referred to were much the same size (for example "clou'--"nail" versus "aiguille'~"needle") (for complete presentation of the list of items, see Appendix 1). In order to simplify the task, items for which the size of the referrant and the length of the name were concordant, performed correctly by all the illiterate subjects in the Kolinsky et al. study, were not included in our material. In each phase, items were presented in random order. The picture that corresponded to the correct answer was, in half the cases, the left one and in the remaining half, the right one. When one of the two objects is supposed to be bigger than the other, its pictorial representation was also bigger (though not proportionally so). In order to permit a correct evaluation of the subject choice, after each response the subject had to tell the names of the two objects. Six examples were provided and explained before the pre-test. (2) Initial Consonant Deletion (ID). As in the Brussels team studies, the subject had to repeat each utterance without the initial sound, but some changes were made from the original studies, in order to increase the necessity of phonemic awareness to complete the task: 1. There was no training with initial vowel (i.e., initial univocalic syllable) deletion (i.e., no vowel-consonantvowel items were used). 2. The consonant that was to be deleted was not always the same phoneme, but sometimes [fl and other times [r]. 3. In order to compel subjects to distinguish syllabic and infrasyllabic levels, items were mono- or multisyUabic, not always monosyllabic. 4. Half of the items were meaningful words, but, in order to prevent the subjects from applying a strategy of recognizing words inside presented items, all the products
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of initial deletion were meaningless pseudowords. This point was explicitly made in the instructions. Data were not analyzed separately for words and non-words. In each phase, items (presented in Appendix 2) were presented in random order. Six examples were provided and explained before the pre-test. (3) Lexical Segmentation of Sentences (LS). The subject had to repeat each sentence (orally presented in random order) with a silent pause between words. As the subjects were adults, the sentences used were more complex than in studies with children. Each sentence was from four to seven words long (see items listed in Appendix 3), longer than in most earlier studies (for an extensive review, see Gombert 1992). However, the correctness of the responses provided was estimated on the basis of sentences produced, even when they did not correspond to the models. Six examples were provided and explained before the pretest. The experiment subjects were then asked for the meaning of the sentences. All the subjects correctly understood all the sentences. Data processing and design Three successive analyses were conducted: First, we calculated the number of subjects who reached the criterion of success (six successive correct trials) as a function of group, task, and phase. Second, we calculated the average number of correct items as a function of group, phase, and task. (To permit the statistical calculations, two decisions were made: (1) items that would have been presented after reaching criterion--after six successive correct itemsmwere considered as correct; (2) if the first phase--pre-testBwas completely correct, the training phase not presented to the subject--was also considered as being completely correct). The ANOVA design used was: $7 * B2* C3, with S=subjects, A=groups, B=phases, and C=tasks. When appropriate, analytic comparisons (Sid~k test: Sid~k 1967) were done. Finally, when appropriate, qualitative analyses of the errors were done. Results A Priori Analyses Individual rates of success as a function of group, task, and phase appear in figure 1. For the task of phonological judgment and the task of consonant deletion, the effect of training was
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Phonological judgments
100 80
oo O9 w 0 0 O9
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o~
80 60
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I1 12 13 14 15 16 17
Consonant deletions
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O9 O9 W 0 0
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PIP2P3P4P5P6P7
I1 12 13 14 15 16 17
Lexical segmentations
80 cO LU
60
0 0 o9
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Figure 1.
