Research on elisions in preschool age children

Abstract

The key activities in child’s phonemic awareness development, are those which require manipulation with phonemes. One of the possibilities for work on the phoneme level and train the ability to manipulate with phonemes are elisions. These tasks assume the children's skills to isolate phonemes (or larger units) and then omit them. The aim is to identify the remaining part of the word that was created by omitting the corresponding phoneme, syllable or parts of the word. This theoretical-empirical study presents some theoretical issues connected with the topic, and it focuses on the results acquired from children in the preschool age in Slovakia. The research was conducted with 866 children at the age of four to seven years. It was focused on the ability to realize phoneme elision, i.e. to isolate the sound in a word and afterward pronounce the word which arises from omitting a certain sound. Testing the phoneme elision has shown that it is the most demanding phonemic ability for children taking part in the research. The overall success in all age categories was only 23%. The test revealed children with above the average developed ability to the established norm. The results are part of a more extensive research which is focused on the development of a complex tool used to evaluate the level of phonemic awareness. The paper is the outcome of the VEGA project no. 1/0637/16 entitled The Development of the Diagnostic Instrument for the Assessment of the Level of Phonemic Awareness of Preschool Age Children.