Effects of a Composite-to-Component Vocal Phoneme Segmentation Intervention on Remediating Kindergarteners’ Difficulties in Learning to Read

Early readers who have learned letter–sound correspondences do not always learn to read words through best practice reading instruction. This suggests a missing stimulus control for textual responses and the literature lacks an intervention to address this problem. Five kindergarten students who did not learn textual responses from reading instruction participated in this study. We used a combined pre- and posttest and multiple probe design to test the effects of a composite-to-component vocal phoneme segmentation (CtCVPS) intervention on the number of correct untaught (a) textual responses, (b) dictated written spelling responses, (c) vocal phoneme blends, (d) abstracted vocal phoneme segmentations, as well as (e) cumulative correct textual responses during reading instruction before and after the intervention. During the CtCVPS intervention participants were taught to listen to a set of composite words and vocalize the component phonemes. Correct responses emerged across all variables for all participants as a function of the intervention and all participants learned new textual responses from reading instruction after the CtCVPS intervention. These findings demonstrated that acquiring a generalized vocal phoneme segmentation repertoire through the CtCVPS intervention established necessary stimulus control for textual responding. Implications on the role of acquiring composite-to-component responses through the vocal phoneme segmentation intervention in learning to read and write are discussed.