Pretest
I
P1P2P3P4P5P6P7
Iphase 2 gain
Individual rates of success
M
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phase 2 loss
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powerful, especially in the deletion task for illiterates and partial-illiterates from whom there were, globally, 9 subjects out of 14 who fully succeeded after training, compared to only one during the pre-test. These results deserve emphasis, for the training itself did not involve reading. Nevertheless, at first glance, two results were unexpected. First, literates were not largely successful in all tasks during the pre-test and also profited from training. Second, for the task of lexical segmentation, they seemed to be the only subjects who profited from the training which, by contrast, seemed to be ineffective in partial-illiterates and illiterates, who performed surprisingly poorly in pre- and post-tests. In fact, this result may be a consequence of the very strict criterion used to consider a subject as successful and must be moderated by taking into account the individual patterns of response. Task of Judgment of Phonological Length. This task (for which chance alone predicts a long-term success rate of 50%) is performed totally accurately, as early as the first phase, by 6/7 literates, 4/7 partial-illiterates, and 3/7 illiterates. As for the other subjects, most of them gave many good responses in the pretest and notably increased their rate of success during the training (only three subjects, one partial-illiterate and two illiterates, did not reach the criterion of success). On the whole, after training, only one subject (illiterate) based his responses on the size of the objects referred to instead of on the phonological length of the names. Task of Initial Consonant Deletion. It was noted above that literates were not totally successful in the pre-test. In fact, of the 3/7 subjects who gave some wrong responses, two performed a majority of accurate deletions and became quickly successful as early as the beginning of the training phase; the third totally failed during the pre-test but learned how to perform the task during the training. Only this subject presented a pattern of results that corresponded to that expected from the illiterates. None of the partial-illiterates fully succeeded during the pre-test. Nevertheless, 3/7 gave a majority of accurate responses, and 2 gave at least one. These five subjects, plus one who totally failed during the pre-test, became totally efficient during the training. Only one subject seemed to be unable to learn how to do initial consonant deletion. One of the illiterates knew how to delete initial phonemes as early as the pre-test as discussed below. Of the other six subjects, only one gave one correct answer during the pre-test, but
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all of them increased their performance during training, two reaching the exacting criterion of success. Task of Lexical Segmentation of Sentences. For this task, the only one that had never been presented to genuine illiterates (the subjects mentioned in Barton 1985 were low-literates), the results are more complicated. One out of seven literates entirely succeeded during the pre-test and five out of the other six had some success. All the literates who were trained increased their performance; the only one who did not reach the success criterion was the same subject who totally failed during the pre-test. None of the partial-illiterates did any correct lexical segmentation during the pre-test. Although none reached the criterion of success, 6/7 moved to between three and six correct segmentations during the training phase; only one subject did not seem to profit from the training. Of the seven illiterates, the four who did not succeed at all during the pre-test produced some correct segmentations during the training, this is congruent with what was expected and with what was found in partial-illiterates. In contrast, there was a curious result for the three subjects who did have some success in the pre-test: two subjects actually did worse during the training phase than in the pre-test, and the third reached the criterion of success. These results will be discussed below, after a qualitative analysis of the errors in this task. Intrasubject Performance. On the whole, the individual patterns of performance were coherent with one hierarchy of difficulty w i t h the p h o n o l o g i c a l j u d g m e n t task as the easiest (although chance predicts a success rate of 50%), the deletion task as intermediate and the lexical segmentation task as the most difficult. Subjects who did not correspond to this hierarchy are rare and performed similarly on all tasks. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that the subjects were bilingual, and were not being tested in their native tongue. This fact may have affected the order of difficulty among the tasks. Specifically, the lexical segmentation task might have been easier for native speakers than for those who learned French after their first language. Only one illiterate presented an overall pattern of performance typical of the one that characterized the literates. Two possible explanations exist: first, for unspecified reasons, this subject has developed, without learning to read, capacities that normally develop during this learning (as do some illiterate poets: see Morais, Alegria, and Content 1987; Roazzi, Dowker, and Bryant in press); second, this subject was less illiterate than the teachers of the work preparation center believed.
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Statistical Processing of Results. The percentage of correct items as a function of group, task, and phase are presented in table I. On the whole, these data are congruent with those already presented. From the statistical processing we only report results within tasks, across phases, across groups, but not across tasks since chance performance varies as a function of tasks. The overall rate of success of literates (82%) was globally higher than that of partial-illiterates (52%) and that of illiterates (46%)--F(2,18) = 10.67, p
